The Brooklyn Rail

The artist mononymously known as Uman speaks of her lifelong desire to be alone in the middle of nowhere. The feeling first arose when she was just a kid in Somalia and followed her to Kenya, then Denmark, then New York City, until—at the onset of her meteoric rise in the art world—she settled in upstate New York around 2010. In this idyllic landscape, Uman found the sort of rustic sanctum she had envisioned for herself since childhood. So it seems especially meaningful that in her first institutional solo exhibition, After all the things … at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, she has set out to pay tribute to her adoptive home, offering paintings, three sculptures, a film, and a mural connected to her dwelling, studio, and the surrounding landscape.

To be clear, it is not self-evident that these works were made in upstate New York in particular (that factoid is relayed in an essay by Amy Smith-Stewart, who curated the show). Uman is an intuitive painter whose images confuse the bounds of abstraction and figuration. Her visual language, with its vivacious transpositions of form and color, untethers her subjects from reality and elevates them to a higher plane of dreams, myths, and visions both spiritual and celestial. The resulting paintings are less a reflection of a specific setting than they are of her subjective visualization of the land. In other words, after all the things that brought her to this place, Uman paints the ecstasy of at last being alone in the middle of nowhere.

The exhibition begins in a gallery with walls painted in red oxide, a reference to the artist’s native landscape of East Africa, where such potent tones imbue the soil. Five large paintings burst from this ground in a flamboyant array of colors, a palette tuned to the same chromatic key as the vibrant textiles donned by the women of Uman’s youth. (“Color itself is a memory,” she has said.) Using oil, acrylic, spray paint, and oil stick, the artist achieves a range of mark-making qualities, from crayon-like scrawl to subtle glazes, that coalesce and collide in each work. The eye first enjoys her paintings for their relations of color, shape, and surface texture. Then, odd lifeforms, objects, and spatial situations emerge, implying genres like landscape or still life, even as many of the painterly components resist comprehension.

In this first room, three vertically oriented canvases structured by dense patterns, frenzied marks, and amorphous forms in the foreground, and horizon lines quivering atop the picture are readily interpreted as landscapes. In the bottom half of amazing grace glorious morning (2025), for example, Uman abuts disparate zones of paint—a section of varicolored caviar, a patch of grassy scribbles, a swath of saffron, a desert of mottled reds, and pool of opaque blues—quilting them together like rural land seen from the window of an airplane. Near the horizon, underneath a vivid blue sky fogged with light green clouds, a ring of circles hover like planetary bodies descended on the landscape. Intruding on the view from the picture’s left edge are four lollipopish protrusions, reminiscent of purple and red flowerheads plucked of their petals. On the other hand, melancholia in a fall breeze (2025) looks not across the earth, but directly into it. The painting’s lower half shows the cross section of a hill, revealing the subterranean mysteries hidden beneath a lithesome tree. Underground reserves of supernatural power are duplicated in the sky, as if to suggest that the same mythos with which we regard the heavens also permeates the very ground we walk on.

While tonally distinct from the otherwise kaleidoscopic exhibition, Uman’s black-and-white video is nonetheless integrated in the whole, corresponding to certain paintings on view in its content as well as its vigorous gesturality. Per Smith-Stewart’s text, Uman’s untitled film (2012–25) concatenates clips of nighttime snowfall that Uman recorded over the last thirteen years. Snowflakes streak across the screen according to the whim of the wind, like a murmuration of white birds isolated against the dark sky. What sounds like a double-bass, arrhythmically bowed in lament, accompanies these mesmerizing visuals, as if giving voice to some lonesome spirit invisibly swept in the gale. The five-minute film is screened on loop in a pitch-black theater, lighted only by specs of digital snow, a radically different atmosphere compared to the sunlit interiors of the museum’s galleries. This contrast lends the film an air of illusiveness, so that it feels like the secret, inner geist of the exhibition.

In a floor-to-ceiling mural painted directly onto the wall of the exhibition’s third section, precipitation continues to fall in the form of imperfect dots of gray and black that increase in scale as they ascend to a double-ceiling, charging the space with vertical effervescence. At the center of the room looms Uman’s sculpture of a streetlight, the thing #1 (2023), inspired by the lamp outside her studio window. Fashioned out of recycled metal and blown glass, its base is ringed with a fringe and its matte-black pole is tied with the artist’s scarf, as if to say, “Uman was here.” Hung near the mural is a 7-by-7-foot painting, titled and it’s the thing again (2025). Its perspective gazes upward at the topmost arc of what could be the very same lamppost, its faintly burning eye surrounded by a blizzard of quick, chalky marks in every color. Aided by the lingering impression of the film, the painting, sculpture, and mural effect a simple, but moving image: that of standing under a streetlight at dusk as snow or rain cascades through its emanation, each mote twinkling for an instant of its descent. After all the things … shows us that for Uman, such local phenomena—the post on the corner, the weather out the window—which can fade into everyday life lest they be recognized for their underlying sublimity, also compose a home.