Sea View is pleased to present Recessive Trait, the first solo exhibition of New Haven-based artist Tuere Nicole Lawton (b. 1994, Brooklyn, New York) in Los Angeles.

Across nine oil paintings and four charcoal drawings on paper, Lawton examines how family histories, inherited behaviors, and experiences of self-suppression shape an individual's sense of identity. The exhibition takes its title from recessive genetic traits, which can remain unexpressed across generations before emerging in a descendant. For Lawton, this is a way of thinking about the parts of ourselves that persist without our knowledge, as well as the things that have disappeared from a family's history. Drawing on family photographs, oral histories, and images from American film and television, she develops imagined characters and scenes, filling gaps in history with speculation.

Lawton's inquiry centers on the lives of Black American women, particularly those of her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. She considers the ways in which the demands of respectability and social acceptance have shaped the presentation of the self, from her grandmother's careful attention to grooming, dress, and speech in the Jim Crow era to Lawton's own experiences navigating predominantly white institutions. What begins as an adaptation to particular social conditions may become a behavior passed from one generation to the next. Lawton asks whether the continual suppression of certain parts of oneself, undertaken for safety or survival, might ultimately compromise the possibility of becoming fully realized. Her paintings give form to these questions without proposing that the past, or the self, can ever be completely known.

Set within expansive landscapes of the American South, Lawton's figures stretch, fragment, and occasionally disappear into their surroundings. The landscape carries the weight of a violent national history, but also remains a place of family life, cultivation, tenderness, and specifically gardening. Lawton's interest in hand-painted cel animation, particularly the distorted transitional images known as smear frames, informs the elastic treatment of her subjects. Bodies occupy unstable positions, sometimes appearing to dissolve into the landscape or be caught in a single moment when they are more than one thing. Animation offers Lawton a means of imagining forms of bodily transformation beyond ordinary physical constraints, allowing humor and pleasure to coexist with the more painful questions of adaptation and survival.

The paintings develop through a process of improvisation and revision, with successive layers occasionally revealing traces of earlier compositions. Lawton's painterly language moves between broad, flat passages of color and carefully modeled portraits, whose subtle tonal variations can make the faces difficult to discern. Their intermittent visibility suggests figures still struggling toward full realization. Across her work, Lawton preserves a portion of the same dark skin-tone mixture from one painting to the next, carrying the material forward and replenishing it over time. This continuity gives her otherwise distinct figures a shared physical inheritance, embedded in the paint itself.

Press release by Phil Falino

Tuere Nicole Lawton (b. 1994, Brooklyn, New York)  has held a solo exhibition at Picture Theory, New York (2025). Recent group exhibitions include Silke Lindner, New York (2026); Wunika Mukan Gallery, Lagos (2026); and Picture Theory, New York (2026). Her work has been reviewed by Artfuse, White Hot Magazine, and El Salto Diario in Madrid. She completed a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in April 2025. Lawton is an MFA candidate at Yale University, with an expected graduation in 2027.