NEW YORK, NY.- Cristin Tierney Gallery will present a group exhibition entitled Influencers, including artists such as Diane Burko, Yayoi Kusama, Abby Leigh, Wangechi Mutu, Judy Pfaff, Amy Sillman, Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos), Audra Skuodas, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, among others. This exhibition is organized by Cristin Tierney and Adam Sheffer, and opens Friday, January 9th, with a public reception from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. Influencers will close Saturday, February 14th.
Influencers considers influence not as visibility or celebrity, but as an ethos, as it operates across art history and artistic communities: through mentorship, exchange, and the transmission of ideas. Bringing together artists whose work has already exerted lasting impact and influence, alongside those poised to do so, the exhibition positions influence as a collective and evolving force rather than a fixed designation—a continuum shaped by persistence, generosity, and engagement over time.
Founded in 2010, Cristin Tierney Gallery is a contemporary art gallery with a deep commitment to the presentation, development, and support of a roster of both established and emerging artists. Our program emphasizes artists engaged with critical theory and art history, with an emphasis on conceptual, video, and performance art. Education and audience engagement are central to our mission. Cristin Tierney Gallery is a member of the ADAA (Art Dealers Association of America).
Diane Burko’s (b. 1945, New York, NY) work in painting, photography, and time-based media considers the marks that human conversations make on the landscape. A Professor Emerita of the Community College of Philadelphia with additional teaching experience at Princeton University, Burko has received multiple grants from the NEA, the Pennsylvania Arts Council, the Leeway Foundation, and the Independence Foundation. She has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art.
After focusing for several decades on monumental geological formations and waterways through landscape painting, Burko has shifted in the past 20 years to analyze the impact of industrial and colonial activity on those same landscapes. The artist’s practice seeks to visually emulsify interconnected subjects–extraction, deforestation, extinction, environmental justice, Indigenous genocide, ecological degradation, and climate collapse—so viewers might feel their connection viscerally through the beauty of her work. While her work deals with impending climate catastrophe, rather than lingering in dystopia, it celebrates the landscape's sublimity by honoring the intricate geological and political webs that shape the identity of a place.
Burko has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally, including shows at London’s Royal Academy of Art, Minneapolis Art Institute, National Academy of Sciences, Phillips Collection, RISD Museum, Tang Museum, and Wesleyan University Center for the Arts. She has been awarded residencies in Giverny, Bellagio, the Arctic Circle, and the Amazon Rainforest. In 2021, her solo exhibition Seeing Climate Change at the American University Museum was cited in the New York Times as one of the best shows of 2021. Her work is held in 40 public collections nationwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Denver Art Museum, Everson Museum of Art, Hood Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Phillips Collection, and The Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. Burko’s studio is located in Philadelphia, PA.
Audra Skuodas (1940-2019) was born in Kaunas, Lithuania and lived for six years in a displaced persons camp in Germany before coming to the U.S. in 1949. She became a US citizen in 1961 and earned a B.A. and M.A. at Northern Illinois University. Despite a lifetime of relative obscurity, Skuodas' work resonates with profound depth and a distinctive voice that challenges conventional boundaries of perception and form. Perpetually experimenting with materials, she explored beads, sequins, and vibrant fabrics, creating rigid and soft sculptures alongside quilts, books, and jewelry. Her paintings and drawings--initially aligned with Surrealism before transitioning to abstraction starting in the 1980s—are where she gained renown the most.
Skuodas taught and exhibited her work throughout her career, and was associated with institutions such as the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and Oberlin College. She exhibited in Chicago with Richard Gray, and in New York with Moti Hassan, as well as at regional spaces in the Cleveland area. In 2010, she received the Cleveland Arts Prize Lifetime Achievement Award. Her oeuvre found greater attention only after her death when it was prominently featured in the 2022 Cleveland Triennial: Front. Over the past several years, museums such as the Allen Memorial Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art have begun acquiring and exhibiting Skuodas' work. A major museum is planning a retrospective exhibition with a publication.
Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos, b. 1976, Springfield, OR) is a multidisciplinary artist from the Umpqua River Valley on the South Coast of Oregon, working in painting, photography, printmaking, weaving, and large-scale installation. She was awarded the University of Oregon's 2022-23 CFAR Fellowship and the 2022 Forge Project Fellowship, which recognized her as one of six Indigenous individuals representing a broad diversity of cultural practices, participatory research, organizing models, and geographic contexts that honor Indigenous pasts and build Native futures. Her work, which has been exhibited internationally, is in many collections, including the Gochman Family Foundation (Miami, FL), Forge Project (Mahicannituck [Hudson River] Valley, NY), Missoula Art Museum (MT), Museum of Fine Art (Boston, MA), and the Portland Art Museum (OR).
Siestreem's work was recently included in the landmark 2023 book An Indigenous Present, conceived and edited by Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee). Coming from a family of professional artists and educators, she began her training at home. Her lifelong mentor is Lillian Pitt (Wasco, Warm Springs, Yakama), and her weaving teachers are Greg Archuleta (Grand Ronde) and Greg A. Robinson (Chinook Nation). Siestreem graduated Phi Kappa Phi with a BS from Portland State University in 2005. She earned an MFA with distinction from Pratt Art Institute in 2007. She created a self-sustaining weaving program for the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw people. Her studio is in Portland, Oregon.
