Join us in welcoming local artist, Rhia Hurt, to Stripe! Come see her paintings on our walls and check out her pop-up featuring her line of handmade jewelry, Faith & Rhia.

Rhia Hurt’s “Balancing Act” series explores contemporary abstraction through evocative surfaces and associative color relationships. Drawing on action painting and inspired by the global climate crisis, Hurt uses deconstructed paint to reflect natural phenomena and ecological concerns. Her organic abstractions reduce landscapes into four stacked ovoid forms, where layered pigment flows mimic natural processes. “Paint must fall apart to reveal itself,” she explains, describing a method where particles separate, settle, and form new visual orders. These works raise questions about environmental fragility, resilience, and our role in recovery.

Rhia Hurt earned her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009, focusing on materiality through observation and experimentation with paint. A Northern California native, she moved to Brooklyn in 2010, where she co-founded the nonprofit art center Trestle and began integrating industrial imagery into her nature-based abstractions. After nearly a decade in the NYC art world, she was invited to join the historic American Abstract Artists group, exhibiting alongside members in Blurring Boundaries: The Women of AAA, 1936–Present. Hurt has exhibited internationally, and her work is held in private and museum collections worldwide.