Breaking Open
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 10, 6–9 PM
Exhibition Dates: January 10 – February 1, 2026
Good Children Gallery is proud to present Breaking Open, a group exhibition featuring work by Kristy Hughes, Lydia Smith, and Luba Zygarewicz. Join us for the opening reception Saturday, January 10, from 6–9 PM.
When parts of the world are breaking, cracks and fractures are reminders for release and remaking. How can we transform the heaviness of destruction? Can we practice shifting our perspectives to notice the slant of light piercing through the cracks? Fragmentation becomes a site for imagination. We tend small pieces through rituals of care, sparking new ways forward in and out of the darkness.
Hughes is dead serious about joy, and makes work as an exuberant insistence on hope—an unapologetic reclamation of agency and belonging. Her new collection of paintings and sculptures are playful explorations of deep attention. She begins each piece with a seemingly random form, color, or texture, curious to see how one compositional choice leads to the next. The resulting works are altars and prayers for noticing, searching, and listening—a meditation on care.
Smith’s expanded photographic works explore the liminality of ruins through research conducted during a summer in Dresden, Germany, a city destroyed in World War II and now fully rebuilt. Smith visits a mountain of rubble transformed into a park, a recently collapsed bridge, a photo archive, and the city’s Lapidarium, seeking to converse with the ghosts that haunt the cracks of these spaces. Documentation from these investigations becomes ground for remaking, newly emerging as collage and poetry.
In thresholds, Zygarewicz deepens the exploration of querencia—that innate sentiment of safety and belonging—through a series of small works. The collection serves as an ode to a year navigating between heft and elation. Through acts of molding, assembling, and tending, the resulting dwelling-like structures function as altars and thresholds, holding vulnerability and strength. These pieces embody quiet resolve, finding pockets of joy and glimmers of hope amidst fragile times.
We break open, and then we break open again.
Kristy Hughes (b. Waxahachie, TX) creates vibrant abstract sculptures and paintings that reclaim agency, visibility, and joy through color, form, texture, and found materials. Influenced by her Hispanic and Indigenous lineage and experiences within fundamentalist religious institutions, her works insist on hope and repair—monuments for joy, care, and belonging.
Hughes has been supported by fellowships at NXTHVN, The Fine Arts Work Center, and Vermont Studio Center, with residencies at MASS MoCA, The Golden Foundation, Hambidge Center, and Residency Unlimited. In 2025, she received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, Maake Magazine, and more. She currently lives and works in New Haven, CT.
www.kristyhughes.com
Lydia Smith (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Winston-Salem, NC. Her research-based practice engages expanded photography, drawing, and writing to witness what lingers in the aftermath of loss. She explores cemeteries, archives, ruins, and landscapes as ghostly bodies, seeking hidden narratives and meditating on inheritance.
Smith received an MFA from The Ohio State University and a BA from Rice University. Her work has been supported by a Watson Fellowship and residencies at Stove Works, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Fabric Workshop and Museum. She is currently an Assistant Teaching Professor of Drawing at Wake Forest University.
www.lydiasmith.studio
Luba Zygarewicz is a Chilean-Ukrainian artist and educator whose practice explores belonging, fragility, and resilience through humble materials and labor-intensive processes. Her work reflects on migration, place, and the transience of time, elevating the everyday through care and attention.
Zygarewicz holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work has been supported by NALAC and the European Cultural Academy. In 2025, she completed a permanent site-specific installation at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.
www.lubazygarewicz.com | IG: @lubazygarewicz
Luba Zygarewicz
Breaking Open
2026
Mixed media installation