For Izzy Barber, painting is a license to get outside herself.
“I like being in the world. In some ways, painting is my excuse to do that, to be somewhere absorbing and learning something new,” said Barber.
Barber, who was born in Brooklyn in 1990 and now lives and works in Queens, likens herself to “old, local guys who just take their lawn chairs and go post up on the street.” She wants to be in the thick of things, and, over the years, has become known for making paintings on New York City streets, in subway cars, bars, and other communal spaces.
However, a few years ago, Barber began to feel that the bustling city, which had long given her inspiration, was becoming a self-imposed limitation. In the aftermath of the 2024 election, the artist became more acutely aware of the disconnection she felt from the rest of the United States, as she consumed news of the nation through a screen, alone.
Coronado National Park, US/Mexico, 2026
Izzy Barber
Charles Moffett
Sulphur Spring, TX, 2025
Izzy Barber
Charles Moffett
“I was reading very upsetting news, but then operating in a world where most of the time you’re not addressing [it],” she said of her life in New York. Barber decided she would head out into the country and witness America firsthand. Over 2025 and the beginning of 2026, the artist took three monthlong road trips across the United States, exploring rural Northern California, Texas, small-town Nebraska, the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, Washington, D.C., and much in between. For each of these three trips, Barber flew west—first to Tucson, Arizona, then to Northern California, and finally to Phoenix—before driving back to New York, often meeting up with a friend or two for the journey home, painting along the way.
“I had just quit a job of 13 years,” she said of her motivations. “I felt like this is the time to do this and do it in a very immersive, large way.”
The intimately scaled paintings Barber made over the course of these three journeys are now on view in “Clay Pigeons,” Barber’s first exhibition with Charles Moffett, a show organized in collaboration with James Fuentes. The exhibition follows Barber’s recent solo exhibitions “Badlands” with MASSIMODECARLO’s Pièce Unique in Paris earlier this year, and “There Is No Time” at James Fuentes in Los Angeles in 2024.
Cedarville, 2025
Izzy Barber
Charles Moffett
The paintings are impressionistic visions of the American landscape that show how the land has been shaped by political, geographic, and historical tensions over the centuries. The paintings are snapshots of moments, but free from narratives that might feel moralizing or grandstanding. Barber lets the land speak for itself.
The show’s title comes from late country music singer-songwriter Blaze Foley’s song “Clay Pigeons,” which Barber listened to while driving alone out West between painting stops. She liked the ambiguity of the title, which called to mind both urban pigeons and the material of the earth.
During these trips, the artist began painting while a passenger in a moving car. The first of these works was made on the Fourth of July, while her friend drove her through northern Texas. “It felt really appropriate,” she said. “Where else would I rather be than on this empty, dark kind of road in America trying to sit with something?”
Painting in the car ended up becoming a key part of Barber’s process and a way of processing what she had seen, while connecting her to the storied history of the American highway, from Route 66 to books like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. “Painting in a car is both really fast and very slow,” she said. “It’s meditative.”
July 4th on Highway 380 II, 2025
Izzy Barber
Charles Moffett
Barber’s paintings rarely feature individual people (figures are visible at a distance in works like the National Guard at Night, DC, 2025), but even so, the landscapes remain engaged in humanistic dialogues around community, access, and belonging. In particular, she found herself drawn to the border wall.
“The moment I saw it, I knew it was a subject,” she recalled. “There is potency to the symbol as a man-made structure that cuts into nature and into the environment. Even just formally, it’s very interesting,” she said, referring to the wall’s dark and towering steel posts, which slice through the horizon line.
As she traveled, the artist noted the differences at each crossing. In some places, like Nogales, a city that straddles both Arizona and northern Mexico, there is a sense of continuity in the land and culture on either side, whereas the border crossing of Lukeville, Arizona, creates an abrupt and visible break.
The human reality of these extreme environments, and the precarity of the lives involved in border crossings, became clear. Barber had first arrived in the Sonoran Desert in June, when temperatures reached 110 degrees. Even brief exposure to the heat left her depleted, transforming what she had read about migration into something physically imaginable.
Border Wall, 2025
Izzy Barber
Charles Moffett
Tule Lake Detention, 2025
Izzy Barber
Charles Moffett
“Reading about border crossings is different than if you’re going and experiencing that heat,” she said, “and imagining that people are out for over a day, multiple days, in that environment to try to get to the U.S.”
Having studied human rights alongside studio art before she did her MFA, Barber was drawn to see the inner workings of the immigration system on her trips, too. During her third trip, she spent a week in El Paso, Texas, going to immigration court. “I met a woman whose fiancé was detained in the detention center,” she recalled. “I met her at a court hearing for her fiancé and then kind of went along with her.”
Her painting ERO El Paso Camp East Montana (Dusk) (2026) was painted just outside a detention center. “I made that painting after the most difficult day of experiencing just how crushing the immigration system is,” she recalled. “It was dusk, sunset was coming. And that was a very emotional painting for me.”
On her trips, Barber also visited several historical sites, like the Wounded Knee cemetery in South Dakota, the location of the 1890 massacre of Lakota people by the U.S. Army. “There’s so much complexity in the experience of going across the country,” she said. “There is night and there is day; there is beauty and terror.” She notes her experiences of visiting Cedarville, California, where pioneer history is very much alive, as well as Modoc County, home to Tule Lake, the largest Japanese internment camp in the U.S. during World War II.
Saturday Night, NY, 2025
Izzy Barber
Charles Moffett
26 Federal Plaza NYPD, 2025
Izzy Barber
Charles Moffett
“There’s a feeling of history, whether it’s connected to good or bad,” said Barber.
Returning to New York allowed the artist to see the city she’d known all her life more clearly. “I needed to go on the trips because I felt isolated in New York from something,” she said. “But at the same time, New York is not isolated from these issues. It’s more like we’re in bubbles of attention.” The paintings in “Clay Pigeons” are at once evidence of the massive divides in American society, as much as they are a record of honest attempts at connection.
Her takeaways from her experience are nuanced, and her road trips might not be at an end. “Strangers are wonderfully kind,” she said. “Right now, I think breaking out of bubbles and connecting with people in real ways makes a lot of sense.”
