Opening Reception: Saturday, September 12, 6–9 PM
McLennon Pen Co. Gallery is pleased to announce Atlanta-based artist Aineki Traverso as its 2026 Summer Artist-in-Residence. Traverso will spend one month working within the gallery’s Austin space, transforming the exhibition venue into a temporary studio from August 1 through September 12. The residency will culminate in a solo exhibition opening on September 12, 2026.
Traverso’s paintings explore the relationship between memory, absence, and the body, considering painting as a means of preserving, transforming, and making sense of human experience. Her works emerge from moments of disappearance: the spaces where memories fade, identities shift, or something once present becomes inaccessible. For Traverso, painting functions simultaneously as an act of mourning and celebration—a way to hold onto the past, process the present, and imagine what has yet to come.
A central concept within Traverso’s practice is the lacuna, an unfilled space where something once existed. She considers these gaps as metaphors for absences within memory, family histories, cultural connections, and lived experience. Oscillating between the vernaculars of figuration and abstraction, Traverso gives form to what cannot always be fully seen or articulated. Bodies, landscapes, and symbolic imagery emerge from and dissolve into fields of color and movement, creating paintings that exist between remembrance and invention.
In recent years, Traverso has shifted from working primarily on canvas to painting on panel, drawn to the distinct physicality of the surface and the way it alters the application and presence of paint. Her compositions often unfold across multiple panels, including diptychs, triptychs, and larger sequential arrangements, allowing images to operate less as singular moments and more as fragments of an evolving narrative. At times, these panels extend across the architecture of the gallery, wrapping around corners and disrupting conventional modes of viewing. The divisions between paintings become spaces of transition, collapsing different temporalities—past, present, and imagined futures—into a single pictorial field.
The 2026 Summer Artist-in-Residence marks the fourth year of McLennon Pen Co.’s annual residency program, which transforms the traditionally quiet month of August into a period of artistic production and public engagement. Rather than closing during this seasonal lull, the gallery invites an artist to temporarily inhabit and activate the space, culminating in a public exhibition of newly created work.
This year, the program has become fiscally sponsored by Future Front, allowing McLennon Pen Co. to seek and accept donations in support of the residency and provide resources for the artist’s travel, lodging, and materials. The program is committed to supporting artists at pivotal moments in their careers while fostering dialogue and exchange between visiting artists and Austin’s creative community.
About the Artist:
Aineki Traverso (b. 1991, Washington, DC) is a painter based in Atlanta. Her work has been exhibited in spaces such as Half Gallery (New York, NY), March Gallery (New York, NY), and MEY Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). She has participated in residencies at R&F Handmade Paints, Vermont Studio Center, the Hambidge Center, VCCA, and is a current resident in the Studio Artist Program at Atlanta Contemporary.
Traverso’s work has been reviewed in ArtReview, Burnaway, and Impulse Magazine, and was featured on the cover of Issue #178 of New American Paintings in 2026. Aineki has received the 2024 Atlanta Artadia Award and the 2023 Edge Award from the Forward Arts Foundation, among others. Aineki is represented in the Southeastern United States by Wolfgang Gallery (Atlanta, GA).
If you would like more information or are interested in acquiring a work, please contact McLennon Pen Co. at info@mclennonpenco.com.