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Learning with Trees-Artists for Climate and Environmental Solutions

In Dialogue
 Installation view. Photo courtesy of Martina Tanga

Curator Martina Tanga had been reflecting on the ideas behind Learning With Trees – Artists for Climate and Environmental Solutions long before the exhibition took shape. In 2022, she read Ben Rawlence’s The Treeline, a book tracing how the Boreal forest is shifting under the impact of climate change. That reading sparked the idea that trees could serve as a highly accessible and disarmingly effective way to approach conversations about climate change.

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Flora Yukhnovich: Four Seasons at the Frick Collection Cabinet Gallery

Installation view of Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons in The Frick Collection’s Cabinet Gallery, showing Autumn and Winter. Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.

What draws artists and audiences back to the Baroque now, in a century shaped by speed and fracture? Perhaps it is the recognition of kinship. The seventeenth century was also an age of cataclysm and wonder — continents mapped, the cosmos recalculated, science expanding perception. The Baroque arose amid fracture: religious schisms, shifting empires, faith and politics entangled. Art became theatrical, constructed to move the spirit through light, motion, and sensation.

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reMastered at Mana Contemporary

In Conversation
Nirvana (Nevermind)


reMastered: Jac Lahav’s Record Paintings is a solo exhibition at Mana Contemporary featuring a selection of over two hundred intimate 12 x 12 inch paintings of iconic album covers celebrating the slow, tactile process of gouache on canvas. The project asks what painting can add to images that already live in our collective memory. This iteration of Lahav’s work opens a new line of inquiry into what artists listen to, drawing from record collections of artist icons Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe, Francis Bacon, and Dan Flavin. Artist Jac Lahav and curator Michele Jaslow sat down to discuss the exhibition for Art Spiel.  

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Samuelle Green: A Human Vocabulary with Steel

In Dialogue
Samuelle Green. By Day: By Night. 2025. (variable size) Installation View — Honesdale, PA. steel, reflective material. photo credit: Samuelle Green Studio

In Samuelle Green’s previous installations such as The Paper Caves and Polypore, viewers encountered forms that were wildly organic in appearance. They were comprised of somewhat amorphous essentialized forms in nature that exist on the micro and macro levels, executed on an immersive human scale, enabling viewers to make a variety of associations with the natural world — pollen grains, clouds, or coral reefs. The new work, By Day: By Night, 2025, is much more specific in its references and seeks to speak a different visual language almost entirely.

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Frances Smokowski at Cavin-Morris Gallery

In Dialogue
Installation view, Cavin-Morris Gallery, photo courtesy the artist

In 2017, during post-concussion recovery and before considering any public audience, Frances Smokowski began drawing as part of her wellness routines. She knew even then that the work could one day be useful and inspiring to others, and she never felt it existed only for her. Pandemic-era synchronicities later led to gallery representation, confirming that this is the moment for her bio-glyphics and energy-scapes to come forward.

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Caroline Burton: The Back of the Moon

In Conversation
The Back of the Moon, Caroline Burton, view 2, on view at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts in the Christine DeVitt Exhibition Hall in Lubbock, TX, photo courtesy of Taylor Ernst

What does it take to move an exhibition from one institution to another, and how does it change along the way? Caroline Burton’s The Back of the Moon began at The Clara M. Eagle Gallery at Murray State University, where curator T. Michael Martin first organized the presentation. Recognizing both the impact of Burton’s large-scale works and the practicality of transporting them rolled in tubes, Martin developed opportunities for the exhibition to travel. This led to a partnership with the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts (LHUCA) in Lubbock, Texas, where curator Taylor Ernst re-envisioned the show for the Christine DeVitt Exhibition Hall. With each venue offering its own curatorial approach and installation design, The Back of the Moon continues to evolve as it moves between sites. In the following conversation, curators T. Michael Martin and Taylor Ernst discuss the process of shaping this traveling exhibition.

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Magnum O-Pspsps at Cornell

In Dialogue
Curator Michael Morgan with George Boorujy’s Dredger (2017) in the Foundry, home to Cornell’s MFA studios. Photo courtesy of Michael Morgan

Curating an exhibition at Cornell doesn’t require waiting until after graduation or climbing a long academic ladder. The Art Department makes the process unusually accessible—for undergraduates, graduates, and faculty alike. Within the department, there are two dedicated galleries, and under the larger umbrella of the AAP College, a third gallery also accepts exhibition proposals. Each semester, a committee comes together to review applications for the following term. It was within this framework that two graduate students took on the challenge of organizing a large group exhibition. Michael Morgan, who co-curated the exhibition with Elina Ansary, tells us about the process behind the show.

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Taylor Bielecki: The Essence of a Moment

In Dialogue
Essence of a Moment, Installation view

The Essence of a Moment, a group exhibition presenting a collection of artists’ contemplations on the makings of a moment. A moment is by its nature fleeting, and it’s by our nature as people that we seek to extend or preserve them; despite their intangibility. This group show engages with the questions – How can one define something as nebulous as a moment? Is it done retrospectively after it has passed? Is it a confluence of occurrences? Or perhaps it exists with the body’s perception of the present moment? These works offer a variety of insights and perspectives into understanding a moment.

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Hovey Brock: The Invasive Species with Cornell’s Eco Arts

In DIALOGUE
A person standing in front of a group of people

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Reception for Invasive Species in Cornell University’s Mann Library gallery

Hovey Brock’s show, The Invasive Species, in collaboration with Cornell’s Eco Arts features a series of paintings that focuses on how the climate crisis in general and invasive species in particular threaten the forests of the Northeast—an outgrowth of his Crazy River project that focused on the climate crisis in the Catskills. The paintings have phrases or questions that have been obsessing Brock for some time.

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