Over the last several years my attendance at exhibition openings at LABspace follow a gleeful pattern: enter the cozy gallery packed with the kindest humans; bump into familiar artist-friends from all over the Hudson Valley and engage in brisk but empowered interactions; insist on bear-hugs with co-directors Ellen Letcher and Julie Torres; absorb an insightful one-on-one dialogue with the artist before rotating through the show; whisk away, heart full and brain enriched from the art lesson given. This time around, Sara Farrell Okamura: “On The Precipice” provided the vibrant backdrop for this happy routine, and it is an honor to share a few words about this compassionate doyenne who held court with her adoring fan-club that day.
Featuring nearly 20 recent oil paintings on view and a flat file with additional gems, the ambiance of this show is both grounded (by way of thick realms of color and familiar vestiges of place) and transcendent (by way of ethereal compositions that defy it all). Farrell Okamura valiantly welcomes us into her rugged painterly adventure, where the diverse possibilities of Abstract Expressionism allow for continued discovery and redefinition of the enduring movement. With an overriding reverence for Mother Earth as reflected in her
organically themed work, she describes beauty as that which “lies in the natural phenomenon that surrounds us wherever we call home.”
This sentiment is wholly embodied by her masterwork Watching (2025), where we peer into a glowing white-hued forest with mighty tree trunks defining the environs while yellow and red orbs hover within this ghostly patch of nature: the feeling is mystical, nostalgic, and Fauvist all at once. With Lamentation (2025), the bulk of this painting appears to be dark waters as a small slice of blazing sun illuminates the portion of the work, a moment of enlightenment amid obscurity. Strange Sky (2001) with its pinkish-dripping-candy color at top, salad-mix-green jumble in the middle, and checkered pattern at the bottom is a funky chaos, while Searching for Atlantis (2024) is a vision of a parallel realm that references nature but goes beyond it, offering a psychological peek into Farrell Okamura’s process. In this breakout work, two headless red figures lay in black to the far left as two blobby creature-like forms float above them amid a verdant zone while puffy white forms occupy the space near a furniture-like object in the upper right (a dreamy scene that solicits more questions than answers). In simpler works such as Dig Deeper (2025) with its white and yellow composition and No Lights (2026) as a stoic black and white binary, Farrell Okamura’s focus as an Ab-Ex painter is pronounced.
Aside from her painting practice, Farrell Okamura has been active as a writer, educator, and community-driven arts professional throughout her career. During her years working in Chicago, she organized cultural exchanges with artists from Mexico, and she went on to be the director of the Northern Berkshire Creative Arts program on the MASS MoCA campus, among other leadership roles.
I was bummed to miss the early June artist talk between Farrell Okamura and fellow painter Elisabeth Condon (who I had the pleasure of studying with at Bennington College during the 1990s), which I am sure yielded a bold conversation about the magic and struggle of making art in all its exquisite weirdness—those two demonstrate badass charm at its finest. Summer has arrived, and this show is on the way out with one weekend remaining. As each of us navigates a personal precipice of some kind, visit LABspace to walk the edge of Farrell Okamura’s before its withdrawn.
