The Need of Being Versed in Country Things

Sammy Bennett Chukwumaa Jeanne F. Jalandoni

"For them there was really nothing sad. But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept, One had to be versed in country things Not to believe the phoebes wept."

—Robert Frost, “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”

One who is versed in country things, who intimately knows nature, would not believe the phoebes weep for us, but despite the intricate knot of Frost’s last line, we are left with three echoing words: the phoebes wept. We put weight on animals and plants to represent things for us but they make their lives despite our destructive impulses. Perhaps because of this tension, they're intimately involved in the story we tell about ourselves.

All three artists in The Need of Being Versed in Country Things value and emblematize nature through personal or cultural mythologies. chukwumaa works through the magnetic pull of a traditional broom woven from palm fronds which he calls a “Persistent Object” used to unearth our banal struggle to keep our living spaces swept clean of dust as well as memories of our stubborn, intertwined and entangled colonial histories. Jeanne F. Jalandoni’s carabao undergoes a symbolic personification to become a character within lush, imagined landscapes of ancestral memory. Sammy Bennett’s installations depict an intimate and idiosyncratic world which deftly lays side by side the pleasures and pitfalls of country and city, inside and outside, high and low, revealing glimpses of ruin beneath a cozy, picturesque cohesion.

Still, plants and animals remain austere even as we write them in to the story we tell about ourselves. It should afford us some comfort that nature doesn’t care if we're sad. Our sadness and anger has imposed on the world and we have wrought more damage than we can ever repair.

Sammy Bennett (b. 1990, Ypsilanti, MI) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice incorporates painting, printmaking, textiles, and found objects to examine his lived experiences across rural and urban environments. Drawing from the neighborhoods and apartments he has inhabited, Bennett transforms personal objects and everyday spaces into layered portraits that explore memory, place, and identity.

Bennett received a BFA from Kendall College of Art and Design in 2012 and an MFA from Michigan State University in 2016. He was awarded the Stanley and Selma Hollander Graduate Fellowship in Studio Art in 2015. He has participated in residencies at Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy (2012, 2016, and 2025), the Jentel Foundation in Wyoming (2025), and Rondo Residency in Mexico City (2026).

Recent exhibitions include Below Grand, BravinLee Programs, All Street, and 81 Leonard (New York, NY); the Ely Center of Contemporary Art (New Haven, CT); Strata Gallery (Santa Fe, NM); Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center (Solomons, MD); and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum (East Lansing, MI).

In 2022, Bennett founded Bob's Gallery, an artist-run space dedicated to supporting emerging and underrepresented artists through debut solo exhibitions. The gallery provides artists with a space to take creative risks, foster dialogue, and engage with New York’s arts community. Its migratory, collaborative model embraces the gallery as a temporal site for experimentation, exchange, and collective practice.

Born in Lagos, Nigeria and raised in Prince George’s County, Maryland, chukwumaa makes soft sculptures, techno-divining performances and other media experiments about liminal characters, Igbo trickster myths and non-linear narratives.

They have performed and exhibited at MoMA PS1, The Corcoran Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, ICA London, The Kitchen, Hessel Museum of Art, The American Academy of Arts and Letters and for festivals including Art in Odd Places and Performa.

They have contributed thoughts and art to publications including Propter Nos. compiled by Tyrone S. Palmer, “The Sound of Quadrillage: Prison, Metropolis, Biopolitics” by Naomi Waltham-Smith, “Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century” by Dhanveer Singh Brar, Bubble Chamber compiled by Gentrified Underground, 00 Magazine compiled by Dozie Kanu, and “A Year of Deep Listening: 365 Text Scores for Pauline Oliveros” edited by Stephanie Loveless.

Jeanne F. Jalandoni (b. 1993) is a painter and textile artist born and raised in New York City. As a second-generation American who has never been to the Philippines, Jalandoni reflects on her relationship to cultural heritage and hybridity, while exploring personal loss, and rituals of mourning and care. Working across knitting, weaving, and painting, Jalandoni creates a body of fragmented, multi-medium works that reference family archives, personal memories, and Philippine colonial histories. A recurring figure in her work is the carabao (water buffalo), a symbolic personification of her Filipino American experience. Jalandoni’s carabao becomes a character who enters landscapes of ancestral memory, encountering objects and animals from multiple timelines in Philippine history– porcelain plates, Philippine fruits, and illustrated birds inspired by the Manila Manuscript. By visualizing her bicultural identity, Jalandoni underscores that identity is not fixed or solitary, but rather an evolving and multifaceted blend of cultures and histories.

Jalandoni received her BFA in Studio Art from New York University and an MA in Painting at The Royal College of Art. Some solo and two-person shows include exhibitions with Taymour Grahne Projects, Latitude Gallery, Cohen Gallery, Wellesley College. Selected group exhibitions include participation with Mandy Zhang Gallery, Jeffrey Deitch, Ben Brown Fine Arts, Fragment Gallery, American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, Pace University Art Gallery, and Asia Society Texas Center. Selected residencies include the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts (2025), Alfred University BIPOC Summer Residency (2024), and the Textile Arts Center (2021). Jalandoni is a 2025 & 2019 grant recipient of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Creative Engagement Grant Award, and Real Art Award (2019). She was a featured artist in New American Paintings issue #164, and Wonder Women: Art of the Asian Diaspora.

At Tempest, we want to talk about art in a maelstrom. We invite artists to broach difficult conversations, seek anti-imperialist frameworks and honor craft and cultural heritage in their practice in textiles, sculpture and installation. Launched in 2024, Tempest Gallery is based in the culturally rich neighborhood of Ridgewood, New York. Through our programming, we aim to create community and a space for gathering and presenting work.