Mieko Meguro
Works, New York, 2009-2026

White Columns is pleased to present Works, New York, 2009-2026, the first survey of the New York-based artist Mieko Meguro (b. Hokkaido, Japan.) Working fluidly across media the exhibition includes paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, and a complete run of Meguro’s artist’s books, and focuses on work made between 2009 (when Meguro moved to New York) and the present. Seen together, Meguro’s project is a profoundly moving meditation on love, life and loss.

A central thread running throughout Meguro’s work is her creative and romantic relationship with the artist Dan Graham (1942-2022). Writing in 2022 about the motivation to make Dan a subject of her work, Meguro said:

One day I was reading a Japanese art magazine that mentioned that Dan was “one of the most difficult artists of our time.” I was shocked. There was no effort to understand Dan. That was one of the reasons I started to make drawings of Dan. I wanted to express to the world that Dan was not just a difficult man. He is a genius, and also kind, generous, handsome, an amazing creature. There are so many books about Dan’s work but Dan’s personal, charming side is not in the books. Therefore, I want to express Dan’s interesting personality with my mischievous hands. (From “My Life With Dan”, Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon, 2022.)

At White Columns, Meguro’s ongoing series of paintings and hand-embroidered pillow-sculptures depict scenes from her everyday life with her partner – e.g., him asleep in hotel rooms, watching TV, writing, and looking for his glasses. Recording Dan’s daily routines – eating, cleaning his teeth, or searching for a vinyl record – has become the subject of Meguro’s disarmingly charming, comic-like artist’s books. Meguro’s first artist’s book Condiments (2009) – the thirty-four original drawings for which are presented in the exhibition – was commissioned and published by Dan. Meguro has self-published four new artist’s books on the occasion of the White Columns exhibition.

Meguro mines her private life for her work, making it public. This threshold – the tensions between the private and public realms – was also a central concern of Dan’s work. As viewers and readers, we become privy to both the specificity of the couple’s shared intimacy and to more universal ideas about companionship, caretaking and loss. In the poignant Bigelow Wrappers, 2015-2021, Meguro poetically re-stages the wrappers from the many prescriptions she would collect and administer for her husband, which she subsequently singed with Japanese incense. The suspended, cloud-like accumulation of inside-out potato chip bags that comprise Exhausted Helium, 2016-2017 are saved and repurposed from the many bags that Meguro had nervously eaten during her visits to see Dan in the hospital over the course of many months. Since her husband’s passing, Meguro continues to explore her life and their relationship: her 2025 text work ‘A Solo Life’, presented as a concertina-like drawing, is a profound meditation on the nature of grief.

Elsewhere in the exhibition Meguro presents works from the series Molotov Cocktails, 2026- , empty alcohol bottles with gesso-painted wire “flames”; Icy Hearts, 2010-2026, heart-shaped forms made from gesso-painted Japanese barbed wire; Love Letter Blank, 2023-2024, the wire muselets from Champagne bottles embedded into sheets of raw paper pulp; and Xavier Hearts, 2009 – present, an extraordinary accumulation of hand cut-and-sewn red felt hearts named after Saint Francis Xavier (1506-1552) who as a representative of the Portuguese Empire led the first Christian mission to Japan. (The Church of Saint Francis Xavier is located on 16^th Street in New York’s Flatiron District.) Two recent series of small-scale, votive-like paintings of candles and flowers gently amplify the persistent memento mori-like qualities that underscore Meguro’s approach to both art and life.

Mieko Meguro (b. Hokkaido, Japan) lives and works in New York. She is the founder and director of 3A Gallery located in New York’s Chinatown. www.3agallery.com Between 1990 and 2009 she showed her earlier work extensively in Japan. Since moving to New York in 2009, her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at: Galleryonetwentyeight, New York (2025); Kunsthalle Freeport, Porto, Portugal (2025); Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon, Portugal (2022); Librairie Marian Goodman, Paris (2020); Shoot The Lobster, New York (2017); Greene Naftali, New York (2016); and Asia House, London (2016), among others. Her work has been included in numerous group shows including those at: Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2023); Magenta Plains, New York (2021); Schirin Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany (2020); Carriage Trade, New York (2019); and at White Columns in 2016 in ‘Looking Back: The 10^th White Columns Annual’, curated by White Columns’ director Matthew Higgs; among many others.

Mieko Meguro has recently published four new artist’s books which will be available to purchase from the gallery, alongside a selection of her earlier and now out-of-print titles.

White Columns would like to thank Mieko for her enthusiastic collaboration on this exhibition.

Eric Spencer
Words on my Mind

White Columns is pleased to present Words on my Mind, a solo exhibition by New Jersey-based artist Eric Spencer (b. 1969). The exhibition focuses on photo documentation of Spencer’s early cutout text works, made between the late 1980s and early 1990s, which were taken by the artist’s mother Doris Spencer in and around their home in rural New Jersey.

