Contemporary Art America
ICA feature | November 9, 2026 | Los Angeles
Disclosure: ICA America and Good Mother Gallery share a founder. This is an ICA feature, not an independent review.
Lacey Stoffer: color carries a history
In Night Carries Color at Good Mother Gallery, paint, sewn yarn and small paper-clay pins make abstraction a record of decisions, including the ones that were undone.
A painting can hold more than its final image. In Lacey Stoffer's Night Carries Color, earlier states remain in the surface: a color pushed behind a darker field, a form reduced, a length of yarn removed but not erased. The holes and traces stay part of the work.
Stoffer works with linen, oil paint, hand-dyed yarn, thread, collage, gouache-painted paper-clay pins and pastel. Yarn passes through the linen rather than resting only on top. That repeated movement works the painting from both sides, adding tension and direction to the painted field. Small pins punctuate the surface; pieces of linen are moved and tested before being incorporated.
The exhibition's title offers a way to read those changes. Night is not an empty space where color disappears. It can hold what has receded. The paintings gather additions and removals into a material history, leaving a previous decision visible inside a new one.
The useful shift is from asking what an abstract painting depicts to noticing what has happened to it. Stitching, punctures and layers let the process remain available to the eye. Revision is not something hidden behind the finished painting. It is part of its structure.
Lacey Stoffer: Night Carries Color
Good Mother Gallery, Los Angeles
November 7 to December 4, 2026
Exhibition details and process information: Good Mother Gallery's exhibition text. Checked November 9, 2026. Interpretive observations are ICA America's; no independent critical endorsement is claimed.