'Reimagined Mysticism': Professors, Alum, and Students Shoe a Horse in Felt at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery
When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools.—This’ a good block. / It were a delicate stratagem, to shoe / A troop of horse with felt:
– Shakespeare, King Lear
In the latest exhibition at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Reimagined Mysticism: To Shoe a Horse in Felt, new works by MFA students Timothy Bair, Francisco Javier Ramirez, and Jeannie Rhyu share the gallery with editions produced at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies by renowned Professor of Visual Arts Sarah Sze, former Professor of Visual Arts Kiki Smith, and distinguished alum Ernesto Caivano '01.
The LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, a not-for-profit printshop located in Dodge Hall at the School of the Arts at Columbia University, puts on two student-curated shows each year. These exhibitions provide students and visiting artists with an environment in which they can explore and present printmaking techniques—including intaglio, lithography, screenprint, relief, and digital imaging—and foster dialogue within and beyond the MFA Visual Arts Program.
I asked Ramirez, who curated the exhibition, what it means to shoe a horse in felt. Even within the context of King Lear's revenge conquest—the felt would allow him to launch his attack in silence—it is an absurd idea, meant to elucidate his encroaching madness. But Ramirez's interpretation reframes it as a metaphor: "To be able to heal, you need to wrap something in softness," he said. Art can be the medium of healing—an absurd softness.
Keeping his curatorial hand light, Ramirez selected works that reimagine our current moment through mysticism, mining the fantastical from the mundane. This theme emerged from an existing dialogue with his peers that he wished to continue; his selections from the Center responded to concerns he had identified in their work: the natural world, fantasy, and imagination as sites of hope.
The exhibition occurs on a clockwise twenty-four hour cycle, beginning with Rhyu's fantastical seascape, The Moon Whale (30" x 88", monotype on BFK Rives, 2025), and Smith's moon-cycle triptych, Moon Three (32 ¼" x 24" each, photogravure sheet, 1998). On the opposite wall, Sze's Day (37 ¾" x 71", offset lithograph and screenprint, 2003) mirrors Rhyu's massive print. Rather than an invented world, it presents "a deconstruction of the world," as Ramirez put it. Familiar structures are thrown into orbit, like an architectural illustration hit by a twister.
Bair's dusk-colored works, Under Tone (26" x 21", color pencil on paper board mounted on wood in artist frame, 2025) and Where It Settles (30" x 20", color pencil on paper board mounted on wood, 2025) conclude, or restart, the cycle. The textural monochrome drawings reward close looking. In Where It Settles, something like a nest or a portal emerges from a flattened landscape of pink grasses.
If you visit the exhibition, do so with caution. You might find a portal to an alternate world—or a door to the print shop.
Reimagined Mysticism: To Shoe a Horse in Felt is on view February 19–March 20, 2026 at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery in 310 Dodge Hall. It is open Monday–Friday from 9 AM to 5 PM.
Francisco Javier Ramirez is a Mexico City born, New York based interdisciplinary visual artist, curator, publisher, and Visual Arts MFA candidate at Columbia University. His work, books, and curatorial projects have appeared at Brooklyn Art Book Fair, Centro de la Imagen, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library, FELIFA Festival, LA Printed Matter Art Book Fair, Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro, Print Center New York, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Wallach Art Gallery, ZONA MACO, among others.
