The gallery is a parking lot. The walls are car hoods, trunks, dashboards, and glove compartments. That is the premise of Stay Frosty, the itinerant art project launched by New York’s BravinLee programs that arrives in Kingston this June as part of Upstate Art Weekend, in collaboration with ArtPort Kingston. After a debut edition in Harlem that transformed a parking lot into a temporary neighborhood, Stay Frosty is now on home ground — a community where the car is less symbol than necessity, and where ArtPort Kingston has spent years weaving contemporary art into everyday public life. We spoke with BravinLee’s Karin Bravin and John Lee, and ArtPort Kingston’s Laurie De Chiara, about what brought them together, what they’re building, and why some of the most exciting art right now might be happening in a parking lot.
Continue reading “No Walls Required: Stay Frosty Comes to Kingston”Seeing and Recognition: The Paintings of Lee Sherry
Lee Sherry (1947–2012) showed paintings in New York and Boston through the 1970s and 1980s, moved in the circles of the Language poets, and left behind a body of work that almost no one knew existed. Seeing and Recognition, on view at Field of Play Gallery in Brooklyn through June 28th, is the first survey of her paintings — assembled by curator and artist David McDonough, artist Susan Bee, who was a close friend of Sherry’s in the 1970s, and artist and archivist Zak Vreeland, who acquired works directly from her studio after her death. The show brings together paintings that span decades, from early experiments made in dialogue with minimalism to luminous, layered late work that unfolds the longer you look. We spoke with David McDonough, Susan Bee, and Zak Vreeland about how the show came together, what the paintings do, and why Sherry’s work went unseen for so long.
Continue reading “Seeing and Recognition: The Paintings of Lee Sherry”A Studio That Became a Gallery: 81 Leonard
What began as Nancy Pantirer’s studio in 1996 has grown, over nearly three decades, into a gallery with a clear sense of purpose. Rooted in years of open studios and informal salon gatherings, 81 Leonard formalized its public presence in 2019, building a platform shaped by artists, for artists. Co-run with Hannah Rothbard, the gallery supports emerging and mid-career artists at pivotal moments in their careers, with a program that prizes beauty, technical competence, and community. Group shows grow organically from the artists themselves. We spoke with Nancy Pantirer and Hannah Rothbard about how 81 Leonard came to be, what drives its program, and what it means to run a gallery with no plans to be anywhere else.
Continue reading “A Studio That Became a Gallery: 81 Leonard”Maria Gil Lucientes: Letting the Materials Misbehave
Maria Gil Lucientes paints in the slim margin where a system starts to come undone. She begins with a constraint, a single color, a periodic screen, a piece of medical gauze, then lets the materials misbehave. In Pareidolia, gauze shifted by air becomes the suggestion of a face. A Spanish-born painter who studied mathematics, physics, and computer science before a decade in tech, Lucientes brings a system-builder’s discipline to a practice that hinges on chance. Here, she reflects on the path from science to painting, the dialogue between control and surprise in her process, and the new Moiré series taking shape in her studio.
Continue reading “Maria Gil Lucientes: Letting the Materials Misbehave”Run by Artists, Built for Artists: OyG and the Cornell MFA
What does a gallery look like when the artists are in charge? Founded in 2013, Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG) is an artist-run collective with no fixed curatorial line and a non-hierarchical structure shared equally among its eight co-directors. Since 2023, it has become the annual New York home for Cornell University’s MFA thesis exhibition — a partnership built on a simple premise: artist-run spaces value experimentation, innovation, and risk-taking, giving graduate artists the freedom to present work without commercial constraints or curatorial imperatives.
Continue reading “Run by Artists, Built for Artists: OyG and the Cornell MFA”Carol Bouyoucos: Eden After Us
Trained as a photographer, Carol Bouyoucos has spent the last several years pushing past the camera’s claims to truth—folding her own images into AI systems, digital layering, and the slow accidents of computational misreading. The landscapes that emerge read as propositions about what nature might become once human authorship loosens its grip.Her recent work, increasingly ambitious in scale and mythic in register, marks a notable departure from the botanical and landscape series that established her vocabulary. In this conversation, she speaks about the terrain that shaped her eye, the painters and visionaries whose company she keeps, and the strange logic of making images in a moment when both ecosystems and pictures behave less and less predictably. What follows is a portrait of an artist thinking out loud about control, instability, and the worlds that emerge when she relinquishes both.
Continue reading “Carol Bouyoucos: Eden After Us”Daniel Wiener at Satchel Projects: Out in front of the back of beyond
Out in Front of the Back of Beyond, the title of Daniel Wiener’s current solo exhibition at Satchel Projects, is a perfect pitch for the work on view. The notion of “front and back” strikes a strong chord throughout — explicit in the freestanding sculptures, hinted at in the wall pieces.
Continue reading “Daniel Wiener at Satchel Projects: Out in front of the back of beyond”Still Abstract at 90: American Abstract Artists
American Abstract Artists turns 90 this year, an unusual achievement for an artist-run group. Its anniversary show, Abstract by Definition: An Index, opened in April at Art Cake in Brooklyn, curated by Saul Ostrow, who brought 88 current members together under a single roof: a curatorial puzzle, an organizational feat, and a long-running argument about what abstraction can be. A companion exhibition at D. Wigmore Fine Art on West 57th Street focuses on the group’s founders and work made between 1936 and 1950 and runs through July. Here, painter Jacob Cartwright, who serves as AAA’s Secretary, reflects on the group’s nomination-only structure, how a show this size actually comes together, and where he wants AAA to go next.
Continue reading “Still Abstract at 90: American Abstract Artists “Jaynie Crimmins: Busywork at Garage Art Center
Jaynie Crimmins’s Busywork turns junk mail, catalogs, and security envelopes into exquisite objects: cones, ovals, and circles arranged across the walls, the larger pieces standing alone and the smaller ones mounted on panels. The show fills Garage Art Center, a converted garage in a Bayside house, now a clean, narrow gallery. The work asks for close looking, and the room is built for it.
Continue reading “Jaynie Crimmins: Busywork at Garage Art Center”Carter Burden Gallery: Why Material Matters
Few New York galleries build their programs around the kind of organizing principle that anchors Carter Burden Gallery. Since 2008, the Chelsea space has focused on artists with long careers that haven’t followed conventional commercial arcs. Here, Associate Executive Director Marlena Vaccaro and Assistant Director Sarah Leon discuss the gallery’s mission, the values guiding their curatorial choices, the thinking behind the current exhibition, Material Matters, and what that focus has opened up.
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