NADA New York
12th Edition
May 13–17, 2026

Starett-Lehigh Building
601 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001

Phil Knoll and Erik Daniel White

American Odd: A Dialogue Between Phil Knoll and Erik Daniel White

Phil Knoll (b. 1959) and Erik Daniel White (b. 1988) are artist-friends and fellow travelers. Though a generation apart, they share a wide-ranging appetite for image-making and a deep affection for the stylistic eccentricities they use to pull viewers into their worlds. In conversation, they often discover they are working within the same pictorial universe. 

White, who has shown with Bill Arning Exhibitions since it opened in 2020, developed a labor-intensive clay-based method during his student years. He paints hand-formed figures, objects, and scenes modeled in never-dry clay, carefully recording the bumps, dents, and fingerprints that mark each surface. These traces highlight fragility, impermanence, and the constructed nature of the cultural concepts he depicts. His images build up like ideas—manipulated, reshaped, and altered over time—reflecting America’s attitudes toward the environment, food culture, peace, liberty, taxation, religion, and our competitive drives. Recurring motifs of homes, money, war, and hesitant human figures reference shared cultural landscapes shaped by projected and inherited values such as Money, God, and Masculinity. His playful touch makes difficult subjects accessible without diminishing their seriousness.

My history with Phil Knoll goes back over thirty years to his early show at White Columns, where he proved himself a true visual obsessive. His humorous artist statement claims he began drawing before birth, etching images onto the inside of his mother’s womb with the nail of his left index finger. Anyone who knows the density and relentlessness of his work might suspect he is only half joking. A protégé of Peter Saul at the University of Texas, Knoll is similarly fearless in drawing from cartooning, old-master painting, farm illustration, and reportage, folding these influences into his own idiosyncratic vision.

For this presentation, Knoll and White extend their long-standing preoccupations—war, classical mythology, baseball, electioneering and protest—into the altered semiotics of 2026. Both artists have often trafficked in imagery that at first glance appears disarmingly charming. Yet the present political atmosphere has decisively shifted the conditions under which such images circulate and are interpreted.

The soldier, the Greco-Roman god, the campaign button: these were, until recently, legible as elements within the ongoing pageantry of civic life—icons embedded in a democratic culture’s messy but recognizable symbolic vocabulary. In 2026, however, when the daily newsfeed delivers a relentless procession of unnecessary death, systemic cruelty, and the brazen repetition of falsehoods by those in power, representation itself becomes unstable terrain. To make images now is to enter a field already saturated, ethically compromised, and emotionally exhausted.

As White observed recently, “I wish we lived in a world where a room of flower paintings was enough.” The remark is less nostalgic than diagnostic, pointing to the diminished innocence of aesthetic retreat.

Now neighbors in the Hudson Valley/ Berkshire area Knoll and White will engage in a sustained exchange, responding to one another’s works over the coming months. Their dialogue—alternately playful, combative, and elegiac—proposes a contemporary history painting of sorts: an inquiry into what images can still promise, and where they inevitably fail, in a moment when visual culture feels both omnipotent and impotent at once.