Installation photo credit: Dawn Blackman

Pier 36, New York, NY
VIP Preview: Thursday, May 14, 2026
Public Days: Friday May 15 – Sunday, May 17, 2026

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to present new works by Samuel Levi Jones, Nate Lewis, and Robert Pruitt for the 2026 iteration of Independent. The presentation, conceived of as three interrelated exhibitions, will spotlight each of the artist’s distinctly tactile approaches to image-making.

Indianapolis-based artist Samuel Levi Jones’s paintings and assemblages question authority, representation, and recorded history. Jones’s practice is centered around physically deconstructing books associated with systems of power and control – primarily medical, legal and historical textbooks – then re-assembling them into abstract, grid-like compositions. The finished works expose the seams of their source material, which is laboriously rearranged and combined with pulped paper to create painterly surfaces. His newest body of work echoes this metaphorical “undoing”, incorporating elements of a disassembled American flag and alluding to an empire in decline.

Nate Lewis’s intricate drawings treat the surface of the paper as a sculptural material, pulling back individual layers to create a dimensionality that recalls topographic maps or animal hides. Figures rendered in graphite and ink are interspersed with frottage, embossing, and other printing techniques in dynamic visual interpretations of music and capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian spiritual martial-arts practice which doubles as a defense and a dance. Lewis’s new works introduce imagery of butterflies, their flight patterns and delicate wing structure acting as a framework to portray figures in motion and to experiment with surface treatments, texture, and pattern.

Robert Pruitt’s portraits fuse together the mundane and the surreal in their representations of figures shrouded in sumptuous textiles, ethereal substances, and otherworldly adornments. Grounded in coffee- washes, Pruitt’s large-scale figurations in conté, charcoal, and pastel evocatively bring to life the artist’s visualization of a Black past, present, and future. The works incorporate religious and spiritual iconography, images culled from science fiction and comic books, and depictions of African artifacts and symbolic objects in their exploration of a Black American conception of transcendence and mythology. These new works expand his use of color to include vibrant blues, greens, pinks and bronzes, drawing from a growing mythology of characters, gestures, and forms articulated in earlier bodies of work.

Samuel Levi Jones was born and raised in Marion, Indiana, and he lives and works in Indianapolis, Indiana. Trained as a photographer and multidisciplinary artist, he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies from Taylor University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Herron School of Art and Design in 2009. He received his Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art from Mills College in 2012.

“Museum exhibitions include Bold: New Voices in Contemporary Art Center at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, IN; When You See Me: Visibility in Contemporary Art/History at The Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Unruly Navigations at The Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA; The Empire is Falling at The Contemporary Dayton, Dayton, OH; Left of Center at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, IN; Infinite Blue at the Brooklyn Museum, NY; Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Guiffrida Collection at the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, IL; and Unbound, Studio Museum in Harlem, NY.

His work can be found in museum and public collections such as the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin – Madison, Wisconsin; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, FL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, Florida; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He is the recipient of the 2014 Joyce Alexander Wein artist prize awarded by the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Nate Lewis was born and raised outside of Pittsburgh in the town of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, and currently lives and works between NYC and DC.

He earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Nursing from VCU, and practiced critical-care nursing in DC-area hospitals for nine years. Lewis’ first artistic pursuit was playing the violin in 2008, followed by drawing in 2010. Since 2017 he has lived and worked in New York City.

Lewis’ work has been exhibited in Plumb Line: Charles White and the Contemporary at The California African American Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Yale Center for British Art, 21c Museum Hotels,The Armory Show, Paris Photo, Expo Chicago, Art Untitled Miami Beach, and is currently in Men of Change: Power, Triumph, Truth, touring with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Services.

Past residencies include Art on the Vine in Marthas Vineyard, Pioneer Works and Dieu Donne. Lewis’ work is in the public collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Blanton Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Grinnell College Museum of Art, and 21c Museum Hotels,Artistic Museum of Contemporary Art, Cardiff, United Kingdom, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, International African-American Museum, Charleston, SC, Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, CA, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA , Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, NY. He has lectured at Yale University as part of Claudia Rankine’s Racial Imaginary Institute, the Yale Center for British Art, and Paris Photo.

Robert Pruitt was born in Houston, Texas in 1975 and lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from Texas Southern University (2000) and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin (2003).

The artist has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including Corpus, Vielmetter Los Angeles, Los Angeles (CA) in 2025; ...Son…Sun…Sin…Syn…Sen…Zen… Zenith, Salon 94, New York, (NY) in 2025: Goodnight Prometheus, Vielmetter Los Angeles, Los Angeles (CA) in 2023; To Control the Universe, Salon 94, New York (NY) in 2021; Guest Minister at Oxbow, Seattle (WA) in 2020; The Banner Project: Robert Pruitt at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MA) in 2019; Devotion at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles(CA) in 2018; and Women at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (NY) in 2013, among many others.

Recent group exhibitions include Icons, Archetypes, and Portraits, North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks (ND) in 2025; A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration, Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson (MS) in 2022, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, (MD) in 2023; Men of Steel, Women of Wonder at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (AR) in 2019; and Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, which traveled to the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco (CA) in 2019; the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston (SC) in 2019; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts (MI) in 2019; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton (MA) in 2020; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City in 2021; and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle (WA) in 2021. Pruitt’s work was also featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.

The artist’s work is in numerous public collections, including the Dallas Museum of Art (TX); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (MA); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (NY); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (TX); the North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks (ND); the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham (NC); the Portland Museum of Art (ME); the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (NY); the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (TX); and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (VA), among others.

Pruitt’s upcoming solo exhibition, Robert Pruitt: Infinite, is scheduled to open at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) in December 2026.