Installation view: Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, The Mud Room: Itinerant Artists, Folk Spectacles, and Painted Walls.
Amant, Brooklyn, NY. September 17-November 29, 2026. Photo: New Document.

The Mud Room at Amant

Entry to Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s newest exhibit at Amant, The Mud Room, is permitted through the reverse side of a mural painting. A precise rectangular passageway has been cut through the muslin, which seems to sigh as I pass underneath it. Three additional large paintings define the boundaries of the cubic room. A makeshift ceramic studio fills the gallery’s center—a kiln, throwing wheels, and in-progress clay mounds have been lifted from the floor and onto an elevated stage.

Installation view: Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, The Mud Room: Itinerant Artists, Folk Spectacles, and Painted Walls.
Amant, Brooklyn, NY. September 17-November 29, 2026. Photo: New Document.

Like murals, the paintings are so large they succeed in disorienting the viewer. Or rather, they instead orient me to the fallibility of my own scale. Up close the linework is rhythmic and loose, but upon distancing myself I am rewarded with a panoramic view. The mural which afforded entry, “Curtain? Ode to the Production Potter,” depicts a garment factory–turned–industrial potter’s studio. Workers line a factory table, trimming and shaping vessels before them. It is as though the ceramic studio has sprung off the wall and into the space between the mural and myself. My instinct is to walk the generous path around that realized platform filled with clay; take in the murals, digest their narratives. But the metronomic ticking of the kiln becomes harder to ignore. The digital temperature gauge rises to 1650 degrees. Heat radiates onto my palms when I hold them in the air before it. I oscillate between taking in the staged studio and the hung artworks.

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy has put the craftsperson’s studio in dialogue with the painter’s finished product without making a mockery of either. Most often, when I encounter a ceramic vessel in a gallery space, it is fully realized. Its glaze shines under carefully aimed track lighting. In The Mud Room, Lutz-Kinoy has stripped back the layers of how an object comes to exist in the gallery in the first place. I am lucky enough to speak with him one weekend morning early in the exhibition’s run. He tells me that artistic labor was an entry point for the installation. On the walls of the room, we see the artistic labor behind these objects. In the center, that labor extends into something more performative and visible.

Installation view: Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, The Mud Room: Itinerant Artists, Folk Spectacles, and Painted Walls.
Amant, Brooklyn, NY. September 17-November 29, 2026. Photo: New Document.

There is a hierarchy in the art world which the porousness of Lutz-Kinoy’s installation disrupts. Function and decoration traditionally lower a piece from an art object to a domestic one. This history of craft is at least true in America, and The Mud Room is undergirded by a distinct frequency of Americana. Lutz-Kinoy’s paintings invoke the WPA, a moment in American history where artistic labor ran in tandem to unionizing garment labor, farm working, and more. It was a moment when hierarchies between class and education were mixed. In the gallery space, these references to American labor history lead me to question those same hierarchies between the world of craft and that of art. Each mural draws from wide-ranging references that share an interest in public access: from Aaron Douglas’s 1934 mural series through the Public Works of Art Project to Ben Shahn’s “Sinopia for the Roosevelt Mural.” Situated across from the cut-out entry hangs “Curtain? My Craft Extraction (W.P.A. Expo New York).” The painting references the composition and characters of Keith Haring’s Heaven and Hell, a rare thematic exhibition by the artist exploring the underworld in his signature graphic style. In Lutz-Kinoy’s work, the inside of a ceramic oven becomes a hellfire where demons devour ceramic vessels amid eternal flames of damnation. And to their right is a canvas whose orange glow bounces across the room. The acrylic and colored pencil painting pays homage to Haring’s “Crack is Wack” mural, originally painted on a Harlem handball court in 1986. A central laborer, inspired by Douglas, appears to dig up what is just out of frame. Could it be clay?

Performance images courtesy of Amant.

