In improvisational comedy, there’s always that one odd moment when someone panics, blurts out something like “I’m a sea witch!” Then the other person on stage stares blankly before muttering, “Uh, what?”
In improv, that’s exactly what to avoid: shooting fellow stage partners down while they’re throwing out a lifeline. Doing so kills the scene, murders the premise and flatlines the energy.
The “yes, and” rule of thumb is designed to prevent that moment. The comedians accept what they’re given and build on it, even if it’s a mythological nautical figure.
That same logic now lives inside the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art’s (BMoCA) new exhibition, “Yes &…”
In the show, 18 artists lean into the impulse of accepting and responding, not knowing exactly where they’ll end up. What unites their work isn’t a visual style, but a human twitch — seams, tangents, gestures and glitches that no algorithm would dare leave in, especially at a moment when smoothness, polish and certainty are increasingly automated.
The idea for “Yes &…” started the way many collaborations do, with two people working side by side and realizing, midstream, that they share a rhythm.
While working together on ideas for BMoCA’s spring exhibition, guest curators Donald Fodness and Tobias Fike discovered that their relationship depends on a basic willingness to accept what the other person brings to the table, and then to keep going.
“When you collaborate with somebody, it’s helpful if you have an approach where you accept the thing that they put forth more often than not,” Fodness said. “If you were constantly shutting down the ideas of your partner, it would not be a fun collaboration.”
That approach began shaping the exhibition long before the phrase “yes, and” entered the conversation. As the two moved through studio visits, artist lists and early conceptual sketches, they noticed a pattern in how decisions were being made.
“We, organically, often accept the thing that one of us puts forth and build on it,” Fodness said. “We recognized a little ways into the process of the show that that ethos echoes the improv theater mantra of ‘yes, and.’”
That mindset also helped explain why the exhibition resists visual cohesion. Participating artists work across painting, sculpture, video, installation and performance, with wildly different aesthetics and materials. The connective tissue is not style, but process. Each work carries evidence of decision-making, revision and response, often in ways that remain visible rather than hidden.
Walking through the exhibition, it quickly becomes clear that this is not a display interested in illusion. Things show their seams. Cords stay exposed. Surfaces carry fingerprints, gouges and hesitations. That, according to Fodness, was intentional.
“The guiding principle was work that really emphasized the human hand or the human involvement in the making process. You can see the artist thinking,” Fodness said. “You can see the artist problem-solving.”
That emphasis began to feel increasingly relevant as the exhibition took shape, not because the artists were responding directly to artificial intelligence as a subject, but because the contrast between human process and machine polish has become harder to ignore.
“We’re in a moment where AI technology is rapidly improving,” Fodness said. “That’s made the involvement of the human being and the human spirit feel increasingly significant.”
That tension, between the human hand and the algorithm, is front-and-center in artist Hannah Purvis’ ceiling-to-floor scroll painting, which cascades nearly 20 feet across the gallery floor in a waterfall of high-gloss Renaissance figures, anime references, pop cultural detritus and digitally altered brushwork.
“I did about a year’s worth of work in roughly three months,” Purvis said. “It was a fast and furious process.”
The piece, titled “Scrolling,” references both the ancient act of unrolling a scroll and the compulsive, infinite scroll of the digital present.
“The work combines ancient scrolls and digital scrolling,” Purvis said. “It’s rooted in the historical lineage of scrolls as carriers of narratives and knowledge, but reimagines scrolling in a contemporary context.”
You don’t have to be online all the time to understand Purvis’ painting, but it helps. The piece is dense with symbols, references and visual fragments, Baroque drama mixed with internet ephemera.
“I noticed a difference between how Gen X or Boomer viewers and Gen Z viewers experienced the work,” Purvis said. “For younger viewers who are chronically online, the scroll almost felt like a secret language.”
Artificial intelligence plays a role in both the process and the source material, though Purvis is careful about how she frames that relationship.
“A lot of young artists are using AI as an outsourcer rather than as a collaborator,” she said. “For me, engaging with AI is a way to challenge myself and better understand what my humanity, memories and experiences bring to the work.”
She describes AI not unlike how one might describe a therapist: neutral, nonjudgmental, oddly clarifying.
“When I talk to it, it doesn’t have a stake in the outcome,” she said. “That allows me to be far more vulnerable.”
