Elijah Wheat Showroom is soul-stirred to announce our inaugural exhibition, featuring     E.E. Kono // Dispersion, opening Saturday 13 June, in our new storefront gallery in Beacon, NY. The solo exhibition will run until 26 July 2026. There will be a closing reception and artist Q&A beginning at 3PM.

The title Dispersion references both the artist’s chosen medium, in which pigment particles are suspended in egg yolk, and broader themes of generational displacement. The paintings explore ideas of settlement and questions belonging.

Kono’s family lineage is tied to westward expansion, and her imagery examines its enduring, often obscured, influence on contemporary national and personal identity.

E. E. Kono is a painter working between Los Angeles and Iowa who uses the ancient medium of egg tempera to explore American mythologies through a lens of place. The artist’s work incorporates historically relevant materials, such as pigments sourced from culturally significant locations like Dutchess county pebbles and 19th-century factory brick. Her paintings question familiar narratives and uncover the quieter, often overlooked stories embedded in the land itself.

Kono has chosen egg tempera for both its ethereal qualities and connection to art history. She is particularly interested in the medium’s relationship to the transition between the medieval and early modern periods, when the enclosure of common lands (dispersed lots) in the British Isles helped drive capitalism by producing a landless working class dependent on wage Labor. This period also marked a shift in art: away from the celestial ideals embodied in egg tempera and toward the depiction of worldly, material objects, more readily captured in oil paint. The artist‘s work suggests that, as the postmodern age cycles toward a more holistic future, egg tempera offers an ideal means of connecting to the past while imagining a less corporeal present.

As subtle as they are beautiful, each work shares a story about the United States and its history. The artist traced her roots to ancestors displaced from Scottish and Irish homelands, drawn by the promise of 19th c. manifest destiny, to settle the frontier that became Minnesota and the Dakotas. They arrived at a moment that coincided with, and benefited from, the forced removal of Native populations. This uncomfortable history is often ignored or excused; as a descendant, Kono acknowledges her own implication within these narratives of expansion. It is a cyclical story of migration that continues to echo in the present.

As you look deeply at Kono’s tempera panels, you witness layered symbolism: Untainted precolonial landscapes; references to diverse mythology; suggestive spiritual embodiment of birds, buffalo, insects, and blossoms; colonial ecocide, and genocide; all cycles of death and rebirth. 

At a moment when the nation’s history is being increasingly subverted, Kono turns to material as a site of truth, constructing a personal mythology shaped by a shared, imperfect past.  

E.E. Kono (USA b.1973 Oshkosh, WI) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Iowa and Los Angeles, USA. She is best known for her vibrant egg tempera paintings which blend elements of Renaissance art with mythological, and religious imagery. Utilizing historically significant materials such as silverpoint and locally sourced earth pigments, her work explores the connection between place, culture, and storytelling.

Kono’s art is characterized by its meticulous technique and thoughtful incorporation of symbolic elements. Uncovering layered personal and geopolitical histories, her subject matter blends cultural imagery with influences that stem from travel to folklore and art history. Kono’s artistic practice explores the intersection between ancient traditions and contemporary issues within the context of global interconnectedness.

A self-taught painter, Kono studied art history at the University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA) and the University of Hull (Kingston Upon Hull, England). She learned traditional egg tempera techniques under the

guidance of artist Koo Schadler. Kono’s work has been exhibited internationally and in notable venues, including solo exhibits at the Dubuque Museum of Art (Dubuque, IA), La Luz de Jesus (Los Angeles, CA), Gallery 825 (Los Angeles) As well as group exhibits at Riverside Art Museum (Riverside, California), FORMah (NYC) Modern Eden (San Francisco, CA), Beinart Gallery, (Melbourne Australia). Her paintings have been seen in Beautiful Bizarre Magazine, American Art Collector, Arts to Hearts Magazine, and Juxtapoz magazine. Additionally, she is an award-winning author and illustrator with over a dozen books published by major trade houses. Her book illustrations are in the collection of the Mazza Museum (Findley, OH) She participated in the Wassaic Project 2025 Winter Residency (Wassaic, NY), Exhibited with Elijah Wheat Showroom at Future Fair, 2025, a solo exhibition at Troutbeck Hotel Gallery, with Wassaic Spring 2026 and another solo, Dispersion with Elijah Wheat at the inaugural opening of their storefront in Beacon, NY for Upstate Art Weekend for June 2026.

Elijah Wheat Showroom (est. 2015) is a New York-based artist-run gallery and nomadic curatorial experience founded by Carolina Wheat & Liz Nielsen. Currently positioned in  Beacon, NY,. The gallery once resided in Newburgh, NY on the Hudson River in an 200 year old raw historic factory building, once “Newburgh Steelworks” comprising 3390 sq/ft from 2020-’26. Prior to that, EWS was in a storefront in Bushwick, Brooklyn, 2016-2020. The duo has put together over 80 exhibitions thus far. The gallery is named after their late son, Elijah, whose creative insight, righteous vision, perceptive being and stylistic voice for trendsetting embody the spirit that the Showroom honors. Elijah Wheat artists are socially conscientious, politically engaged and reflective of a creative community striving to cultivate meaningful interactions to promote the diversity of artists' voices through the determination to make visual culture part of our everyday life.