Intersect Palm Springs: Juan José Barboza-Gubo, Crystalle Lacouture, Yuri Shimojo, and Helena Wurzel

Yuri Shimojo is a Tokyo-born, contemporary Japanese painter who currently lives and works between New York and Kyoto. The last descendent of her samurai clan who lost all of her immediate family members before the age of 30, Shimojo has always used painting to express the interconnected emotions of joy and pain. Using traditional Japanese watercolor or ground SUMI and SHU ink, her work combines the abstract and the surreal, often playfully and always evocative of the desire for universal compassion. 

With minimal formal training in fine art, her style is grounded in the practice of Japanese traditional arts, especially Ikebana flower arrangement, Noh, and Kabuki theatrical art in her upbringing. Her publication includes a memoir of her unique childhood with her late family. She also spent many years in Hawaii studying indigenous healing practices and spirituality. These experiences moving between cultures have influenced her work throughout her life and continue to bring new sources of inspiration today. She has exhibited in the United States and Japan and is in private collections around the world.

Helena Wurzel is a painter living in Cambridge, MA. She received an MFA in painting from Boston University in 2007 and is a two-time recipient of Massachusetts Cultural Council Grants (2010 and 2016). Her work has been featured on the cover of New American Paintings, and in multiple campaigns with the designer Kate Spade, as well as in designer Jonathan Adler’s retail spaces in Los Angeles, Miami and beyond. For 15 years, until 2022, she taught painting full-time in the Boston area. Her work is in private and corporate collections throughout the United States.