Bill Arning Exhibitions & Ten Barn Farm

December 1–5, 2026

NADA Miami 2026 

Bill Arning Exhibiitions presents

Paintings by Donna Moylan, Andy Ness, & Erik Daniel White

“Great Art,” after a poem by Tim Dlugos

Underneath your skin, your heart
moves. Your chest
rises at its touch. A small bump
appears, every
second. We watch for what appears
to be hours.

Our hands log the time: the soft
light, darkness
underneath your eyes. Our bodies
intersect like highways
with limitless access and perfect spans
of attention.

We pay for this later. I pay
for breakfast. We
can’t stay long. We take off
to the museum
and watch the individual colors
as they surface

in the late works of Matisse.
They move the way
your heart moves, the way we breathe.
You draw your own
breath, then I draw mine. This is
truly great art.

Tim Dlugos's poem Great Art, written while he was dying of AIDS, transforms ordinary experience into something profound and deeply moving. The experience of going to a museum with someone important to us—whatever the nature of that relationship—and looking together at great art reminds us of the joy of shared attention, the evanescence and unrepeatability of that experience, and the knowledge that the artworks will remain unchanged on our next visit while we ourselves will have changed. On re-encountering beloved works, we remember who we were with when we first saw them.

While this kind of bonding experience is most often discussed in relation to movies, television, or pop songs, Dlugos correctly demonstrates that sharing pictures—from canonical works of art to journalistic news photographs and even album covers—and the rhythms of revisiting that shared visual universe are also luxuriantly interwoven into our interpersonal relationships. Perhaps our viewing companion is no longer in our lives for whatever reason, yet we return again. We may be haunted by who is missing from our lives today, but we still eagerly walk into the room with our ghosts.

Responding to Tim Dlugos's poem Great Art, Andy Ness, Donna Moylan, and Erik Daniel White are each creating new work specifically for this presentation. Drawing upon our shared art-historical and cultural image banks alongside depictions of people engaged in intimate acts of looking together, ecstatic experiences, and moments of deep quietude, they extend the poem through their own distinct visual languages. The images submitted with this proposal are representative of each artist's existing practice rather than the new works themselves, illustrating why I believed Dlugos's poem would resonate so deeply with each artist's practice—and how it has already begun to generate compelling new directions in their studio work.

Erik Daniel White, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, after Bruegel, 2026, oil on linen, 23 x 21 in