New York City does not work by accident. From above, the city feels mesmerizing. Light, motion, noise, and energy move in every direction at once. To the untrained eye, it can feel almost chaotic, but beneath that spectacle is structure, carefully engineered systems, invisible grids, and deliberate design holding everything together.
That same tension exists in the work of artist Ryan Cosbert.
At first glance, Cosbert’s paintings feel instinctive, even spontaneous. Colors collide, textures rise from the canvas, and movement seems to unfold freely across the surface. Underneath the abstraction, though, is an underlying order, a hidden framework guiding each composition. Much of that structure begins with a grid.
“Even though sometimes it gets camouflaged behind the paint, I just use the canvas alone and allow the paint to speak for the paintings,” said Cosbert.
Like poetry written on lined paper, the grid narrows Cosbert’s focus during the earliest stages of experimentation before allowing intuition to take over. Although largely invisible in the finished works, it serves as the foundation beneath the texture and movement.
“I feel like it helps me reach my fullest potential and then the grid would kind of be like the foundation for the painting,” she said. “It gives me the chance to create a geometrical balance with the texture versus having the texture all over, covering the entire surface, so it allows me to break it up into little sections.”
That balance between freedom and control places Cosbert in a long tradition of abstractionists who use structure to sharpen their expression. While figures like Jackson Pollock are often treated as torchbearers of abstract art, Cosbert cites pioneering Black abstractionist Jack Whitten as a major influence.
Credit: Malcolm Johnson
When asked what she would title her current body of work, shown through BolsterArts, Cosbert settled on “Abstract Point of View.”
“The works that I’m making are abstract, of course,” she said, “but the stories, the people, or places, or research I am presenting is still from my perspective, in my point of view. Especially when I’m picking the colors myself.”
That perspective reveals itself immediately in her use of color. Each piece is built around a tightly controlled palette, usually anchored by several dominant tones that move across the surface in layered streaks, raised textures, and fractured gestures. In some areas, colors dissolve into one another, creating compositions that initially feel improvisational before revealing careful balance on closer inspection.
During the show’s opening, viewers frequently gathered around one of Cosbert’s most striking departures from canvas work: a large woven textile piece titled “An Ode to Omar Ibn Said.” The work reflects another dimension of her practice while remaining rooted in the same intellectual curiosity that drives her paintings.
“Each piece has a chance to enlighten people, but also get them to research the work,” said Cosbert, “and not even just the work, but research the subject matter and the same thing I’ve been researching.”
That pursuit of knowledge runs throughout her work, particularly in the titles. Many pieces function as “odes” to historical figures, thinkers, and overlooked influences that Cosbert hopes to reintroduce to contemporary audiences. Omar Ibn Said, the subject of the woven piece, was a Muslim, a scholar, and one of the millions affected by the transatlantic slave trade. That same historical engagement led Cosbert toward studying epigenetics in 2021.
Epigenetics examines how environmental factors and lived experiences can alter the way genes function without changing the DNA sequence itself. For Cosbert, the subject became a way to examine memory, inheritance, and generational trauma in her own family history.
“I was mainly thinking about my family and thinking about slavery, and it was kind of dark,” she said. She became particularly interested in whether the psychological weight of historical trauma could continue expressing itself through later generations.
“Are we carrying any weight from our past or our ancestors? Is that possible?” she asked herself. “Sure enough, it is. And every year, I’ll revamp the series and I’ll keep doing research and shockingly, every year, there’s new information on it.”
BolsterArts founder Lydia Nobles saw that intellectual depth as central to Cosbert’s work and selected her as part of the organization’s fourth cohort. Through studio support, networking opportunities, and access to collectors and curators, the organization aims to reduce structural barriers for emerging artists.
“Through abstraction, she resists fixed interpretation,” Nobles said. “Cosbert holds space for contradiction and asks viewers to locate themselves within the tensions her work refuses to resolve.”
For Cosbert, those tensions are inseparable from representation and education. “Knowledge is power and representation matters,” she said. “Since I didn’t see a lot of people who looked like me within art growing up, and also being in school, I didn’t learn a lot about people across the African Diaspora. That’s what drew me directly toward making this work.”
Cosbert’s paintings encourage viewers to sit with them long enough to recognize that abstraction is not randomness at all. Underneath the texture, color and movement is a carefully constructed language about memory, ancestry, and survival that refuses to stay buried. Like the city systems hidden beneath New York’s streets, the structure is not always visible at first glance — but it is always there, carrying history forward.
Find out more at bolsterarts.com.
