Verdure takes its name from the medieval tapestry tradition—dense, floor-to-ceiling weavings of stylized foliage made for the transitional spaces of palaces and great houses: corridors, antechambers, rooms between rooms. They were not meant for focused contemplation but for peripheral absorption, for the slow accumulation of green as you moved through a space. The works gathered here propose something similar.
Nicole Burko draws from her personal experiences of freediving into underwater caverns on a single breath. What reads as horizon—as land meeting sky—is, in her paintings, always a view from below the surface, light pressing down from above. Her landscape is real and inverted simultaneously, extending the exhibition’s logic of green as a shifted perception.
For Moira Holohan, chroma green—the green of the film industry’s green screen—has become a contemporary signifier: a portal, a marker of unstable identity, a place of transformation. In the works on view, that green migrates from the digital into the textile and the painted mark, carrying with it the instability of a space where one image ends and another begins.
Karen Starosta-Gilinski’s recent work moves between fingers and clay on canvas—tactile, direct, and grounded in the Venezuelan landscape of her formation. Her green is terrestrial, almost remembered: grass, growth, and the irreducible fact of the natural world pressing back; it completes the exhibition’s movement from image to material ground.
Together, the three practices hold a single color across different relationships to land, surface, and image—and show that green, like verdure itself, is less a color than a condition.
Studios
Moira Holohan
Moira Holohan (b.1976, New York, NY; lives and works, Miami, FL). Raised in Manhattan, Holohan studied at iconic New York art schools such as the Arts Students League of New York, Cooper Union, New York Studio School, or the National Academy of Design School of Fine Art. Holohan was greatly influenced by some of her earlier training including her high school teacher Marc Schlesinger who assisted Lee Krasner, a renowned artist from the New York School. Holohan was an artist assistant to John Coplans (1995) and to Fred Tomaselli (1998). Holohan received a Masters of Fine Arts Degree at Hunter College, NY and a Bachelor Degree at Bard College, NY.
Holohan lives and works in Miami, FL. She was an artist in residence at Annex Arts in Castine, ME with a final exhibition, Subsurface(2019) and had a solo exhibition Green, at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden(2019) Holohan was one of the cofounders of meetinghouse, an exhibition space merging disciplines of art, design and architecture. She served as the Director of Art from (2015-2018). Since 2020 Holohan has been an associate artist at the Bakehouse, Miami, Fl.
Select group exhibitions include; A Thread of Execution, Dimensions Variable, Miami, Fl , (2017) Aesthetics & Values, FIU Frost Art Museum, Miami, Fl , Screen Dance Miami, Perez Art Museum, Miami, Fl (2016 ) Flow State: Thisishappening, Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Miami, Fl (2014 ) Pattern State: Fringe Project, Miami, Fl (curated by Amanda Sanfilippo) (2014) Miami Light and Texture, Miami, Fl (curated by Kathryn Mikesell) (2014) Cortaditos, MDC Museum of Art & Design, Miami, Fl (2013 ) New Work Miami 2013, Perez Art Museum Miami, Miami, Fl (2013), co-curated by PAMM associate curators René Morales and Diana Nawi. Practices Remain, Regina Rex, Queens, NY (2012), DCG 2012, David Castillo Gallery, Miami, Fl , (2012); Practices Remain, Norwegian Wood Building, Miami Fl (2012); Split, General Practice, Miami, Fl, curated by Carlos Rigau (2011); Re-Framing the Feminine, Girls Club Web Project, Fort Lauderdale, Fl (2010); and Sky/water…Reproduction, de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space, Miami, Fl, curated by Carlos Rigau (2009 ).
Karen Starosta-Gilinski
Karen Starosta-Gilinski was raised in Caracas, Venezuela and born in Minnesota, USA in 1982. She holds degrees from the Accademia Del Giglio in Florence, Italy, and a BFA from Miami International University of Art & Design, graduated Cum Laude. Her practice incorporates found objects and altered materials, as well as comforting objects such as clay on canvas, plush toys and recycled objects to create a variety of assemblages and sculptures that are humorous, provocative to touch and heartfelt. She has had solo exhibitions at the Design District Dacra’s Melin Building, granted by former Miami Design District, Craig Robin’s collection and program curator, Tiffany Chestler. Starosta-Gilinski’s has exhibited twice at The Moore Building, supported by Design District DACRA. She has exhibited at the Art Culture Center of Hollywood, curated by Jane Hart. The Frost Art Museum, curated by Klaudio Rodriguez, former executive director of the Bronx Art Museum, NY, and now executive director and CEO of the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg.
Her group shows include David Castillo Gallery, The Bass Museum, Coral Gables Museum & The Freedom Tower, curated by Sonia Becce, also at Bakehouse, curated by former MOCA chief curator, Bonnie Clearwater, and Primary Los Angeles. A commissioned sculpture is in the permanent collection at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum. Some international shows include London, Venezuela & Shanghai Art.
Starosta-Gilinski’s artwork is part of important private and public collections, such as FIU Frost Art Museum, Bass Museum President’s collection: Diane & Alan Lieberman, Bass Museum President: George Lindemann Jr., Art Collector & Miami Design District Visionary: Craig Robins, Alberto Chehebar, Paul Berg, Joseph Berg, Solita Cohen-Mishaan, Mario Cader-Fretch, Lolo Sudarsky, Felipe Grimberg & Eduardo Ojeda, Gallerist Jumanne Naamdie, Fredric Snitzer, John Linn, Valentina Tintori, Pamm Board members: Arlene & Wayne Chaplin, Fountainhead Residency founders: Kathryn & Dan Mikesell, Cota Cohen, Artist Liu Bolin, Typoe, between others.
Since 2012, Karen Starosta-Gilinski, has presented workshops as Guest Artist, for adults and children at The ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art Miami Design District), Oolite Arts, PAMM, The Underline, The Art & Culture Center of Hollywood, Site 95 Brooklyn-based Gallery at Bayfront Park, Design District Family Day, and Coral Gables Museum. Karen is a former pioneer artist at The Fountainhead Studios and at her current studio, Located at “City State” in Little River, Miami, directed by fellow artist, Jillian Mayer; visits can be arranged by appointment.
Karen has had her work displayed at The PAMM Museum Shop, and is currently on view at the vibrant Bass Museum Shop.
Starosta-Gilinski’s work has been featured in Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, Ocean Drive Magazine, New Times, White Hot Magazine, Tide Magazine, Art Nexus Magazine, Haute Living, [NAME] Publications, Casacor, Design District Magazine and more. She was named Miami Design District Ambassador 2014, and was part of The MOCA shakers board committee 2007.
Nicole Burko
Nicole Burko was born in Toronto, Canada in 1987. Burko holds an MFA from Columbia University (2019) and a BFA from the New World School of the Arts (2011). Her works have been exhibited in prestigious museums and institutions in NYC and Miami, including the Frost Art Museum. In addition to her artistic practice Nicole is an experienced educator having worked as an assistant professor at Columbia University and currently teaching visual art at Miami Arts Charter School. Burko’s paintings are informed by her own explorations of the ocean through freediving—the act of taking a single breath of air and descending into the ocean as far as humanly possible. The resulting psychological landscape paintings investigate the vastness of the natural world through an intimate lens.
