ANDREW RAFACZ is thrilled to announce New Travelers, a solo exhibition of new painting and sculpture by Cody Hudson, in Gallery Two. The exhibition opens November 7th, and continues through December 20th, 2025. This marks the artists’ tenth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Throughout his career, Cody Hudson has used his practice to support and engage communities, exploring how art can create spaces for reflection, unity, and collective experience. New Travelers brings forward a new chapter in Hudson’s evolving journey, one that reaffirms his belief in the power of art to connect people and inspire a sense of belonging.

In New Travelers, Hudson deepens his exploration of abstract image-making, responding to a period of personal introspection amid global uncertainty. Across this new series, he introduces motifs that suggest familiar forms, function, and hope. Across the tabletop and wall-mounted sculptures, and within the singular painting anchoring the forms in Gallery Two, high-contrast compositions of pinks, crimsons, creams, and saturated blues emerge, creating a rhythmic interplay of positive and negative space. The chromatic palette heightens the emotional resonance of the works, evoking the vibrant, somewhat romantic hues of sky, flora, and earth. Throughout the compositions, organic shapes reminiscent of plants, flowers, and birds emerge, seamlessly integrating with Hudson’s signature use of geometry and color.

Influenced by vernacular design elements such as barn quilts and weather vanes, the works in New Travelers bridge the everyday and the transcendent, grounding abstract forms in the visual language of his lived experience. While modern barn quilting first gained widespread recognition in the early 2000s, its roots reach back to the folk traditions of quilting circles and community craft in rural America. A barn quilt is a large, painted representation of a traditional quilt block—typically created on wooden panels or a sheet of metal—then mounted on the side of a barn or other agricultural structure. Each pattern, often geometric or symbolic, evokes layered narratives of place and community.

Hudson’s practice engages these same sensibilities. Over the past two decades in his sculptural works, he has moved between using plywood, steel, and aluminum—materials that mirror the tactile and utilitarian character of rural vernacular. His large-scale site-specific projects, including the 2016 mural at The Holdout (an artist residency and apple orchard in Évora de Alcobaça, Portugal), and the 2020 Rainbow installation at The Ecology Center (a 28-acre Regenerative Organic Certified™ farm and educational hub for Southern California’s ecological movement) similarly fuse folk aesthetics with contemporary visual language. These projects, like the works in New Travelers, connect landscape, community, and material in a shared pursuit of renewal.

Beyond their decorative appeal, these forms have long carried social and symbolic meaning—articulating collective identity, self-sufficiency, and resistance to mainstream culture. Within this context, Hudson’s adaptation of these motifs positions New Travelers as a meditation on emblems—both physical and spiritual—and on the ways creativity can chart new paths toward balance and belonging. The exhibition title itself suggests a community of seekers, moving between worlds, practices, and histories. Much like the migratory patterns of folk art or the generational transmission of craft and design, Hudson’s meditative compositions, whether large scale mural, sculpture, or painting trace a lineage of making as a means of intentions and futures. These works operate as visual waypoints—portals toward renewal, grounded in the shared, ongoing act of creation.

CODY HUDSON (American, b. 1971) lives and works between Chicago, IL, and Sugar Creek, WI. Residencies include The Jaunt (Seoul, South Korea), The Ecology Center (San Juan Capistrano, CA), Soho Beach House (Miami, FL), Form Arcosanti (Arcosanti, AZ), and Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN). Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include ANDREW RAFACZ (Chicago, IL), Louis Buhl (Detroit, MI), The Jaunt (Seoul, South Korea), Primary (Miami, FL), Mini Galerie (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Left Field Gallery (Los Osos, CA), HVW8 (Berlin, Germany), and V1 Gallery (Copenhagen, Denmark). Group exhibitions include Joy Machine (Chicago, IL), Phloem Studio Gallery (Hood River, OR), Left Field Gallery (Los Osos, CA), STRAAT Museum (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Somerset House (London, UK), Joshua Liner Gallery (New York, NY), and Chicago Design Museum (Chicago, IL). In 2006 Hudson was commissioned by the City of Chicago Public Art Program to create a permanent installation at the White Sox/35th CTA station as part of the Arts in Transit Program. In 2025, he worked on a special collaboration between the Chicago Bulls and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the first of its kind. He has exhibited at art fairs in Chicago, Copenhagen, Miami, New York, and Rotterdam. His work has been written about in Art & Object, The Chicago Reader, Hypebeast, MLB.com, NBA.com, and Newcity. Publications include Save My Life (2008), and Selected Universal Portals (2023). His artwork can be found in numerous private and public collections.