Plumb Line, installation view
In Dialogue by Etty Yaniv

Plumb Line: Irit Baniel and Alexis Granwell at Medium Rare

Medium Rare Project Space in DUMBO opens the season with Plumb Line, a two-person show pairing Irit Baniel’s paintings with Alexis Granwell’s sculptures. The two artists work with different materials and processes, but their work shares a concern with the body, vulnerability, memory, and grief. Medium Rare is an artist-led space rooted in making, looking and conversation. Surrounded by artists and studios, it has close ties to the Brooklyn art community and uses exhibitions, talks and workshops to connect artists with a wider public. In this conversation, co-founder Narelle Sissons discusses the curatorial process, the visual axis linking the two artists, the venue’s origins, and its plans for the year ahead.

This Candy Has Teeth, curated by Shuhan Zhang, 2026, image Courtesy of Weicang Wang
Exhibitions by Sherly Fan

This Candy Has Teeth: Can Nostalgia Really Comfort Us?

Is nostalgia really a safe space for us to process the uncertainty of the rapidly changing present? This Candy Has Teeth, curated by Shuhan Zhang, features five Chinese artists, Shengjie Jiang, Weican Wang, Jiaqi Mao, Yukun (Chloe) Ba, and Cindy (Zhaoyue) Chen, who move through childhood, memory, and nostalgia in different ways. Together, their works reflect our current desire for nostalgia, a desire that perhaps reveals just how uncertain the present feels. Yet the more we try to grasp onto the soft, safe, familiar places of the past, the more complicated those memories become. If you really delve back into them, they are also full of discomfort: moments of being forced to accept what happened, and the stiffness of a choke at the throat. As the curatorial text suggests, it is a “sensory misalignment”—an apple is sweet, yet hard to swallow.

Diane Burko, Extraction, A Dialogue of Extremes, Installation Featured Image
In Dialogue by Etty Yaniv

Diane Burko: Extraction, A Dialogue of Extremes at Rowan

Extraction, A Dialogue of Extremes, Diane Burko’s solo exhibition at Rowan University Museum of Contemporary Art, pairs two bodies of work: Arctic paintings based on NSF-funded climate research and works on Amazon mining and deforestation. The show was created as the research grant’s community engagement component. In this interview, curator Mary Salvante discusses how the exhibition came together, the tension between the two series, how the work uses beauty to address climate change, and what the museum hopes visitors take away.

Exhibition Highlights by Taylor Bielecki

SPRING/BREAK highlights: Hide and Seek

This year’s theme for SPRING/BREAK Art Show was Hide and Seek. The fair was within this new and exciting office space that felt like a labyrinth at first, but then it evolved into a wonderful journey- meeting new artists and old friends. Full of amazing works and installations, the booths caught my attention through either a detail, a connection, or a wonderful conversation. The themes varied, from Peter Gynd’s focus on the joys of the everyday to Juan-Manuel Pinzon and Matthew Logsdon’s connections through material, action, and discovery. David Howe and Jesus Benavente’s team brings urgency and humor, showing how decisions from up high affect our everyday lives. My experience of the fair concluded with the works of Noa Charuvi and Shmuel Charuvi, exploring connections to a sense of place and ways of viewing the world, often influenced by the works of family, while Braden Bandel’s paintings and drawings bring us into another world entirely- allowing us a place to rest and contemplate. 

Danny Balgley, installation view, Wexler Gallery, Courtesy of Wexler Gallery, Philadelphia
Exhibitions by Art Spiel

Pentimento: Danny Balgley at Wexler Gallery

The abstract paintings in Pentimento, the debut solo exhibition at Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia by New York artist Danny Balgley, live up to their title. Like geological strata, the urban palimpsest of peeling billboards and weathered facades, or memory itself, their layers let traces of earlier marks show through, revealing themselves gradually, the longer we look.

Gamaliel Rodríguez, Lo grabado de lo vivido (What is etched from what has been lived), Pace Prints, 2026. Artwork © Gamaliel Rodríguez. Photo by Garrett Carroll.
In Dialogue by Etty Yaniv

Gamaliel Rodríguez: What is etched from what has been lived at Pace Prints

At first glance, Gamaliel Rodríguez’s monoprints look like postcards of tropical lands: saturated palms and skies that evoke Caribbean tourism imagery. The paradise turns more industrial and quite specific as you look longer: an ethanol plant in Medina, New York, the Bacardi distillery in Cataño, Puerto Rico. Following Rodriguez’s first solo show with Pace Prints, we discussed this new body of work.

Painting in the Age of Apocalyps
Exhibition Review by Taylor Bielecki

Rebecca Morgan at Asya Geisberg Gallery: Traversing the Apocalypse 

Rebecca Morgan’s exhibition Painting in the Age of Apocalypse is a bit of a roadmap for viewers. Morgan tackles the question of how to present images in the face of a raging political landscape,  how to keep moving forward, and how to maintain oneself and some humor about it all. And most importantly to me, how to open up one’s painting style and allow both the work and the process to support you through this tumultuous and often unbelievable terrain we may find ourselves within. In this exhibition, Morgan engages potent themes from all her eras: sympathy for her rural background, feminist reappraisal of art history, and an unbridled excitement at infusing humor and technical prowess into her critique. Here, Morgan fuses all of these themes well, all the while showing us a fresh, looser style of painting that captures the frenetic energy of the moment. 

Featured Artist by Art Spiel

Yu-Hsu Chou: Beyond the Visible World

Taiwanese visual artist Yu-Hsu Chou uses photography to ask: how much can we trust what we see? This question runs through all his images, whether landscape, digital signals, urban surfaces, or human shadow. However varied the subject matter is, each work evokes the gap between what is visible and what we believe it to be.