Contemporary Art and Culture
As Cultural Affairs Director at Two Trees and the Walentas Family Foundation in DUMBO, Ariel Willmott plays a central role in the neighborhood’s cultural life — overseeing initiatives including DUMBO Open Studios, Smack Mellon, the Sharpe Residency, and Two Trees’ studio subsidy program. Ahead of DUMBO Open Studios weekend, we spoke with her.
Continue reading “Ariel Willmott on Building Community Through Art in DUMBO”
Tobias Pils’s paintings do not give themselves up quickly. It took me two long visits to begin to grasp his extensive solo exhibition at Mumok, curated by Manuela Ammer across two floors and ten years of work. The show traces a practice rooted in personal experience and daily life, charting a shift from floor to easel painting and revealing how drawing and painting remain in constant dialogue throughout. The layout rewards sustained attention and makes the changes over time visible. I viewed the exhibition in reverse, starting with the floor of Pils’s most recent works.
Continue reading “Tobias Pils: Shh at Mumok Vienna”
Spirit in the Flesh is on view at UTOPIA in Kingston, the gallery, bookstore, and studio space founded in 2025 by Lucia Cote. Curated by Saul Chernick, the exhibition brings together sculpture, painting, and works on paper by Courtney Puckett, Ben Pederson, and Chernick. The show treats art as a way of being, shaped by imagery rooted in intuition and dreams and carried into physical form through sustained attention to process. In a climate of constant noise and unrest, the works lean toward beauty, curiosity, and play. Curator and artist Saul Chernick tells us more about the exhibition and the venue.
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At Silver Art Projects, In the End, Everything Gives brings together more than thirty artists from the Women Sculptors Group (WSG), a New York–based network of women-identifying and non-binary sculptors that now includes over 350 members. Installed within the residency spaces at 4 World Trade Center, the exhibition carries the energy of a working community—artists connected through an ongoing commitment to sculpture and material inquiry.
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Alice Pixley Young’s Still Life takes shape in semi-darkness at A.I.R. Gallery as an immersive meditation on ecological time, stratified and shadowed by industrial residue. Installed as a multisensory environment of video projection, sound, industrial scaffolding, and glass bell jars, the installation places viewers in a space where remediation and damage coexist. Suspended from tall black scaffolding, the glass containers move like dimly illuminated pendulums, casting shadows across the walls and establishing the installation’s temporal pulse from the outset.
The work’s rootedness in place is central. Young’s studio is located on an Ordovician fossil bed near a nuclear Superfund site in the Rust Belt. Her exhibition in Brooklyn hints at another Superfund site, the Gowanus Canal, linking two contaminated landscapes across geography. The central video shows horizontal strata in constant motion. Below the upper dusky blue sky, you can travel slowly through narrow moving bands — grasses and wildflowers filmed at the Fernald site in southwest Ohio — creating a lateral sense of passing through a remediated landscape. Alongside it, a thinner strip shows water seen from a bridge, evoking an industrial waterway shaped by contamination and cleanup. The cross sections are clean-cut and suggestive, tinged with a bluish monochrome.
Birds enter through sound and sight. The birds’ calls, recorded by the artist, continuously shift and reorganize, gradually overtaken by industrial noise. They suggest a tough migration. The suspended glass bell jars are engraved with imagery of Eastern Meadowlarks (one of the bird speciesin population decline). The glass pieces swing slowly like pendulums of grandfather clocks, casting moving bird shadows across the projection, encapsulating past, present, and future. These dome-shaped transparent jars are recognizable as decorative containers used to showcase collected specimens, typically placed on a safe shelf. In Young’s installation, they lose their ground, engraved on, and swing side to side hypnotically. Here, these fragile containers of life also signal warnings, becoming what she calls “active image-makers.” I can imagine those glass jars holding the souls of vanished birds. The birds’ blurred wings flicker as their cries reverberate through the space, at times piercing, at times distant.
The birds’ imagery appears in motion, blurred and only partially formed, more hinted at than fully seen. The birds seem to move as if traveling between sites, from Young’s Rust Belt landscape toward Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, some vanishing along the way. The black scaffolding structure stands before the screen, geometric, imposing, and bare. It interrupts the projected space, holding the blurred flight behind it in tension with containment. Objects, shadows, and projected imagery fold into one another. The present physical space bleeds into its layered past, reaching toward an unknown future. The disappearing birds, the scientific monitoring of contaminated landscapes, and the broader theme of environmental time link seamlessly. Or as the artist says, the projection reads like a “cross-section connecting atmosphere, land and contaminated infrastructure.”
As projected forms lengthen and shift, they spill beyond the screen and into the room, animating the gallery with a haunting beauty that is eerie, grim, but not yet fatalistic. Still Life does not settle into elegy. It resists the stillness implied by its title. It operates as a poetic wake-up call.
Alice Pixley Young: Still Life at AIR, 155 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201.On view throughMarch 15, 2026. Wed–Sun, 12–6 pm
About the Writer: Etty Yaniv is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, curator, and founder of Art Spiel. She works in installation, painting, and mixed media, and has shown her art in exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Since 2018, she has published interviews and reviews through Art Spiel, often focusing on underrecognized voices and smaller venues. @etty.yaniv
Adria Arch and Keith Wiley had never met before working on Still / Moving, their exhibition at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art. Living on opposite coasts—Arch in Boston and Wiley in Atascadero—they developed the project from afar, connecting through shared images, ideas, and a common interest in movement and form. In the exhibition, Arch’s bright paintings and hanging shapes reach outward with color and rhythm. Her flowing, curving forms feel energetic and playful, as if they are moving through the air. Wiley’s portal-like sculptures draw viewers closer. Built from small marks and quiet details, they invite pause and careful looking, with openings that pull you inward. Emma Saperstein, the exhibition curator, discusses her curatorial vision and reflects on the museum as a venue for this project.
Natalie Moore grew up in San Diego, California, and spent many summers in Norway with her mother’s family. Although she has lived in New York for much longer, the dramatic Californian and Norwegian landscapes remain a lasting influence. Climate and ecology have also become more present in her work over the last decade, as the climate crisis worsens and governments and corporations continue to minimize the effects of carbon emissions, pollution, water use, and chemical waste.
Continue reading “Natalie Moore: Capturing Mirage”
Emily Berger met the late painter and artist, Anne Russinof, twenty years ago at The Painting Center in New York. Russinof’s intelligence and presence were immediate. A friendship formed around their work—studio visits, openings, exhibitions, and eventually, showing together. Both were committed to abstract painting and supported each other’s practice. Berger curated this exhibition of Russinof’s elegant, rigorous paintings at Equity Gallery to bring them wider recognition. What Russinof left behind is a powerful body of work. “I believe she would be pleased with the exhibition, the beautiful catalog designed by Patricia Fabricant, and the thoughtful, poetic writing from Paul D’Agostino and friends,” Berger says.
Continue reading “Anne Russinof – Gestural Symphony at Equity Gallery”
In her mid-twenties, Meghan Roghanchi began collecting art with her husband, engaging directly with artists and developing an interest in the relationship between artistic production and collecting. After raising three children to school age, she returned to a professional focus shaped by her long-standing engagement with art, education, and collecting. Drawing on these experiences, Roghanchi founded RAM Gallery, positioning it at the intersection of creative practice and collecting, with an emphasis on direct exchange between artists and audiences and an accessible, welcoming gallery environment.