Spencer’s work is marked by a profound fascination with alphabetical characters, an affinity that developed very early in his life. As a toddler, Spencer displayed traits of hyperlexia, learning to recognize and read aloud letters and words from ambient text like license plates and juice cartons before he truly began to talk. He spent hours playing quietly with his favorite toys, magnet letters, moving them around a magnetic board. As a young child Doris recalls him fashioning “letters out of Play-Doh and food and even out of men’s long socks,” overcoming his fear of a swimming pool by placing his magnetic letters on the ladder before jumping in, and writing short stories personifying alphabetical and numerical symbols who had familiar adventures like playing in the park and going to the market.

In his early teens Spencer began to create cutout text installations with materials available around the house: construction paper, Styrofoam and Scotch tape. These elaborate installations borrowed phrases from his own life, including notes picked up around his family’s home and titles of favorite albums, films and television shows. Spencer would freehand cut letters in one of the dozens of fonts he has memorized, and create highly accurate reproductions of logos including fonts, symbols, and imagery. The paper cutouts were then arranged in a web of Scotch tape and often suspended from his bedroom ceiling, hanging in midair like the opening credits of a film. These fleeting installations typically existed no more than a day. Doris documented those she could with a 35mm camera, and Spencer himself often made an appearance in the frame. Though they never discussed his motivations, she later reflected that Spencer had “captioned his life.” This collaboration ended when Spencer moved to his own home in his 20s.

Eric Spencer continues to work as an artist in watercolor and ceramic, and makes cutout text for himself, family and friends, and community events. Since 2023 Spencer has been an artist at Studio Route 29, a supported art studio centering the creative practices and perspectives of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. His cut paper installations are the subject of the book 𝘔𝘺 𝘊𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘓𝘪𝘧𝘦 published by Beauty Books in 2024. An expanded edition is set for release in the Fall of 2026 in conjunction with this exhibition. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Beauty Gallery, Art Yard, FiNNBAR, and Flemington DIY, NJ, MAKE Studio, MD, and Walpole, ME, and his work has been featured as part of the Sincerely Summertime series at Summertime, NY.

White Columns would like to thank Eric and Doris Spencer and Studio Route 29 for collaborating with us on this exhibition.

Juliette Collet
Bobbie Cadet in the Court of the Ladybugs

White Columns is proud to present Bobbie Cadet in the Court of the Ladybugs, the first solo exhibition by Juliette Collet (b. 2000.) The exhibition consists of original comic pages from Collet’s ongoing “Bobbie Cadet” series, including selected pages from the published first issue or “chapter” alongside pages from the forthcoming second chapter, concept drawings, and a hand-drawn advertisement for the series. What follows is a Q&A between Collet and Violet Saxon, White Columns’ Curatorial Assistant/Archivist.

White Columns: You work mostly as a comic book artist, and the works on display in this exhibition include comic pages and concept drawings for the first two chapters of your “Bobbie Cadet” series. Can you talk a little about the origins and development of the series?

Juliette Collet: I had started a story called “Bobbie Bondage” about a girl in an S&M relationship with her ex-professor. The idea was, Bobbie would embody this completely submissive role, but during S&M, she would dissociate into hypothetical realities where she was more in control of herself. Bobbie Cadet just happened to be one of these realities. That story ended up interesting me a lot more than the original story I was working on. The first chapter was inspired by a misconception a friend of mine had about tentacle porn.

WC: I first encountered your work in a group show at the artist-run space Rumpelstiltskin in 2024. You were just coming out of undergrad at that time, but I was immediately struck by how fully realized your work felt. In the years since, how have you understood/contextualized your work across comics, illustration and art?

JC: I think a difference between the fine art and the comics world is that in fine art you are often asked to “contextualize” your work, but in comics, you are just asked to work on it.

WC: One of the most distinctive aspects of your comics is the cast of characters — not only the protagonists but also their sidekicks, friends, lovers, enemies, etc. The worlds that they inhabit are clearly fantasy, but they also feel very lived-in. How do you go about developing a character and their broader “world”?

JC: More and more, I am approaching comics like a film director. I have to draw out every set and every costume. Making comics is like working on a film with an unlimited budget and no one you have to compromise with.

WC: Your writing is as distinct as your visual style, and is often very funny. Can you talk about the role of humor, or even irony, in your work?

JC: By the time I’ve written out a joke, I can never tell if it’s funny anymore.

WC: Your characters have really enviable outfits. How does clothing/fashion/costuming play into the stories you’re telling?

JC: My approach to science fiction isn’t genre based. I basically believe that humanity is a failed project. Bobbie Cadet is the alternate reality where the project doesn’t fail.

Juliette Collet (b. 2000) is a cartoonist. Her current series, “Bobbie Cadet” explores a future where humanity collectively self-sterilizes and returns the Earth to its pre-industrial state.

Copies of Bobbie Cadet Ch. 1 are available for purchase in person at the gallery and online at peacecomics.net.

For more information about these exhibitions, please contact info@whitecolumns.org

White Columns
91 Horatio Street
New York, NY 10014
Tuesday–Saturday, 11 AM–6 PM
info@whitecolumns.org
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