Brooklyn, NY—In celebration of its 20th Anniversary as a cornerstone of Brooklyn's richly diverse cultural community, Tabla Rasa Gallery is pleased to announce a new exhibition titled Idiosyncratic Identities, curated by Izzy Nova and Giustina Surbone. The exhibition's featured artists, Christina Schlesinger, Giustina Surbone, Grace Graupe-Pillard, Robin Tewes, and Sandra Cavanagh, explore the complexities of individual identity through the framework of contemporary art.

Over the past two decades, Tabla Rasa Gallery has established its own "idiosyncratic identity." The gallery's character and impact have been shaped by the wide variety of artists and stories it has presented to the public.

Continuing this narrative, Idiosyncratic Identities showcases work that engages with themes of personal experiences, cultural heritage, and the continually evolving understanding of self. Viewers can expect to see paintings that examine the intersections of individuality and collective identity.

"Arising from our multiple vantage points as practicing artists, supporters of art nonprofits, and commercial gallerists, it is thrilling to celebrate Tabla Rasa's 20th Anniversary." States Audrey and Joseph Anastasi, Directors of Tabla Rasa Gallery. "As the first full-time gallery in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, it has been profoundly rewarding to have shared visual art within this vibrant residential and industrial community.”

Please join them in celebrating 20 years of art, culture, and storytelling as they honor Tabla Rasa Gallery's vibrant legacy. The exhibition will run from May 8 to 30th, 2025.

About Tabla Rasa Gallery

Founded twenty years ago by Audrey and Joseph Anastasi, Tabla Rasa Gallery is dedicated to the visual arts as an expression of the human spirit and a voice for social issues. The gallery provides a non-intimidating, accessible, and community-friendly space for high-quality art viewing. It showcases works by emerging, mid-career, and established artists from Brooklyn, New York, and across the United States. Located in a turn-of-the-century carriage house in industrial Sunset Park, Brooklyn, the gallery hosts solo and group exhibitions encompassing various styles, themes, and media.

Exhibitions are free and open to the public. For the latest updates on events and scheduling, please call (917) 880 8337 or Audrey.TablaRasa@gmail.com.



About the Artists

Christina Schlesinger ’s paintings and mixed media collages explore self-portraiture and lesbian sexuality. Her work examines connections between gender, identity, sex and representation. The narrative, implicit in Schlesinger’s Tomboy and Lesbian Bar paintings, reveal a hidden history of lesbian culture, inspired by the American artist, Romaine Brooks’ confident portraits of the out lesbians of the 1930’s Paris demimonde.

Beyond Schlesinger’s career as a painter and educator, she is also a distinguished public artist. In her 20s, she co-founded SPARC, the Social and Public Art Resource Center, in Los Angeles with artist Judy Baca. She went on to work on The Great Wall of Los Angeles, recently designated a national monument by the Mellon Foundation. Schlesinger has painted murals in California, Colorado, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York. 

Schlesinger has an extensive exhibition record and has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner, the Gottlieb Foundation, the Community of the Arts, and Foundations Karoly in Vence, France. She is on the Board of SPARC and Provincetown Arts magazine. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Leslie Lohman Museum in NYC and in private collections.

Giustina Surbone is a painter, video, performance, and culinary artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her paintings are an exploration of unfamiliar beauty within the construct of portraiture and the narrative. Her paintings epitomize certain aspects of humanity: ageism, body image, and sexual identity, often with a nod toward art's historical symbolism. Surbone designs her paintings to deliver a direct impact by virtue of size, style, and the expressive force of her subjects. "My subjects confront themselves and their audience in terms of their inner emotional being to communicate truth and the poignant and transitory nature of life and beauty." 

Venues where Surbone has exhibited in both solo and group shows include McCaig-Welles Gallery, Exit Art, Tribes Gallery, Tabla Rasa Gallery, Gallery Korea, The Flux Factory, Sideshow Gallery, Lascono Gallery, and El Barrio's Artspace PS 109, to name a few. Her work has been published and reviewed in the NY Times, the NY Daily News, Hyperallergic, and Time Out NY and is in private and Kentler International Drawing Space collections.

