Exhibition Review: "Squeak Carnwath: Goddess of All" at Jane Lombard Gallery (on view through February 28, 2026)

Portrait of Squeak Carnwath with her paintings at Jane Lombard Gallery, Tribeca, 2026. Image courtesy of Jane Lombard Gallery. Portrait by Rosscollab.

By LIAM OTERO February 25, 2026

Exhibition Link

Only a few days remain to check out the epic paintings of legendary California-based artist Squeak Carnwath (American, b. 1947) in her fourth solo exhibition at Jane Lombard Gallery, Goddess of All. With a focus on paintings made between 2022 and 2025, Carnwath’s heroically-scaled compositions are enriched with a combination of imagery and text operating as pedagogical signposts on the multifarious nature behind womanhood. Goddess of All makes for an impactful title of this show, not only for its memorability, but more so in its encapsulation of a core thematic tenet intrinsic to the vastness of womanhood: the feminine divine. 

Squeak Carnwath, Ancestors and Future Ghosts, 2023, oil and alkyd on canvas over panel. 65 x 65 inches / 165.1 x 165.1 cm. Image courtesy of Jane Lombard Gallery. 

Carnwath’s paintings have a conceptual bent to their execution given the coexistence of figurative and abstract imagery alongside text, a marriage of the aesthetic and the metaphysical. A painting like Ancestors and Future Ghosts (2023) honors matrilineal heritage with its buoyant descriptions of female archetypes: mothers, daughters, sisters, women, goddesses, witches, shamans. Interspersed among these words are depictions of Ancient Greco-Roman statuary of goddesses, with the recognizable silhouette of the Venus de Milo twice appearing as the largest of them all (also a recurring motif in a few other works throughout this show). A work like this became an emphatic statement on the need to look to the ancients for wisdom and inspiration, to harken back through time from a matriarchal lineage.

Squeak Carnwath, Past, Present, Future, 2025, oil and alkyd on canvas over panel. 36 x 36 inches / 91.4 x 91.4 cm. Image courtesy of Jane Lombard Gallery. 

The need to uphold women’s rights is one of the moral imperatives that - metaphorically - gave birth to this body of work. As you take in the abundance of iconography within Carnwath’s paintings, her messaging comes across quite explicitly with a slew of contemporary and historic issues surrounding this theme: violence as embodied by the symbol of the handgun; attacks on reproductive rights articulated by the wire coat hanger; or a house under the label of “BEFORE” as representative of pre-Second Wave Feminist advancements when womanhood was strictly confined to the domestic sphere. 

Squeak Carnwath, Goddess of All, 2025, oil and alkyd on canvas over panel. 77 x 77 inches / 195.6 x 195.6 cm. Image courtesy of Jane Lombard Gallery. 

While these are pressing issues that are expressed with a sense of urgency, I found that Carnwath’s paintings are equally driven by a radical optimism. Flowers blossom with the most gloriously colored petals alongside the silhouettes of female art historical figures - one of Degas’s young ballet dancers, the aforementioned Venus de Milo, and the Statue of Liberty. This trifecta of iconic representations of womanhood, which traverse ages and generations, has me pondering if these could be Carnwath’s ideal conceptions of daughter, mother, grandmother? Or even the idea of a maiden, mother, and crone (aka the Triple Goddess of Neopagan lore)? 

Squeak Carnwath, Wisdom of the Future, 2024, oil and alkyd on canvas over panel. 50 x 50 inches / 127 x 127 cm. Image courtesy of Jane Lombard Gallery. 

Something should be said, too, of the meta-commentary Carnwath brings to the table as these works are just as much painting about painting. She has built up an entire career as a painter, and so all the more appropriate that these works reflect upon it. Swatches or dots of colors filter in and out, not quite stealing the scene, but making their presence felt all the same in tandem with the more direct imagery of Carnwath’s goddesses or textual statements. Even the partial smears of painted handprints in a work like Wisdom of the Future (2024) invokes such an impressive association of painting’s longevity in human culture extending back to the Prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux all the way to today when some of our earliest childhood memories of art came from fingerpainting exercises in elementary school. 

Squeak Carnwath, Keep (What You Love), 2025, oil and alkyd on canvas over panel. 36 x 36 inches / 91.4 x 91.4 cm. Image courtesy of Jane Lombard Gallery. 

Much of what I’ve written here is derived from my initial walkthrough of the exhibition with Carnwath, who was such a delight to converse with that I found myself referring to her as “Squeak the Prosyletizer.” It checks out that communication is one of her natural skills as she has been an arts educator for much of her career, having taught at the University of California, Davis, UC Berkeley, and California College of the Arts and Crafts. Subsequently, I realized that you are not just “looking” at Carnwath’s paintings, but also “reading” them. And quite literally, not just with those one-off statements or words, but even an entire lecture on the importance of art that covers almost the entire surface of the painting Keep (What You Love) (2025). These paintings are as much an intuitive portal into Carnwath’s mind!

Carnwath’s paintings are inviting pieces which wield an aesthetic brilliance that is ensconced within engaging critical discourse on gender, history & futurity, knowledge, power, and spirituality. After you’ve immersed yourself in Carnwath’s world, you will leave this exhibition with a greater wisdom and appreciation for womanhood. WM