For the 2025 edition of Basel, Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to present a selection of works by Melissa Cody, Pap Souleye Fall, Paul Feeley, Howardena Pindell, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Richard Van Buren, Emmi Whitehorse, Franklin Williams, and B. Wurtz.

Melissa Cody
Based in No Water Mesa, Arizona, Melissa Cody is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation. A fourth-generation weaver, Cody creates tapestries that draw on the tradition of Germantown Revival, a stylistic movement that emerged from the Long Walk or Hwéeldi, the forced migration and ethnic cleansing of Navajo people by the US Federal Government in the late nineteenth century. For Cody, this century-old genre of weaving—characterized by vivid colors and bright, dazzling designs—is not only an expression of history. It is also a powerfully contemporary format for envisioning a new, digital life: “I’m a child of ’80s video game culture,” she says. “Pac-Man, Frogger, Nintendo. I grew up with this world of pixilation.” The presentation in Basel includes two weavings from 2011, both of which also featured in the artist’s recent survey at MoMA PS1.

Pap Souleye Fall
Pap Souleye Fall is the latest artist to enter the gallery’s program. A Senegalese-American artist and recent graduate from the Yale School of the Arts, Fall makes work spanning sculpture, performance, and installation. In Fall’s Afrofuturist imaginary, world-building, speculative fiction, and gameplay are instruments whereby members of the African diaspora might navigate—and transcend—systems of global oppression. The group of cast-aluminum reliefs here, one of them augmented with a passage of greenscreen green, deploy the motif of the peanut—an export of Senegal and a traditional West African decorative motif.

Paul Feeley
The presentation will feature work by the Des Moines, Iowa–born Color Field painter Paul Feeley. All three examples—two paintings and one work on paper—date to the 1960s, an period of intense innovation for the artist. Germanicus (1960), a major early work, appeared in the artist’s first solo show at New York’s Betty Parsons Gallery. After visiting the exhibition, the legendary critic Clement Greenberg, in a private note to the artist, remarked that the canvas might prove a “masterpiece.” In the coolly meditative Homer, made two years later, Feeley’s edges have become crisper, more defined. Such changes, paired with the increasing flatness of Feeley’s color fields, represent a pivotal shift in the artist’s practice that set the stage for his mature, hard-edge work and his eventual move toward sculpture.

Howardena Pindell
Howardena Pindell is a New York-based artist born in Philadelphia. A key member of a small group of Black abstract painters, including Jack Whitten, Al Loving, and Sam Gilliam, Pindell pioneered a multifaceted art practice that fused deeply political commitments with a rigorous inquiry into the medium of painting. Four of the works in Basel issue from her recent Deep Sea series and feature a pioneering technique of indirect mark-making the artist first developed in the late 1960s. Pindell sprays paint through hole-punched cardstock, heavy watercolor paper, or manila folders to build up sensuous, abstract veils of diaphanous color. Works like Untitled #33 (2004) and Tang (2025) represent a parallel practice: the artist collects the leftover, hole-punched circles, or “chads,” and collages these units into richly material, densely textured surfaces that at once summon the seriality, systems, and grids of conceptual art and evoke richly personal associations.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, passed away this past January at the age of 85. The recipient of a major survey at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 2023, Smith is one of the defining Native artists of her generation. Across her five-decade career, she has imbued her paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings with motifs drawn from Native iconography, American Pop art, and mass media in a profound, oft-times satirical meditation on histories of violence, environmental destruction, and dispossession. Key to her cosmology—and present in two of the three works in Basel—is the figure of the coyote: the archetypal trickster and, for Smith, a key figure in Indigenous survival and resistance.

Richard Van Buren
After his inclusion in the landmark exhibitions Primary Structures (1966) at New York’s Jewish Museum and A Romantic Minimalism (1967) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Richard Van Buren became closely associated with 1960s American Minimalism. Yet his distinctive formal language signaled distance from the movement. This break became decisive in the late 1960s and ’70s, when van Buren began to make his signature cast and poured-resin wall sculptures, festooning their eclectic, biomorphic forms with heterodox materials such as ground-up charcoal, milled paper, colorful glitter, and bits of abalone shell. While many of Van Buren’s works of this period are no longer extant, he has refabricated a selection of key pieces, including the balletic Coop (1970/2022), a brilliantly blue sculpture that was displayed at the legendary Richard Bykart Gallery in 1970.

Emmi Whitehorse
An enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, Emmi Whitehorse is an artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her paintings—four examples of which appeared in the 2024 Venice Biennale—are characterized by atmospheric fields of diffuse and shifting color that teem with elemental forms. Meditative and slow, Whitehorse’s painting is rooted in the Navajo philosophy of Hózhó, a concept connoting beauty, order, harmony, and balance. “My paintings tell the story of knowing land over time,” she says, “of being completely, microcosmically within a place.”

Franklin Williams
Though sometimes affiliated with movements like “Nut Art” or Pattern & Decoration, Petaluma, California–based artist Franklin William has assiduously resisted categorization. A longtime and beloved teacher at the California College of Arts and San Francisco Art Institute, Williams has worked independently—largely in isolation from the art world—for more than six decades, quietly limning a personal cosmos via the masterful execution of vernacular handicraft and a meticulous, delicate line. The selection of mixed-media paintings on view here, all made in 2020 and 2021, are examples of the artist’s recent experiments in portraiture, featuring distorted visages adorned with dense patterning and crocheted passages of thread and yarn.

B. Wurtz
B. Wurtz is a New York–based artist who showed with the city’s legendary gallery Feature Inc through the 1990s. A consummate artist’s artist, Wurtz has developed a distinctive approach to artmaking defined by the alchemical transformation of mundane materials such as plastic grocery bags, takeout containers, and tin cans into playful, formally sophisticated assemblages. Here, the presentation includes five of Wurtz’s sculptures—among them the emblematic Bunch #2, 1995—as well as a large group of the artist’s iconic Pan Paintings, made by the application of acrylic paint to the bottoms of disposable aluminum food containers to yield.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Melissa Cody, Pap Souleye Fall, Howardena Pindell, Richard Van Buren, Emmi Whitehorse, Franklin Williams, and B. Wurtz, as well as the estates of Paul Feeley and Jaune Quick- to-See Smith.