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Simphiwe Mbunyuza: UMTHONYAMA
opinion Simphiwe Mbunyuza’s ceramic sculptures are a powerful synthesis of ancestral traditions, personal history, and contemporary expression. His recent exhibition, UMTHONYAMA, at David Kordansky Gallery in New York (January 16 – February 22, 2025), presented a body of work that transforms the physical space of the gallery into one of spiritual reflection, cultural storytelling, and artistic innovation.
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Insider Outsider
This past weekend New York saw the latest iteration of the Outsider Art Fair. Started in 1993, it has become a NYC institution and seems to be thriving after a few lean pandemic years. The Fair serves a field that has evolved a great deal over the past 30 years, and I really felt that this year more than in the past. As the number of now “blue chip” or “Old Master Self-Taught” artists dwindle, there’s been an influx of both younger artists and some who push against the definitions of self-taught in the first place. It’s a sticky subject…
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Art Spiel Picks: All Around NYC Exhibitions in March 2025
HIGHLIGHTS Spatial dynamics and human hybridity are central to this month’s roundup of highlights in New York. From monumental sculpture to works intimately interspersed within the home, all things great and small commune and offer reflection upon their relationships to the environments in which they currently reside. The hierarchy between the natural and the manmade is in conversation within this selection of shows through shifting currents of tenuous and harmonious moments.
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OXH Gallery Setting the Stage for Women Artists in the Heart of Tampa
In dialogue Odeta Xheka, an artist, curator, and mother, has been an avid advocate for women in the fine arts. Her latest endeavor is an ambitious and exciting one, as she opened OXH Gallery in the heart of Tampa’s Ybor City Historic District just a few months ago. I’m sitting down with Odeta to discuss her new gallery, her mission, exciting collaborations, and the current two-person show Time Shards, which will be on view through March 20th, 2025.
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Rope and Revolver at Catharine Clark Gallery
In 2023, I saw Ansel Adams in Our Time at San Francisco’s de Young Museum. Along with Adams’ famous gelatin silver photographs of national parks and the Southwest, the show had work by contemporary photographers such as Binh Dahn and Meghann Riepenhoff, and it aimed to present a narrative of the West that didn’t depict it as a vast, empty land ready for settlement. I was thinking about this show and how art and the way institutions present it isn’t neutral when I saw Rope and Revolver: Artists Respond to Frederic Remington’s ‘The Broncho Buster’, the engaging exhibition at San Francisco’s Catharine…