Tappan Celebrates Living Artists, Curates Community, With First New York Space

Eschewing his ubiquitous black wine in a kylix for frat boy party favorites, Dionysus raises a 40–ounce bottle of malt liquor or beer in one hand and a red SOLO cup in the other. His youthful chest bare beneath a himation, Dionysus rides what looks more like a cheetah than his unusual leopard. Entangled woody, perennial vines bearing robust bunches of grapes seem to emanate from the head of a dolphin-human hybrid. White doves surround the vines, signaling Peleiades, the sacred women of Zeus and the Mother Goddess, Dione, at the Oracle at Dodon.

Mythology and modernity collide in Umar Rashid’s sensational celestial-oceanic visual narrative, where even mightiest Zeus, god of the sky and king of Olympus, is drawn into his dynamic heir’s preposterous revelry.

Dionysus, our intrepid enabler (2025), a three-foot-by-three-foot square acrylic on stretched canvas embodying the inner circular imagery within a sparkly pale background encased in a walnut frame, is a highlight of the Proximities exhibition presented by Tappan, the contemporary art platform dedicated to identifying and amplifying the next generation of emerging and and mid-career artists. Tappan’s engaging founder, Chelsea Neman Nassib, was wise to scale her business from an online platform while widening her reach of matching collectors with artists who may be otherwise underserved. Celebrating artists in their lifetime is essential to the fortitude of humanity.

“With Proximities, we wanted to explore the ways we experience intimacy—with ourselves, with others, and with the spaces we move through. New York felt like the right place for this show, not only because of the city’s unique rhythm of closeness and distance but because many of the artists featured live and work here,” Neman Nassib says. “To bring them together under one roof feels like a celebration of the creative energy that together feels like a celebration of the creative energy that makes the city so singular.”

Chicago-born Rashid (also known as Frohawk Two Feathers) lives and works in Los Angeles, home base for Tappan. The son of a playwright and actor, Rashid borrows from a wide range of influences – illuminated manuscripts, Native American ledger drawings, primitive art paintings, Mughal Persian miniature paintings, Indonesian Batik, Hmong story cloth, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian Babylonian cuneiform, Roman mosaics, Greek black-line pottery, and Japanese woodblock prints, and African sculpture – to create powerful stories that often present jocose retellings of the dark past.

Artists featured in the exhibition celebrating Tappan’s first physical New York presence during a buzzy dinner last night, surrounded by the eclectic array of artworks, underscoring what is more a collective than a gallery. Taking over the ground floor of 100 Grand Street in SoHo, guests indulged in a feast fit for Greek gods, curated by Olivia Muniak. Built in 1910 as a loft building in a prominent part of the original Cast Iron District, the building retains its distinctive architectural details and high ceilings, lending to art viewing. A former Le Pain Quotidien, Tappan has transformed the space into a singular immersive experience, where you can sit by the fireplace or admire the columns, which play exquisitely with Rashid’s painting. The goal should always be to make art accessible to all.

Delve into another imaginary realm with Irinka Talakhadze (born 2000, Georgia), who whisks viewers into a dystopian dreamworld. In HOPE (2025), a figure stands tall in an oversized pale grey coat and a coordinated demonic-cat-ear cap fastened at her neck, patting the covered head of a smaller seated figure, perhaps her child. The arms of the standing figure seem elongated, as if to fit the coat. The smaller figure is blanketed by an immense light brown coat that obscures her hands and drapes over her shoes. While both figures are rosy cheeked, suggesting good health, they appear despondent, despite the intimacy indicated by their collective pose. A shadow lurks behind the larger figure, evoking a ghost or a menacing presence. Perhaps Talakhadze is haunted by her Soviet heritage, as Georgia gained independence in 1991, following a period as the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), incorporated in 1921 after the Red Army invaded and established a communist government. At more than 71⁄2 -tall, the painting is larger than life.

We gaze at a colossal visage, pondering what the subject is thinking with her eyes shut. Shawn Polmo chooses a minimal palette that compels a close focus to the precise brushstrokes and lines that evoke emotion and curiosity. Sculptural facial features accentuate the mystery of M.M.B., oscillating between real and imaginary, as the quotidian evolves into the complicated. Navigating this face becomes an obsession, her inability to look back at the viewer opens the dialogue for myriad interpretation. Placing M.M.B. above the fireplace invites viewers into the fungible worlds between the everyday and the exceptional.