“Right Now It’s All Yellow”

For spring '25, Drawing Rooms sticks up for the most unloved primary color in the paintbox.

Stephanie Romano gets happy (sort of).

Yellow gets no respect. When asked for their favorite color, not too many people pick it. Fewer still wear it. Designers don’t tend to use yellow in their liveries, and sports teams don’t often incorporate it into their uniforms. In the popular imagination, yellow connotes cowardice and jaundiced views; in corporate branding, it’s associated with fast food and cut-rate couriers. It means neither acceleration nor a firm, coerced stop. Then there’s that Coldplay song that we’ve all had quite enough of. Yellow is the flat butt-end of the color wheel; the low-rent precinct of the spectrum. 

Artists, too, use yellow sparingly. The cheeriness of the child who finger-paints a smiling yellow sun in the middle of a friendly scene?, that’s not an emotional tone often encountered in art exhibitions. That’s especially true in Hudson County. Here, artists prefer colors that reflect their seriousness: industrial grays and institutional greens, the brick red-browns of the post-industrial landscape, monomaniacal black and white. Threats to the environment and civil society are immense, and artists want to reflect that in their work. In spring 2025, it’d take a brave curator indeed to open the windows and let a big, bright, jolly bumblebee buzz around the galleries.

Yet that’s exactly what Drawing Rooms (926 Newark Ave.) has done. In “Right Now It’s All Yellow,” Anne Trauben has invited seventy artists to submit pieces that incorporate the color of smiley-face pins and canaries in the coal mine. Generally, shows organized around a specific color don’t work. That this Easter basket of a show succeeds well beyond expectation is due to Trauben’s eye for juxtaposition and knack for curatorial storytelling, and the total buy-in she’s gotten from painters and textile artists who don’t ordinarily splash much yellow pigment around their canvases. As it turns out, this bunch is ready for the big thaw. Some shows ask to be seen. This one begs to be pollinated.

Jill Scipione gets sunflower-bright.

Notably, the artists haven’t changed very much. They’ve just allowed a few dandelions to sprout in the marsh. Concern for the beleaguered biosphere is still evident in Barbara Seddon’s sharp prints, but here, she lets a few thick golden rays tickle the tops of her trees. Karleen Loughran continues to scribble and scratch nests of lines into her mixed media pieces, but for this show, her gloomy grey rectangle can barely contain the big yellow block at its turbulent heart. Gabriel Feld enhances his tangles of ribbon-like white lines with streaks of amber, Tatyana Kazakova bathes her depiction of purple flowers and pointed leaves in warm solar radiance, Jill Scipione’s amalgam of cloth blossoms are, for a season, daffodil-warm, and Guillermo Bublik drops three of his fierce agglomerations of dots and circles on a saffron-colored background. All of these pieces are done in the artists’ established styles: if you’ve seen their work before, you’ll recognize their visual signatures immediately. The difference is the amount of butter they’ve spread on their toast.

And as “Right Now” proves, a little yellow goes a long way. Caroline Burton makes paintings that look something like worn textiles and something like architectural plans viewed from above. Though they often come across grayscale at a distance, they’re actually full of muted colors — and at the Drawing Rooms show, she’s brought the yellow undertones to the surface. The streams of rust-colored pigment humanize the house-shaped objects in the foreground. At the same time, they’re suggestive of dust storms, faded photographs, the low clouds before a thunderstorm. Kim Bricker’s contribution also demonstrates how much specific information a shot of color can give. Her landscape prints often bring us to the seaside or the mountains. Here, the shades of wheat and gold put us right on the prairie, in the midst of rich earth, untilled and untrammeled, desolate, scorched, exceedingly American.

Caroline Burton's yellow traces.

A few of the “Right Now” artists turn coat enthusiastically on their typical palette. Ben Fine, acclaimed for his pink armchair portraits, leaves his favorite color behind for a dynamic washes of yellow so intense that the obscure the inverted script hidden beneath the paint. Architecturally-minded Linda Streicher retires her blueprints for a sun-toned study in intersecting lines and parallel bands. Stephanie Romano has gotten great mileage out of her black and white lettered pieces, stains a paper amalgam yellow, runs black thread through it, crumples it up, and hangs it on the wall. Upon closer inspection, it reads “happy,” over and over. She can’t quite bring herself to lay it flat and say it outright. But she’s feeling it.

Ben Fine in yellow.

Lemons, naturally, make a tart showing. Deborah Pohl, an oil painter skilled at the art of wringing meaning out of everyday objects, gives us a single fruit, wrapped in a string and tacked to the wall. Janice Belove goes further, adding a pair of crossed pencils, a gold ring, a toy bee, a sheaf of yellow paper, and a chapstick to her citrus basket. Camilla Fallon slices one in half, rests it on a plate, and surrounds it with luminous circles that look like footlights. The pulpy dividers inside the fruit look like the hands of a clock. It’s almost May. For all things yellow, it’s showtime.

Then there are the artists in the show who indulge in yellowness without reservations. Ted Larson’s exciting “Tupperware Party” fits a topographical array of triangular pieces in various shades of yellow. Jodie Fink flashes us a cut-out flower with yellow petals and a yellow stalk, and affixes it to a yellow background. Cynthia Egel-Grant stacks scores of yellow dots on a black field, separating four sections of Lite-Brite amber circles with a great black cross. It could be the flag of a nation that values illumination above all other things. Then there’s Robert Nealon’s piece, perhaps the most elemental in the show: a yolky disc about a centimeter thick, right in the middle of a square of a slightly lighter shade. If a button existed that could turn the world yellow, it would look like this.

The gallerist goes yellow on us.

An entire subchamber of the main gallery is devoted to pieces by Drawing Rooms gallery director James Pustorino: roughly rectangular fields of bright color in bunches, all together on schoolbus-yellow backgrounds. It wouldn’t exactly be right to call them happy, but they are harmonious, and they do fit the mood of the season.  Like the rest of the artists in “Right Now It’s All Yellow,” he’s giving the lie to the notion, widely circulated, that Hudson County artists are a doomy bunch. Yes, there are plenty of reasons to feel down. We may, in fact, be in bigger trouble than we even think we are. But we’re still going to celebrate. We’re going to have a spring — even if it takes all the yellow paint in the world to make it happen.

(Drawing Rooms is open on Thursdays and Fridays from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m. and on Saturdays and Sundays from 2 p.m. until 6 p.m.  There’ll be an artist talk this Sunday afternoon at 3 p.m. The show will hang until May 18.)