Among the lineage-rich works that define the room’s boundaries, it is the domestic objects they depict that take center stage. And on that stage, those objects perform as non-domestic ones. In the hours when Amant is closed to the public, Lutz-Kinoy takes his place at the wheel. He works steadily to amass a collection of dinner plates for use in two performances. Chef Ned Baldwin of Amant’s Zoli Restaurant has worked closely with the artist to design a menu fit to serve upon the ceramics made within The Mud Room. On October 9, Lutz-Kinoy enacted a table reading of Farm to Europe with collaborators Natsuko Uchino, Chelsea Culprit, Dena Yago, Hadi Falspishi, Tenko Nakajima, and Arley Marks. Coming up on November 13, Lutz-Kinoy will present Voulkos / Mishima, a play and pottery demonstration with Kazunori Hamana. So while Lutz-Kinoy himself is engaged in a performance of craft, his work is not merely performative. It is functional. When not in use for either performance, in-progress plates and vessels are kept from dehydrating under transparent sheets of plastic. The myth of the craftsperson is realized in the hours spent making them—when Lutz-Kinoy sincerely inhabits the role of artisan. As he tells me, it’s like in a zoo where you go hoping to see the bear, but instead the bear is in his cave. He becomes the bear only when the galleries are closed to the public. But even so, he notes that Amant staff wander in and out often enough that his labor is not exactly invisible.

Of all the threads in our conversation, I have not stopped thinking about the one exploring the construct of craft as a social fantasy. Lutz-Kinoy proposed a link between the resurgence of craft movements in countries to the nationalistic desire to reconnect with a fantasized identity. When an object can be identified as truly culturally specific, the reason might be because of a quasi-fascist governmental approach toward the valorization of their culture and objects. He points to Shaker furniture, which has recently become more popular in the mainstream, as a solid example of this. The opposite might be something which is very much referenced in The Mud Room: the studio pottery movement. In a melding of Eastern and Western ceramic techniques, founders Bernard Leach and Shōji Hamada forged a collaboration which was inherently anti-fascist in its interest in fusion and an independent creative life. After meeting in Japan, Hamada traveled to the UK with Leach to establish a studio where they began making slipware, stoneware, and raku (a traditional Japanese firing method)—always maintaining the hand and their anti-industrial stance.

This framing of craft as a social fantasy fascinates me, in part, because I am often in rooms with designers who fret over the loss of working craft techniques and what a preservation of them might look like. I am an art director at a design gallery which represents domestic objects—furniture, lighting, and textiles. Impeccable and innovative craft elevates these objects into something more collectible. The complication that it is not always possible to push forward while preserving what has passed feels as true in the world as it does in the maker’s studio. The Mud Room manages to transform the gallery into both. It is a porous space where everything happens at once, yet with enough distance to offer clarity. The paintings and ceramics both serve as physical indexes of the techniques that went into making them. The indent a body leaves behind on a plate never quite smoothed out, the shadow of a charcoal line painted past in acrylic.

Stepping out on Maujer Street on my way home, I get a glimpse of the East Williamsburg of fifteen years ago, one where I had just begun my tenure in the world of art and craft, interning at a wallpaper studio merely two blocks from where Amant is today. My role there was a performance in its own right—printing the back side of cardboard mailers and washing ink from the silk screens in a washout booth. The actual wallpaper printing, and the skilled artisanal labor behind it, was left in the hands of a factory upstate. On the spectrum of functional to decorative, wallpaper leans firmly on the side of decoration. Where a mural and a vessel lie on the same scale is much more ambiguous. Leaving The Mud Room, I am left thinking there is always another layer to peel back on any form; always a deeper understanding behind how one certain object might come to occupy one certain room.

Installation view: Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, The Mud Room: Itinerant Artists, Folk Spectacles, and Painted Walls.
Amant, Brooklyn, NY. September 17-November 29, 2026. Photo: New Document.


Performance images courtesy of Amant.

The Mud Room is on view at Amant through November 29, 2026.