NY2CA Gallery Presents Show & Tell, New Work by Irene Nelson and Nancy Selvin

BENICIA, CA — NY2CA Gallery presents Show & Tell, an exhibition of new work by abstract painter Irene Nelson and ceramic artist Nancy Selvin, on view October 8 through November 15, 2026, at 617 First Street in downtown Benicia.

Bringing together painting and ceramics, Show & Tell explores the ways artists navigate uncertainty through intuition, material, memory, imagination, and the physical act of making.

Irene Nelson works in the elusive territory between memory and imagination. Originally from New York and based for much of her adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area, Nelson describes her work as absorbing both the attitude of New York abstraction and the distinctive sensibility of Bay Area light. Her paintings develop through organic gesture, color, layering, intuition, and persistent experimentation. Rather than beginning with a fixed destination, she allows compositions to emerge through the process itself.

For Nelson, uncertainty is not something to resolve before making the work. It is part of the work.

She describes being an artist as a commitment to continue showing up, to work from a place of not knowing, to welcome mistakes, and to repeatedly ask the question, “What if?” Her paintings reflect that openness. Marks accumulate, disappear, collide, and change direction as memory and imagination move in and out of focus.

Nancy Selvin’s new work for Show & Tell begins with a different proposition.

The works are physical, ceramic, booklike forms whose tactile and sensory qualities reference the enduring literary principle “show, don’t tell.” For Selvin, that familiar phrase takes on new significance at a time increasingly defined by questions of authorship, plagiarism, authenticity, artificiality, and what can or cannot be proven.

Her response is not nostalgia for a simpler world, but an insistence on tangible experience.

A ceramic object is made. It occupies space. Its surfaces record decisions and actions. Like music performed in real time, a handmade tool, a competition, an ancient structure, or a child learning to shape clay, the object becomes evidence of human effort.

Selvin sees value in the skills and processes that make such experiences possible: craft, trial and error, discipline, talent, labor, and persistence.

That emphasis on material and making is rooted in a career spanning more than five decades. Selvin is among the Bay Area ceramic artists associated with the radical California Clay Movement, which challenged traditional assumptions about ceramics, expression, form, function, and the medium’s position within the art world. A graduate of UC Berkeley, she received her M.A. in 1970 while studying with Ron Nagle and Peter Voulkos. She taught ceramics at California College of the Arts and retired from teaching in 2020. Today she maintains an active studio practice in West Berkeley.

The works Selvin created for this exhibition were developed with the expertise and assistance of Eleni Berg, a recent MFA graduate of UC Berkeley.

Together, Nelson and Selvin present two distinct but closely related approaches to living with uncertainty.

Nelson moves toward uncertainty through intuition, vulnerability, experimentation, and discovery. Selvin responds by returning to material presence and the unmistakable evidence of human making.

The exhibition’s title brings those ideas together.

Show & Tell recalls both childhood discovery and a foundational principle of storytelling, but here it also becomes a question: What do we understand because we have been told, and what do we understand because we have encountered something ourselves?

Painting offers marks, color, gesture, memory, and suggestion.

Ceramics offers surface, weight, texture, volume, and touch.

Neither provides a simple answer.

Instead, the exhibition invites viewers to experience the work directly and consider the role art can play in a moment when the boundaries between the real, remembered, imagined, copied, and constructed have become increasingly difficult to define.

Exhibition Information

Show & Tell: Irene Nelson & Nancy Selvin
October 8 – November 15, 2026

NY2CA Gallery
617 First Street
Benicia, California

Hours: Thursday - Sunday, 12pm-5pm