Torey Akers
Torey Akers is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn. She holds MFAs in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art and in Creative Nonfiction from Hunter College. As an artist, she has attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Arts Letters and Numbers, Penland School of Craft, AIR Studios Paducah, Surf Point and Mass MoCA. She has shown her work all over the country, most recently at AIR Gallery in DUMBO, NY and DVAA Gallery in the Catskills. Her art criticism has appeared in This is Tomorrow, Big Red & Shiny, Two Coats of Paint, ArtsEditor, Queen Mob's Tea House, Art Papers, White Hot, and Art Spiel. In 2015, she was named a Detroit Fellow for the CUE Foundation's Young Art Critic's Mentorship Program, and has also been a finalist for the Red Bull Detroit Art Writing 2018 Fellowship and the 2018 Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writing Workshop. She was invited to join the Banff Center's Experimental Art Writing Ensemble Residency in fall of 2019. She works as an associate editor at the Art Newspaper.
Abscission
October 3rd - 24th, 2026
The word “abscission” refers to the natural detachment of the ripe and wilting portions of fruited plants, a process that underscores the painful science of growth and self-determination.
In a political era defined by the algorithmic construction of fear, Torey Akers’ solo show, Abscission, reflects the universality in the specific, taking on the mantle of the Rennaissance-era erotic nude—simultaneously coy and brazen, exploited and self-referential—by transforming awkwardness into adoration through touch. Through sensitive pen-and-ink naturalism and organic sculptural techniques ,Akers explores the lived experience of intimacy under state siege in 2025.
