Artist Interview – Art Spiel

September 10, 2026September 9, 2026, by Cynthia Chen

This is Me Looking: In Dialogue with Wen-You Cai on Collaborating with Her Six-Year-Old Self

In 1996, a six-year-old child was given a camera and sent out to capture the world through her eyes. She aimed the lens at her father’s back against the Twin Towers, at her own blurred hand, at a sculpture in a museum, at Buddhist drawings on the wall. She had recently arrived in the United States, and the world in front of her was made of curiosity, novelty, and strangeness.

June 23, 2026July 15, 2026, by Art Spiel

What Remains: in dialogue with Arghavan Khosravi

Altarpieces—historically sites of devotion, revelation, and spiritual certainty—become something altogether different in Arghavan Khosravi’s What Remains, currently on view at Uffner & Liu through July 2. The exhibition brings together large-scale wall works, a freestanding sculpture, and an intimate suite of new altar-inspired paintings that continue Khosravi’s ongoing exploration of the forces that shape women’s lives under political, cultural, and religious systems of control. Drawing equally from Persian miniature painting and medieval European iconography, the artist constructs layered worlds where architectural structures become psychological spaces, symbols migrate across histories, and moments of resistance emerge within conditions of constraint. Rather than offering resolution, the works linger in states of suspension—between freedom and captivity, memory and displacement, devotion and doubt.

June 12, 2026July 15, 2026, by Art Spiel

Your Birth is My Birth at Jane Lombard: Merryn Omotayo Alaka and Sam Frésquez in Dialogue

Kanekalon hair, the synthetic fiber of braiding salons and everyday hair care, is the raw material of Your Birth is My Birth, a speculative universe currently taking over Jane Lombard Gallery through June 13th. Artists Merryn Omotayo Alaka and Sam Frésquez have spent nearly a decade building Hairland, a collaborative fictional ecosystem that began with large-scale tassel sculptures in a Phoenix nonprofit space and has grown into a fully realized botanical mythology.

October 9, 2025October 9, 2025, by Will Kaplan

Reinventing the Grid: A Conversation with James Gold

The paintings in James Gold’s solo show, Infinite Scroll, act as intermediaries between past, present and future. These glimmering grids at Morgan Lehman gallery toggle between his deep reverence for history and his active aesthetic imagination. Talking with the painter about his wider practices in collaged artist books and archeological renderings revealed new means of perception and applications of art-making.

January 27, 2025January 10, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

Jennifer Trask: What is perfect?

X-ray of a hand with a skull

Description automatically generated — Untitled, 2023, Digital image etched into glass, paint. 20 x 20.

Jennifer Trask’s materials—whether bone, wood, metal, or antique fragments—function as collaborators in her sculpting process. Their physical properties and embedded histories guide her decisions, shaping how she responds to their density, grain, and structural limits.

December 2, 2024December 7, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

Louise P. Sloane: Optically charged text-ures

From an early age, Louise P. Sloane has been compelled by an intense fascination with how color and texture influence mood. “I was one of those art nerd kids who went nuts each time there was a new color crayon from Crayola!” she recalls, describing a childhood shaped by a relentless curiosity about different mediums and textures. Making art quickly became the dominant force in her life, guiding her on a creative journey that has spanned over fifty years.

October 25, 2024November 2, 2024, by Anna Shukeylo

Bill Scott: Two Decades at Hollis Taggart

Installation view at Hollis Taggart Gallery

Bill Scott’s solo show Two Decades at Hollis Taggart Gallery’ celebrates this painter’s long career of collaboration with this renowned New York City gallery. Bill, a fairly reserved individual, often clad in neutral colors at gallery openings, produces profoundly beautiful works bursting with color. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Bill, a friend and mentor for more than 15 years, dating back to my days as an undergraduate at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

October 7, 2024December 7, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

Dorothy Robinson: Paint Through Space and Time

End of Story, 2022, oil on panel, 48×60 inches, photo courtesy of Bill Massey

Dorothy Robinson’s family moved often during her childhood, starting in rural Iowa, where they farmed for generations and eventually settled in California. After high school, she bounced between colleges before landing at UC Berkeley. Studying art never crossed her mind, but she was drawn to geography, “probably because of its strong visual component—map making, field trips, slide shows,” Robinson says. During an internship, she learned darkroom skills and later worked in commercial photo labs, shaping her sense of color while making color prints. An invitation from an artist friend to join a drawing group was transformative, and started Robinson on the path to a life of making art.

June 24, 2024June 14, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

Bat Ami Rivlin: Functional Narratives

A person standing in a grass field with a dog and a large object

Description automatically generated — *Untitled (12 tubs)*, 2023, Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, NY.

Bat Ami Rivlin, who has lived in New York City for over a decade, finds her artistic practice profoundly shaped by the city’s relentless cycle of object turnover. The daily expulsion of waste from restaurants, buildings, and homes onto the streets, followed by the inevitable clear-out, is a stark reflection of urban existence. This phenomenon sparks contemplation on how these transient objects organize our spatial interactions, both during their use and after their disposal.

June 17, 2024June 17, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

Eileen Neff: The Bigger World in Categories

14. Self Shelf — *Self Shelf*, UV pigment on dibond, 30 x 38 inches

Eileen Neff, a multidisciplinary artist with a background in literature and painting, has been creating “photo-based images and installations” since 1981. She recounts her understanding of poetry long before grasping painting. Her academic path led her from being an English major at Temple University, where she immersed herself in painting studios, to the Philadelphia College of Art (the recently closed University of the Arts). While teaching at a private secondary school, a tuition-free photography class captured her unexpectedly. “I began photographing pieces of my paintings and, before long, had convinced a couple of students to build a black and white darkroom in my apartment,” she recalls. This transition directed her focus to natural elements and interiors, subjects she still rigorously explores. Though she no longer paints, Neff states, “I still think more like a painter than a photographer; my photographs are still very driven by how a poem means.” Neff currently exhibits her work in In Some Light Reading, a group show at the Mitchell Art Museum featuring work by five artists and poetic texts by four writers addressing the life-making qualities of light. The show runs through July 7th.