Exhibition Review – Page 2

January 20, 2026January 27, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Like Cotyledons Buckled with Loam: Conversations and Inspirations

Walking into the group exhibition, Like Cotyledons Buckled with Loam at Art Cake, curated by David Dixon, you are first greeted with a piece by Thomas Nozkowski. This piece is one of three included in the exhibition, each serving as a foundational anchor point in the show. Within the paintings, Nozkowski abstracts forms or fractions of events, allowing viewers to experience the essence and bring their own associations to the works.

January 19, 2026January 19, 2026, by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Rifka Milder Paints Downtown Without the Downtown Act

New York City loves a label the way it loves a line outside a new restaurant: there is the promise of significance and the reassurance that someone else has already decided what matters. The label flatters, then quietly ends the conversation. The oil painter Rifka Milder’s work refuses that bargain. Call her a “downtown painter,” and you’re not wrong, but her new solo show at Helm Contemporary, GREAT JONES, is what happens when someone who actually grew up downtown, in a household run on paint and argument, makes abstraction that declines to become neighborhood branding. Art in America once called her “an oil painter’s painter.”

January 5, 2026January 4, 2026, by john ros

Making Room: Refusal and Collective Practice at The Living Space

On the second floor of a prewar building on a non-assuming block of Flushing, Queens, one might stumble upon a vibrant community of young artists making work and creating community. There is no signage announcing arrival, no threshold that signals entry into the capital “A” capital “W” Art World. Instead, there is a buzzer, a staircase, and a living room temporarily transformed. This is where Reflections of Home, the inaugural exhibition at The Living Space Gallery, takes place — as an encounter and as a statement of refusal.

December 29, 2025December 29, 2025, by Emma Ahmad

Bonny Leibowitz: Adventures in Plunderland

In 2023, multidisciplinary artist Bonny Leibowitz’s world shifted when she stumbled upon an active demolition site in a shopping center in Richardson, Texas. She described the landscape as “both horrific and beautiful” – a scene of destruction and chaos situated right in the middle of the inner city Dallas suburb. Braving the sweltering Texas heat, Leibowitz made multiple trips to the site, photographing it extensively and collecting pieces of debris from the wreckage that would later comprise her series Adventures in Plunderland.

December 23, 2025December 23, 2025, by Taylor Bielecki

Bonesetter: Dislocations, Connections and Synergies

Walking into the space at 86 Bowery, you are greeted by a calm, welcoming exhibition, the walls warmly lit and filled with a wide array of drawings, paintings, and sculptures, featuring works by 24 artists. The exhibition title is Bonesetter, based on the idea of a bonesetter, an individual in many cultures who resets broken bones and dislocations.

December 21, 2025December 21, 2025, by Jac Lahav

Rachel Rampleman’s “Life Is Drag”: An Epic Queer Archive at SoMad

Rachel Rampleman has been documenting drag performers for 6 years. With over a thousand hours of footage of interviews and performances, she has compiled the largest archive of American drag in the world. At SoMad, a queer and femme-led contemporary art space in Manhattan, Rampleman unveils their latest iteration of Life Is Drag. In a dark room, glowing monitors with monumental portraits of drag artists shimmer, shout, and whisper. Ultra high definition acts of defiance and glamour brighten the walls in this installation, running through December 18, 2025.

December 15, 2025December 9, 2025, by Stephen Wozniak

Tom LaDuke’s Dream Sets for a Lost Message

*Tom LaDuke, Chain, 2015, Acrylic and canvas over panel, 87” x 153”*

Across trippy, iridescent seas, massive, eerie interiors, and uncanny, translucent forms, Tom LaDuke composes intimate “letters” to the cultural ghosts that shaped him—poetic reflections on perception, memory, and the subtle currents of emotional drift.

Love letters straight from your heart
Keep us so near while apart
I'm not alone in the night
When I can have all the love you write

–  Love Letters by Heyman and Young

December 10, 2025December 13, 2025, by Taylor Bielecki

Spectral Evidence: A deeper introspection on Color, Light, and Energy

Installation view, photo courtesy of the Shirley Project Space

Walking into this show on a cold, blustery night, you are greeted by large windows illuminated out by gallery light. Inside, you are met with a collection of color, light, and energy. Each piece in the exhibition Spectral Evidence uses mainly acrylic to illuminate new spaces by dissolving edges, blending colors, and allowing gradients to calmly and smoothly envelope the space within the works. While each artist in the show has their own take on creating their own spaces, they use many conventions of painting and abstraction to create new forms and environments to experience, and each piece seems to flow well into the next. The gallery layout lends itself to a meandering space.

December 3, 2025December 6, 2025, by Peter Schroth

Tom McGlynn: This Here at Rick Wester Fine Art

Tom McGlynn, *This Here*, installation view, Rick Wester Fine Art, New York

Tom McGlynn continues to grow a decade-long train of thought with a new selection of paintings in This Here at Rick Wester Fine Art. Consistent with his oeuvre, he arrays a selection of color rectangles suspended within various fields of color. An acquaintanceship with the origin of this direction, accompanied by a fresh pair of eyes, will enable a viewer to put aside the parallels with Mondrian, Albers, or even Hans Hoffmann, and see these works anew.

December 2, 2025December 1, 2025, by Jac Lahav

Maureen McCabe: Feminine Surrealism, Witch Culture and the Original Goth

Tod Gangler (b. 1953), Professor Maureen McCabe, 1975, Hand-altered photograph, 5″ × 4⅜”

I’ve never been to a séance; however, walking into Maureen McCabe’s exhibition Fate and Magic at the William Benton Museum of Art invokes strong séance vibes. Artworks on black slate whisper, engravings of shooting stars, goddesses, brew potions, and long-forgotten stage magicians appear at the Benton like reliquaries of the past. For over six decades, Maureen McCabe has been an overlooked alchemist of memory, transmuting her personal experiences and arcane cultural references into this intimate magical retrospective.