The first exhibition in our 2026 Cohort Showcase; Still, I try is a group exhibition presented by Hammerspace Gallery at Do Not Start’s newest warehouse expansion, featuring Samantha Conrad & Wendy Withrow.
This exhibition considers what it means to care within structures that were never designed to hold us.
External pressures accumulate. Technological, political, social. The effort to protect what is vulnerable becomes continuous.
Across daily life, bodies absorb the weight of expectation, competition, and crisis. Technology accelerates attention. News arrives faster than it can be processed. Fear accumulates.
And yet, something persists.
Across the exhibition, gestures of care replace gestures of control. Uncertainty and disconnection are not resolved through distraction but held.
Not certainty, but attention.
Not control.
Care.
Still, I try.
Wendy Withrow
Wendy Withrow creates art to process the experiences of daily life as a parent, partner, friend, neighbor, citizen, and steward. She wants people to relate her work to their own lives, recognize familiar emotions and experiences, and tap into a universal sense of the human experience. Her influences include contemporary dance, origami, and the ceramic arts. She gravitates toward artist books for their ability to combine words, texture, shapes, lines, and movement in time. An artist book can tackle global issues while offering an intimate, quiet experience.
Wendy earned a diploma in traditional bookbinding from the North Bennet Street School in Boston, Massachusetts. Before pursuing the book arts, she studied sculptural ceramics, graduating with a BFA in ceramic art from Grand Valley State University. In addition to exhibiting her artist books locally and nationally, she makes functional ceramics in a shared studio with her neighbor under the name Calkins Clayworks.
Samantha Conrad-Vanranden
Samantha is a painter, educator, and live wedding artist based in Michigan. She earned her MFA in Painting from Kendall College of Art and Design and her BFA from Indiana University. Her work explores themes of motherhood and connection, often through the lens of traditional oil painting techniques blended with contemporary storytelling.
She teaches drawing at Grand Valley State University, where she fosters both technical skill and conceptual thinking in her students. In addition to her academic work, Samantha runs a live wedding painting business, creating heirloom-quality paintings that capture meaningful moments in real time.
As a mother of two children, Samantha’s creative practice is deeply informed by the rhythms of family life. Her studio is a space where artmaking and caregiving often coexist, and where the boundaries between the personal and professional are actively explored. She is particularly interested in how motherhood shapes identity and her creative voice.