Graphic Heights
July 1 – July 20
Artists:
CC Streetzy – Chip Calvin
The artists in Graphic Heights are building a visual conversation: playful, sharp, and deeply aware of how we respond to shape, color, and pattern. They aren’t just referencing pop culture they’re reframing it with precision and style.
This exhibition is grounded in design not as decoration, but as structure, language, and logic. These works embrace flatness, edge, and balance. They operate like posters, like punchlines, like signage for something just out of reach. Edges are crisp. Forms are deliberate. Color isn’t used it’s placed.
There’s no filler here. Every composition is tightened to its essentials, where contrast carries the weight and composition does the talking. Line becomes attitude. Scale becomes wit. Visual tension becomes a kind of rhythm. These artists treat space like a designer would: with restraint, clarity, and the confidence to leave things unsaid.
Graphic Heights doesn’t shout. It’s too composed for that. But it leaves an immediate, stylish, and unforgettable impression.
Explore the Collection
CJ Cowden
Aaron Jackson Bowman
Bissera (Pearl)
CC Streetzy
Ralph Paquin
Chip Calvin
More About the Works
Kitty Lips
by CJ Cowden
Kitty Lips is pop art with a purr and a punchline. In this cheeky series, five feline faces stare you down with wide turquoise eyes and unapologetically pouty red lips. Rendered in bold color blocks: fuchsia, green, gold, black, and red; each kitty brings its own mood, but they all share the same sultry smirk.
It’s glam, it’s weird, it’s a little seductive and yes, the lips are exactly what you think they are. A playful nod to the more, shall we say, personal parts of the feminine mystique, these cats aren’t just cute they’re in on the joke.
Kitty Lips doesn’t take itself too seriously, and that’s exactly the point. It’s flirty, funny, and just a little bit filthy.
Whispers of a Light that Blooms
by CJ Cowden
Petals remembering the fields they once loved.
King Rats and King Pigeons
by CJ Cowden
In Kings of New York, CJ Cowden crowns the true icons of the city not the financiers or fashionistas, but the pigeons and rats who run the streets with unapologetic swagger. These are New York’s unbothered monarchs, surviving, strutting, and scavenging with a confidence that only comes from living in the thick of it.
Each piece features a boldly rendered subject pigeons perched with purpose, rats caught mid-scurry marked with a golden crown that elevates them from urban nuisance to noble figurehead.
Set against punchy, saturated backgrounds, the compositions echo pop art, street art, and satire all at once. The message is simple and smart: royalty isn’t about polish it’s about grit. Kings of New York is Cowden’s cheeky love letter to the underdogs of the city, those crowned not by bloodline but by pure survival instinct.
Marilyn Monroe
by CC Streetzy
In classic CC Streetzy style, Marilyn Monroe gets a downtown makeover streetwise, unbothered, and laced with just the right amount of attitude. Set against the grit and vertical chaos of New York City, the silver screen icon is reimagined in bold graphic style: black-and-white glamor colliding with pop-infused rebellion.
Her lips, glinting with hand-applied Swarovski crystals, are the centerpiece equal parts Hollywood dazzle and East Coast sass. A flash of red against her monochrome face, it’s glamour with a bite.
She wears Streetzy’s signature bunny graphic on her chest, complete with the cheeky tagline: kiss it. The bunny, of course, is flaunting a pair of plump lips on its backside, turning the whole scene into a stylish wink at authority, sex appeal, and the art of not giving a damn.
This piece is not just a tribute it’s a remix. A love letter to icons and iconoclasts, served with sparkle, humor, and a little Brooklyn edge.
If Art is Dead, Let’s Eat Warhol
by Aaron Jackson Bowman
Inspiration is clearly from Andy Warhol’s well-known lithograph series Flowers. And the piece is a bit of a play on the notion of a series—or the notion of making copies. Much of Andy’s work was about becoming a machine. About mass production. If Art is Dead, Let’s Eat Warhol is matching Andy’s methodology as it’s plagiarizing an image—one of Warhol’s images—it’s a copy of a copy. (Actually it’s a copy of a copy of a copy, since Andy was basing his work on a photograph.) And the piece’s title is basically proclaiming that if all art has already been made, then let’s just default to remaking what has already been made. Let’s become machines.
Miscreant XI
by Aaron Jackson Bowman
Inspiration and what story does it tell?
I hadn’t thought of it until answering this question, but If Art is Dead, Let’s Eat Warhol curates really well with Miscreant XI from an origin standpoint. While they both work well together visually, it’s more interesting how they relate in the way in which they were conceived. They are both repeats. Remakes. Again, the artist becoming a machine. The miscreant character is one I have done repeatedly—this being the 11th version that has made it to canvas. So the initial work on canvas, inspired by a scribble, has inspired ten subsequent copies.
