Dates: September 19 – November 1, 2026
Reception: Saturday, September 19, 4 – 6 PM, public invited
Gallery hours: Thursday – Saturday 11:00 – 5:30, Sunday 12:00 – 4:00

My Heart Like a Kick Drum – Will Hutnick and Melissa Marks

Kenise Barnes Fine Art is pleased to present My Heart Like a Kick Drum, a two person exhibition featuring work by Will Hutnick and Melissa Marks, artists whose practices channel rhythm, repetition, and emotional velocity into visually charged, deeply imaginative worlds.

In My Heart Like a Kick Drum, Hutnick and Marks explore the pulse of interior life—its accelerations, syncopations, and unexpected shifts—through distinct yet complementary visual languages. Hutnick’s layered abstractions, built through collage, pattern, and improvisational mark making, generate a sense of movement that feels both bodily and architectural. His compositions hum with energy, revealing structures that emerge, dissolve, and reassemble in real time.

Marks’s drawings and paintings push gesture to its expressive edge, transforming line into a living force. Her forms twist, collide, and unfurl with a kinetic intensity that mirrors emotional states—joy, urgency, longing, and the restless drive of imagination. Together, her works create a visual rhythm that feels at once intimate and expansive.
Presented in dialogue, Hutnick and Marks offer two approaches to the idea of the “kick drum”—a metaphor for the steady beat that underlies human experience. Their works share a commitment to exuberant mark making, intuitive process, and the belief that abstraction can hold narrative, memory, and emotional truth.
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Will Hutnick
Will Hutnick received his MFA from Pratt Institute and his BA from Providence College. He has exhibited widely, including solo and group exhibitions at McDonough Museum of Art and the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, Wassaic Project, and Collar Works among others. Hutnick has been awarded numerous residencies, including Soaring Gardens Artists’ Retreat, Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, Wassaic Project, and Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency by Collar Works. Hutnick’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, New American paintings, Upstate Diary, Chronogram and ArtNet to name a few. His professional career included dozens of curatorial projects, public speaking engagements and lectures. Hutnick was the Co Director of Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn and is currently the Director of Artistic Programming at Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY.

Melissa Marks
Melissa Marks earned her BA from Wesleyan University and her MFA Yale University School of Art, Her work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, The Drawing Center, The Aldrich Museum of Art, Mass MOCA and Santa Monica Museum of Art among others. Her work has been featured in El Pais, MoMA Magazine, The New Yorker and Diario de Almeria to mention a few. Marks is known for her expansive, improvisational drawing practice and has completed major site specific commissions for Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, Wesleyan University and for private collections.

Please contact Lani Ming Holloway, Associate Director, Lani@kbfa.com, 860 560 3085 with inquiries or to arrange a preview of the exhibition.