WHY PAINT? II is a sequel to the 2020-2021 exhibition Why Are You Painting?, curated for the Honolulu Museum of Art School. That project brought together 21 painters from New York, California, and Hawai‘i, each asked a deceptively simple question: Why are you painting?

In 2025, curators Reem Bassous and Jan Dickey posed a similar question to twelve painters working in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Chicago: Why paint? The shortened title shifts the focus from painting as action, inquiry, or craft to paint itself—its presence, its weight, its material fact. Every five years, every painter would do well to ask themselves: Why paint?

​

- Reem Bassous & Jan Dickey

Curators of Why Paint? II​