Ragged Rooftops
by Bissera (Pearl)
All about the signature NYC water towers! These iconic New York staples still define our city skyline, so unique to NYC, rich in size and colors. Features of both our history and present, much loved by New Yorkers and quite intriguing to our visitors. Showcasing them here, perched on our rooftops, for all to see and be amused and delighted by their lasting presence on our city skyline.
Vintage Vibes
by Bissera (Pearl)
All about the vintage bits of NYC, remnants of its past, still existing in the present, mixing with the new, reminding of the old. Fragments of our city rich history, architecture charms laden with nostalgia for what used to be. Capturing some here, such “diamonds in the rough” for all to notice and appreciate our heritage.
Violet on Red Gene Column
White on Off Gene Column
Turquoise Gene Column
Erythristic Gene Column
by Ralph Pàquin
Gene Columns:
The molecular level of how our bodies process information and energy is fantastic and other worldly. This series of contemporary abstract sculpture was playfully brought about with this very new biomechanical knowledge.
More About Our Artists
CJ Cowden
Artist Statment and Bio
As a mixed media artist, CJ explores the boundaries of form, texture, and color through abstract compositions. CJ’s work is a dialogue between spontaneity and intention, where different materials and techniques come together to create layered, dynamic pieces. CJ aims to evoke emotion and provoke thought, encouraging viewers to find their own connections and interpretations within the abstract forms. Through this process, CJ seeks to capture the essence of creativity—unpredictable, complex, and endlessly evolving.
CJ’s artistic journey is a testament to the transformative power of creativity in the face of adversity. Born into the whirlwind world of a traveling evangelist, she spent her formative years on the road, bearing witness to the fervor and devotion of her parents’ mission.
After her parents passing at age 10, CJ navigated her new life in foster care with art as it allowed her to express her depth of emotions. Today, CJ stands as a testament to resilience and the enduring human spirit. She has transcended her humble beginnings to become a gallery owner, a curator of dreams, and an artist of international acclaim. CJ’s journey from troubling childhood to a globally recognized artist and gallery owner reminds us that even in the darkest of circumstances, creativity has the power to heal and transform lives.
Aaron Jackson Bowman
Artist Statment and Bio
In both natural and artificial forms, shaping nearly all reaches of the human experience―from geographical borders to the phenomena of the cosmos, from civil infrastructure to electricity and the internet, from stock exchanges to mathematics, from music and dance to penmanship and needlework, from parades to rockets, from architecture to tree roots, from the construction of our bodies to the chronology of our lives―the line is everywhere, always.
In the beginning, mankind created the line; and creativity has since depended on it as a foundational primary. The line is a cartographer, an exhibitionist, a shapeshifter. the line is a malleable god; and it prevails as one of the purest forms of mark-making.
In Aaron's work, the line has been adopted, exploited, and is the most conspicuous part of the art. Aaron Jackson Bowman lives and works in new york city.
Artist Statment and Bio
As an artist, architect, designer, I am truly fascinated by images of buildings and infrastructure in our cities, many of which are unique in form and artistic in expression. I see the ART in everything, as I discover city bits with captivating shapes, volumes, curves, and colors. My art is about revealing these "diamonds in the rough" for all to see and admire. I connect with cities as they speak to me and are the inspiration for my art.
In my raw images of vintage New York, I reveal the ART in city buildings and supporting structures, or as I call it ARCHITECTURE as ART.
My artworks named after NYC neighborhoods are handmade of printed and cut photos which I have personally taken around the city. They feature columns, structures, bridges, pipes, washed-out brick walls and signature NYC water towers still defining our city skyline. My art is all about the OTHER New York - the obscure parts of NYC we don't notice and mostly avoid or ignore. To elicit discovery, recognition, acknowledgement, and appreciation for our urban past and present is the driver of my art work.
Bissera (Pearl)
Ralph
Pàquin
Artist Statment and Bio
From an early age, I was captivated by the intricacies of human biology and genetics—an initial curiosity that evolved into a broader investigation of human origin and consciousness. This exploration has expanded to include cosmology, archeology, mysticism, and belief systems. These fields, combined with lived experience, form a kind of visual encyclopedia that fuels my creative output.
My work draws from observation, imagination, and experimentation. Mysticism and natural phenomena influence my abstracted forms, while humor often shapes layered metaphors. Whether rooted in complex concepts or intuitive impulses, my approach is intentional, dimensional, and rigorously crafted.
I work with a wide range of materials and techniques, from spontaneous “free form” sculpting to intricate, multi-step cold casting. Each sculpture is fabricated using traditional and contemporary methods, with materials selected for their durability, flexibility, and expressive potential.
My artworks serve as philosophical vessels—bridging the tangible and the cosmic, the seen and the unseen. They invite viewers to reflect on the mysteries of existence, the intersections of art and science, and the invisible structures that shape our reality.