In addition to her practice as a painter, Surbone created and produced the Hungry Grlz Project, an ongoing series of works using the table as a focal point for absurd dining experiments and decadent artistic presentations, including painting, performance, installation, video, and photographic works. In 2012 she was commissioned by the Flux Factory to create a public performance work entitled, A Bacchanalian Banquet for the Banquet of America Experiment, which was influenced by Greek and Roman saturnalia and Filippo Marinette's Futurist Cookbook. Her most recent project, entitled “RAGE”, is based on a global feminist ideology that was initially inspired by the 2016 Women's March in Washington and the #MeToo movement.

Grace Graupe-Pillard is a painter, public artist, educator, and videographer. Graupe-Pillard's mythic and heroic portrait paintings are large in scale and tell a story of the humanity and beauty of everyday people. "My work since 1975 has dealt with feminist issues beginning with paintings of large frontal nudes of men and women of various ages who did not "fit into" the dictates of the "gaze" of the male-dominated art history/museum network." 

Graupe-Pillard’s work has been exhibited in many venues, including Cheim & Read Gallery, NYC; Carl Hammer Gallery, Chicago; the Proposition, NYC; Hal Bromm Gallery, NYC; Rupert Ravens Contemporary and Aljira-A Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, NJ. She has also participated in group exhibitions at The Noyes Museum, P.S.1., Bass Museum, Indianapolis Museum, The Maier Museum, The Aldrich Museum, The Drawing Center, The Hunterdon Museum, The Frist Center, and The National Academy Museum. Her photos and videos have been presented at Lars von Trier's Gesamt, Warsaw Jewish Film Festival, Scope Miami, Scope London, Art Chicago, Art Fem. TV, Cologne OFF, Found Footage, and SHOAH.

Robin Tewes is a New York City-based artist known since the early 1980s for her representational paintings of frozen, narrative-like moments. She paints everyday people and domestic interiors in a precise, almost deadpan style that Artforum critic Ronny Cohen called "searingly direct" in its presentation of information and emotional impact. Another review by critic Roberta Smith of the NY Times states, "Robin Tewes paints small, meticulously rendered interiors in which disturbing details regularly define the balloon of domestic normalcy." Tewes often incorporates subtle, graffiti-like text into her paintings, suggesting pointed or disquieting thoughts, conversations, or social commentary on the scene portrayed. Or as ARTnews Barbara Pollack describes Tewes' work as maintaining "an edgy balance between surrealism and soap opera." In addition to her art practice, Tewes has worked as an educator, lecturer, curator, and activist.

Tewes has shown her work in numerous solo exhibitions in New York City, as well as nationally and internationally. She has exhibited at venues including The Whitney Museum, The New York Historical Society Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art, The Drawing Center in NYC, and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China, among many. Her work has been widely discussed in publications including Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Tema Celeste, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Village Voice. Tewes was a founding member of the PS 122 Painting Association. She has been recognized with a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (2015) and NYFA Painting Award (2015, 2008), an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award (2007), and inclusion in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in 2016.

Sandra Cavanagh was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her early life was pitched on a growing awareness of the prevailing political instability, an overbearing patriarchal society and the dangers of state sanctioned brutality and censorship. Cavanagh read Social Sciences at the University of Belgrano, emigrated to California and later to the UK. She is a Fine Art graduate from K.I.A.D, University of Kent. Since 2010 she's worked and resided in New York City.



Cavanagh's work has been exhibited at various venues, including the Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art, Pen & Brush, Gallery 14C, and Westbeth Gallery in New York; Miami National Fine Arts in Florida; and Museo Limen in Italy. In November 2025, she will have a solo exhibition at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

She has participated in notable exhibitions such as Aqua Art Miami and the Every Woman Biennale at La Mama Galleria. Her art has received recognition, including the Waave New York Women's Art Month Award in 2025 and being a finalist for the Women United Art Prize in 2023. Most recently, she has been awarded the 2025 Jackson Art Prize Oil Award.

Cavanagh's practice has been featured in several publications, including the covers of Create! Magazine and Feminist Space Journal, as well as interviews with Women in the Arts Network, Contemporary Art Collectors, and the Women United Art Prize. Additionally, her work has been highlighted in publications such as The Jersey Journal, Epicenter NYC, Visual Arts Journal, and The Anti-Misogyny Journal.