GREAT JONES

For Rifka Milder, GREAT JONES returns her to the world that first shaped her as an artist. Raised downtown by painters Sheila Schwid and Jay Milder, she grew up in a milieu where art was an everyday language — looking closely, discussing form and color, listening to music, and learning to trust the act of making.

Working today on Great Jones Street places her within a lineage that connects family, neighborhood, and the wider history of New York’s avant-garde. The creative currents surrounding the block — from the legacy of artists and musicians who passed through it to the experimental spirit of La MaMa — form a backdrop rather than a subject, inflecting the work with a sense of lived continuity.

Within this context, Milder’s practice remains resolutely abstract. Guided by music and intuition, she builds paintings through layered, call-and-response gestures — erasing, revising, and returning until the surface arrives at its own logic. In these works, inheritance becomes material: history, sound, and experience are absorbed into a visual language that is unmistakably her own.