“American Interior” Dan Gunn at Pentimenti

Dan Gunn opens “American Interior” at Pentimenti Gallery on April 17 with a reception and artist dialogue running from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibition marks the Midwest-based artist’s first solo show at Pentimenti and arrives in deliberate alignment with Philadelphia’s 250th anniversary celebration of American independence. Through a series of intricately carved wooden “tapestries,” Dan Gunn explores the layered meanings of “interior” — the Midwestern heartland, the nation’s collective psyche, and the decorative domestic space — intertwining these registers into an exploration of identity, memory, and cultural inheritance that runs through June 13.

Dan Gunn received his MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions include KMAC Contemporary Art Museum in Louisville, Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago, The University Club of Chicago, and Good Weather Gallery in North Little Rock. Group exhibitions span the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Elmhurst Art Museum, among others.

Residencies include the Wassaic Project, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Vermont Studio Center, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been reviewed in Frieze, Art in America, Artforum, and New American Paintings, and is held in the collections of the Mayo Clinic, KMAC Contemporary, TD Bank, the Joyce Foundation, and the Marciano Art Foundation.

The Index of American Design in Dan Gunn’s Practice

The work of Dan Gunn stages a tension between image and structure that rewards sustained looking. His carved and sewn plywood compositions mimic the appearance of drapery while asserting their rigid, constructed form. He draws inspiration from material in motion — the buckling of a fabric theater curtain, the swag of political garland, expanding screens — arranged to emphasize the rhythm and formal movement of their folds. From that initial observation, Dan Gunn meticulously hand-cuts, carves, dyes, and paints plywood segments, which he sews together with nylon cord to evoke the appearance of hanging fabric. The labor-intensive process transforms the fleeting qualities of drapery into something architectural and enduring, arresting movement within a system of fixed, assembled parts.

Many of the works in “American Interior” incorporate objects drawn from the Index of American Design, a federal initiative established during the Great Depression to document and preserve a distinctly American visual heritage by constructing what its creators called a “usable past.”

The original watercolors depicting folk and decorative arts from the colonial period through 1900 serve Dan Gunn as both source material and conceptual framework, translating archival imagery into constructed surfaces that emphasize both the persistence and instability of American identities. Growing up in the Midwest, he found the region reflecting upon its past in everyday objects — familiar but often defunct things shaped by place, labor, and memory — and his work explores how these representations of regional identity become both a psychological foundation and a mythological mirror.

Dan Gunn at Pentimenti: Exhibition Details

The opening reception for “American Interior” takes place Friday, April 17, from 6 to 8 p.m. at Pentimenti Gallery, featuring a dialogue between Dan Gunn and Bill Adair, Creative and Executive Director at ArtPhilly, from 6 to 6:30 p.m. The exhibition runs through June 13, 2026. If you have been following how Dan Gunn’s relationship with Pentimenti has developed, “American Interior” is the realization of that partnership — a full solo presentation that positions his carved plywood tapestries as objects capable of holding the contradictions of American identity without resolving them, asking viewers to look again and then look deeper.