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Michele Pierson
Fractal Roots, 2025
Oil on canvas, 30 x 24
Tee Taylor
Back Story, 2024
mixed media, 24 x 36
Justine Simmons
Deep Blue Sea, 2022
Fluid acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24
Kathleen Maximin
Jupiter, 2023
Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40
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Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation presents
Presence without Permission
Opening Reception
Saturday, March 21st | 3pm to 7pm
Rush Arts Philadelphia
4954 Old York Road
Philadelphia, PA 19141
Gallery Public Hours:
Thursday- Sunday | 12pm to 5pm
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Presence without Permission
An Exhibition Featuring Tee Taylor, Michele Pierson, Kathleen Maximin, and Justine Simmons.
“This is an exhibition about reclamation and declaration with works that oscillate between abstraction and the highly refined and detailed.”
Exhibition opening reception at Rush Arts Philadelphia on March 21, 2026, from 3:00 pm – 7:00 pm, and will run until May 30, 2026.
Presence without Permission is a bold and resonant group exhibition that centers reclamation as both action and ethos. Bringing together four distinct voices: Tee Taylor, Michele Pierson, Kathleen Maximin, and Justine Simmons. The exhibition explores what it means to occupy space unapologetically. Moving fluidly from abstraction to intricate detail, the works on view assert presence as an inherent right rather than a granted privilege.
This exhibition unfolds as both a declaration and an invitation. Across painting and mixed media, the artists navigate identity, memory, spirituality, materiality, and transformation. Each body of work resists erasure and challenges inherited boundaries, offering instead self-defined narratives that are intimate, expansive, and uncontained.
Michele Pierson
Born in 1993 in Philadelphia, Michele Pierson creates paintings that illuminate the interdependent relationship between inner and outer space. Her phantasmal landscapes, altar-like still lifes, interior spaces, and figures investigate the supernaturality of the human experience—accessible through ritual, reflection, dreams, memory, and reverent observation. Driven by a deep curiosity to decolonize and personalize inherited frameworks such as religion, tradition, and cultural memory, Pierson reframes these structures through an intimate lens. Her work suggests that self-authored belief can be both personally and collectively liberatory.
Pierson earned her BA in Studio Art and Art History, magna cum laude, from Spelman College, with additional studies in Ghana and Florence, Italy. A recipient of numerous fellowships and grants, including the Black Artist Fellowship (Mural Arts Philadelphia, 2024) and the Jar of Love Grant (ArtNoir x Sotheby’s, 2023), her work has been exhibited across Philadelphia and beyond, including Chicago and Miami Art Week.
(website @ michelepierson.com)
Tee Taylor
A native of West Philadelphia, Tee Taylor began painting at age 2, then paused her practice after college. During quarantine, she made a life-altering decision to leave her job and return to art full-time. In that period of reinvention, she embraced her signature three-dimensional painting style, an approach that has since garnered significant attention.
Taylor’s tactile surfaces and sculptural compositions push painting beyond the flat plane, embodying the exhibition’s spirit of material assertion. Her work has been featured in the Athenaeum Museum of Philadelphia and in the Sixth Street District/Historic Eureka, marking a pivotal year in her evolving career.
(website @ tayloredfacesphilly.com)
Kathleen Maximin
Brooklyn-based abstract artist Kathleen Maximin contributes work that navigates gesture, color, and emotional terrain. Through abstraction, Maximin creates dynamic visual languages that speak to interiority and embodied experience. Her practice reflects a commitment to process and presence, offering compositions that feel at once spontaneous and deeply intentional. In Presence without Permission, her work underscores abstraction as a site of both freedom and force.
(IG @Kathleenmaximin)
Justine Simmons
Designer, philanthropist, and author Justine Simmons makes her artistic debut in this exhibition with a series of abstract works. Known for her creative leadership across fashion, literature, and community work, Simmons brings a new dimension to her practice through painting. Her compositions reflect a personal evolution, an embrace of visual expression as a vehicle for vulnerability and affirmation.
(IG @iamjustinesimmons)
With Presence without Permission, Simmons joins her fellow artists in asserting that creative voice requires no external validation. The work stands as both a personal milestone and a broader statement about reinvention and self-claiming.
Together, these four artists form a collective declaration: to exist fully, visibly, and without concession. Presence without Permission is not only an exhibition; It is a stance. Through abstraction, texture, symbolism, and refined detail, the show affirms that occupying space spiritually, culturally, and materially is an act of power.
For press inquiries, images, and additional information, please contact: rushartsphiladelphia@gmail.com