Natural Growth Process
September 5 - October 25, 2025
Alex Ebstein | Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann | Jenny Walton
Exhibition Reception: September 5th, 5 - 7 p.m.
SU Art Galleries | University Gallery in Fulton Hall
Natural Growth Process features Maryland and DC-based artists working in collage, painting, and mixed media. The exhibition explores themes of beauty, endurance, wellness, myth, and the passage of time. The work uniquely reveals patterns and metaphors, creating space for new forms to emerge. From imagining the expansion of a single day to envisioning mythical worlds within our ecosystems and investigating the aesthetics of self-help and wellness, a natural growth process is embedded in both their creative practice and the exhibition itself. Reflecting on materiality, the interplay between the hard and soft edges of abstraction and realism, and the tension between containment and continuity, each artist engages in an ongoing dialogue—with themselves, their materials, and the viewer.
Meet the Artists
Alex Ebstein is a Baltimore-based artist and curator known for her tactile mixed-media abstractions, often incorporating found, readymade, and traditional materials—most notably yoga mats. Drawing from the aesthetics of gym equipment, yoga and dance studios, and DIY construction, her work critically engages with the tropes of self-help culture, wellness, boutique fitness, and the white cube gallery space. These stylized, aspirational environments evoke elite consumerism, positioning health, fitness, and art as exclusive commodities. In her recent work, Ebstein explores landscape as a framework for meditative and aspirational imagery, referencing outdoor wellness culture and social media branding. Her use of flexible materials and organic shapes blurs the line between observation and subconscious perception, offering dreamy, designed spaces that question the myth of individual ascension. Bright, playful motifs balance the deeper critique embedded in her practice.
Ebstein’s solo and two-person exhibitions include Current Space (Baltimore), Victori + Mo (New York), De Novo (Washington, DC), and Frutta Gallery (Rome). She has participated in group shows at Asya Geisberg Gallery (NYC), The Delaware Contemporary, Katzen Museum (DC), and Galerie L’Inlassable (Paris), among others. In 2018, she was a resident artist at Tilleard Projects in Lamu, Kenya. Formerly curator at Goucher College, Ebstein is now Senior Program Manager for the Ruby Artist Grants at the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation. She also co-founded the Baltimore galleries Nudashank, Phoebe, and Resort. She holds a BA from Goucher College and an MFA from Towson University, and is represented by Pazo Fine Art in Washington, DC.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann creates large-scale paper paintings and installations that explore landscape, mythology, and identity. Her work merges the romantic and immersive traditions of Chinese and Western landscape painting with a personal visual language—featuring recurring motifs like ribbons, bats, peaches, and biomorphic floral forms—that reflects her experience as a biracial, second-generation Asian American. Mann investigates how contemporary landscapes are shaped by digital and graphic media, inserting her own fragmented, hybrid world into this evolving visual history. Her richly layered works embody both cultural negotiation and myth-making.
Mann has received numerous awards, including a Fulbright grant, the Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, the AIR Gallery and Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Fellowships, and Washington, DC’s Mayor’s Award and Hamiltonian Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Kreeger Museum, Academy Art Museum, Walters Art Museum, American University Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and internationally at the U.S. consulate in Dubai and the embassy in Yaoundé, Cameroon.
Jenny Walton invites viewers to reflect on the subtle interplay between nature’s ethereal presence and the rhythms of daily life. Often overlooked, nature surrounds and shapes us—through time, light, color, and mood—responding in delicate balance to our actions. While we may believe we control the natural world, our relationship with it is more of a quiet exchange. Her piece, In the Space of a Day, explores themes of passage and stillness through watercolor depictions of sky and clouds across a single day. Composed of rice paper panels, the work shifts with air currents and viewer movement, bringing it to life. Benches placed nearby invite visitors to pause and experience three distinct times: dawn, midday, and dusk.
Walton holds a BFA from Central Washington University and an MFA from American University (D.C. and Italy). She has exhibited nationally in New York, Miami, Boston, and Seattle, and internationally in Italy. Her accolades include a D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artistic Fellowship, as well as grants and residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center. Her work is held in several notable public and private collections, and she currently lives and works in the Washington, D.C. area.