Purvis said that viewers often try to separate the hand from the machine.
“People often ask which parts of my work are painted, and which parts aren’t,” Purvis said. “I’m interested in why that matters.”
She sees that uncertainty as productive.
“Through collaboration with AI, I’m trying to understand my own relationship to material and physical space,” she said.
Questions of instability, context and belonging also surface in the work of Xi Zhang, a painter whose contributions include “Christina’s World” and “Home Sweet Home.” Zhang immigrated to the United States at 19 and now lives in his 40s with a long memory of life before constant connectivity.
“Before smartphones and the internet were everywhere, we communicated face to face or through letters,” Zhang said. “Now that format has changed completely.”
Zhang described how political conditions continue to shape even casual communication, particularly when maintaining family ties across borders.
“Even speaking with family members online, you have to be careful about certain words on social media in China, or you could be profiled,” he said.
Those pressures inform “Christina’s World,” a large painting that references Andrew Wyeth’s well-known 1948 image of the same name. Zhang reworks the scene through architectural fragmentation and layered color, drawing from traditional Chinese folk art and German expressionism.
“As an immigrant, the idea of home is constantly changing,” Zhang said. “Home is no longer one solid place, but something that keeps shifting.”
In Zhang’s version, the “Christina” figure from Wyeth’s painting becomes older and intentionally ambiguous.
“I immigrated to the United States when I was 19, and now I’m 42,” Zhang said. “Even though I’ve lived longer in the U.S. than in China, when I think of home, the city that comes to mind is still Kaifeng.”
When Zhang returns to China, the city no longer matches his memory.
“I can’t even direct a taxi driver to my old home,” he said. “Everything is different.”
The instability shows up in the painting, visually. Objects hang from strings, structures appear in mid-collapse, and familiar domestic items take on an uneasy humor.
“That’s why the painting looks like things are falling apart,” Zhang said. “That’s my lived experience.”
His second piece, “Home Sweet Home,” is a deceptively cheerful painting of an ice cream cone rendered in lush, painterly detail. The image is based on an AI-generated prompt but carries a darker undercurrent: ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) haunts the composition.
“Visually, the work looks appealing,” Zhang said, “but the content is unsettling.”
Both works function as invitations. There is no single right reading, and Zhang is careful not to dictate one.
“I hope people can project their own experiences onto the work,” he said. “If someone feels a connection and thinks, ‘I’ve experienced something like this,’ then the work has done what I hoped.”
Elsewhere in the exhibition, visitors will encounter sculptures, layered drawings and interactive works that require physical participation, including a vintage turnstile by artist Alex Stephens that activates video projections only when viewers push through the metal gate.
There’s also an accompanying zine, developed by Fodness and Fike, that invites each artist to share something about their lives beyond their studio practice, like hobbies, personal histories or bowling scores.
“Most often, art exhibitions extract art from the artist’s life,” Fodness said. “We wondered what would happen if we brought another part of that life into the exhibition context.”
Some entries are illuminating. Others are, frankly, odd. And that’s part of the point.
“It might not change how you feel about the art at all,” he said. “But someone else might relate to it deeply.”
The exhibition does not end when you leave the gallery. “Yes &…” is accompanied by a small run of public programs, including a therapeutic improv workshop, led by Rebecca Peebles of Home Safe Projects, on Feb. 26. The workshop invites participants to work through a “yes, and” mindset without requiring prior improv experience, or, mercifully, a spotlight.
On April 9, London-based artist William Cobbing will present a live, in-gallery performance using clay, working directly with the material in front of an audience. The piece unfolds without a set endpoint, relying on improvisation and the unpredictable and somewhat stubborn nature of clay.
Taken together, the exhibition and its surrounding programs make a fairly modest case for paying attention to how things are made, who is making them and what happens when the process remains visible.
“Yes &…” is on view at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 1750 13th St., Boulder, through May 3. For more information, visit bmoca.org.
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Artist Benjamin McQuillan talks about his sculpture “Gently Chewed” during a media tour of the “Yes &…” exhibit at BMoCA on Jan. 29. (Matthew Jonas/Staff Photographer)
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Artist Benjamin McQuillan talks about his sculpture “Gently Chewed” during a media tour of the “Yes &…” exhibit at BMoCA on Jan. 29. (Matthew Jonas/Staff Photographer)
