For the 2025 edition of the Dallas Art Fair, Library Street Collective will present the works of painters James Benjamin Franklin and Zoe McGuire in booth F4 from April 10-13, 2025. This pairing inspires a dialog between the two, where Franklin’s abstractions activate the formal qualities of McGuire’s suspended landscapes; and McGuire’s representations of nature bring out topographies in Franklin’s intuitive multimedia works.

Franklin is perhaps best known for the organically shaped supports he builds by hand to contain his many layers of paint, resin, sand, and textured blankets, carpets, and towels. By pooling paint and allowing absorption into the textile before hanging it on the wall, the liquid soaks in as well as traverses its surface, creating crags and valleys in the stratum. Consecutive layers build on these textures, and Franklin responds with brushstrokes, shapes, and dry media that add layers of complexity.

Next to McGuire’s paintings, one can see the mountains, horizons, and constellations that emerge from his experimentation. Similarly, the softly molded surfaces that characterize Franklin’s works invigorate the organic ‘frames’ of McGuire’s compositions, where supple, symmetrical forms act as windows that reveal expansive and suspended landscapes. All at once, McGuire’s tree roots, meandering lakes, and rolling hills become shapes and fields of color that echo Franklin’s labyrinths of dripping paint.

Like Franklin, color and shape are essential to McGuire; her biomorphic forms are arranged architecturally to build out her compositions, driven by the desire to reclaim concepts of design within painting. In her works, one can see the visual patterning of Art Nouveau’s sinuous forms, the vast sublimity of the Hudson School, and the spiritually oriented abstraction of the Transcendental Painting Group.