New Exhibit: Wild Leaves

Spring 2026 brings the exhibition Wild Leaves to the Flinn Gallery at Greenwich Library. This show presents works by Yura Adams, Katie de Groot, Maggie Nowinski and Jacqueline Qiu, four artists whose creative practices are driven by a deep connection to nature and the environment. Like the poem Wild Leaves by writer/musician Patti Smith from which the exhibition draws its name, the art on view captures the natural world’s ephemerality, majesty and beauty, echoing the experience of life itself. Wild Leaves is curated by Kirsten Pitts and Isabelle Schiavi. The exhibit runs through April 28, 2026.

Join us for an opening reception Thursday March 12, 6 – 8pm.

Far from crafting literal representations, Adams, de Groot, Nowinski and Qiu re-imagine worlds drawn from the poetry of nature. Through visual metaphors, they depict landscapes not as perceived by the eye, but as experienced by the body, the mind, and through all of our senses. Shifting patterns of light, wind, clouds; the mutable colors and shapes of our changing seasons; flashes of insect and animal life; blooms and decay; these are some of the transient natural phenomena upon which they draw.

Abstraction allows these artists to connect the external physical world with the internal: intuitions, reflections, emotions – that which is unseen but deeply felt nonetheless. Using very different media, but a similar approach based on intuition and improvisation, Adams, de Groot, Nowinski and Qiu capture nature’s fluidity as well as its resilience and regenerative power. Filtered through the artists’ experience, the wonders and mysteries of the natural world are captured in works that pulsate with energy and speak to us all.

Yura Adams’ draws inspiration from the dynamics of nature that exist just outside her studio, in the rural Berkshires. Her interdisciplinary practice, which includes painting, sculpture and installation, is rooted in constant experimentation. Her work relies on abstraction to convey her own embodied experience of her environment beyond the visual. She says, “My habitual scrutiny of the natural world has caused me to fall under the thrall of the beauty of my surroundings. I share with landscape painters the impulse to bring attention to my native scene, but with a difference: my paintings abstract the why and how of the scene…The work is a mash-up of source, memory, and imagination with an active doorway to subconscious input. As self-appointed inspector of my environment, my perceptions are reimagined and transformed in the process of painting.”

Katie DeGroot collects fallen branches and tree limbs gathered on long walks near her home in upstate New York, responding to their interesting shapes and the unique organic growths that adorn them. Her watercolors are inspired by these natural elements, but not meant as realistic representations. She says that having first worked with individual branches she… “soon found out that my branches could be arranged to interact between themselves, forming an anthropomorphic story sometimes based on real emotions…other times on social interactions.” In addition to the works on display at the Flinn, De Groot’s Promenade of the Trees, a three-panel permanent installation commissioned in 2024, can be viewed in the main Reading Room of Greenwich Library. Like all of De Groot’s work, it is an ode to woodlands and flora. In her words, “Having spent many years now looking at trees and forests, I am continually amazed at their individuality, adaptability, and perseverance within a connected society.”

Jacqueline Qiu creates woven artworks using materials derived from natural ecosystems. Her weavings are about the beauty she uncovers in even the most urban settings: scrawny city trees, fallen branches and leaves, drips on the pavement, birds roosting in the dirt. Working on a loom, she filters the energy of her lived experience and environment into tangible form through a largely intuitive process that forgoes preparatory studies. Her woven artworks combine personal expression with an exploration of traditional Kesi silk weaving, an ancient Chinese technique dating from the Tang Dynasty. With this method each weft thread is woven separately, resulting in tapestries that are iridescent, delicate and intricately detailed. She chooses her materials and colors as she goes along, leaving certain sections void and others more tightly woven. According to Qiu, “my art practice is the interface between my inner landscape and the outer world, expressed through playful rearrangements and reconstructions of nature.”

Maggie Nowinski is a multimedia artist whose practice combines traditional and unusual media including found objects, performance and sound. She is inspired by her outdoor walks to create intricate line drawings of imaginary human-botanical hybrids and large three-dimensional
installations that encroach into our space like an invasive species. Through her work, she explores themes of internal and external processes in the natural world as it adapts, mutates and struggles to survive. Of her fantastical ink drawings of anthropomorphized natural life forms she says: “I identify with them, I am repulsed by them and ultimately, I am curious to witness these forms emerge…I let go of the need to make [them] function in terms of scientific logic. I imagine that each is a living system—with locations for intelligence and intention, a muscular center, circulatory, digestion and nervous systems, and limbs for mobility.”

Events:
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 12, 2026, 6-8 pm
Artist Talk: Sunday, April 19, 2026, 2pm

The Flinn Gallery is a non-profit organization sponsored by Friends of Greenwich Library. It is located on the second floor of the library at 101 West Putnam Avenue, Greenwich, CT. The gallery presents five curated exhibitions of contemporary art each season. All exhibitions and related programs are free and open to the public, welcoming visitors Monday-Sunday 10am-5pm, Thursday 10am-8pm, and Sunday 1-5pm.