A Quiet Painter's Show Carries a Thread Back to the Walker

Lynne Woods Turner's exhibition "one thing and another," on view through Feb. 28, 2026, at Adams and Ollman in Portland, Oregon, looks at first like a self-contained show of spare, meditative work. Its origin, though, runs back to Minneapolis: Turner has said the show grew from her response to a 1979 film of choreographer Trisha Brown's "Spanish Dance" performed at the Walker Art Center.

Turner described that response as "immediate and profound," saying the dance held "everything I want from a work of art: smart, articulated, complex but somehow distilled into something essential and whole." The exhibition pairs her abstract paintings and intimate works on paper with visual documentation of Brown's "Spanish Dance," alongside a series of her own "Spanish Dance" drawings that trace the dance's movement through line and space.

Brown's "Spanish Dance," first staged in 1973, is a study in economy: a line of women moves slowly across the stage, accumulating one at a time until the group reaches the wall. Turner's own work shares that vocabulary of rhythm and restraint. Her paintings are reductive and quiet, built from spare geometry and subtle tonal shifts, the kind of canvases that give up little to a passing glance and a great deal to a long one. The show also includes "magic square" works that visualize mathematical balance, and pieces drawn across found paper, graph paper and hand-ruled grids.

The cross-reference is a reminder of how central the Walker has been to postmodern performance. The 1979 record of an ephemeral dance has had a long afterlife, traveling decades later into a painter's exhibition in another city, where it sits as both evidence and material. The performance lasted a single evening; the conversation around it did not. The show runs through Feb. 28, so the pairing of painting and dance documentation is available only for a window.