Art Spiel Picks: All Around NYC Exhibitions in March 2025

HIGHLIGHTS
Nick Cave at Jack Shainman photo courtesy of Yasmeen Abdallah

Spatial dynamics and human hybridity are central to this month’s roundup of highlights in New York. From monumental sculpture to works intimately interspersed within the home, all things great and small commune and offer reflection upon their relationships to the environments in which they currently reside. The hierarchy between the natural and the manmade is in conversation within this selection of shows through shifting currents of tenuous and harmonious moments.

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Rope and Revolver at Catharine Clark Gallery

Installation shot of WOUNDED, Courtesy of Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco

In 2023, I saw Ansel Adams in Our Time at San Francisco’s de Young Museum. Along with Adams’ famous gelatin silver photographs of national parks and the Southwest, the show had work by contemporary photographers such as Binh Dahn and Meghann Riepenhoff, and it aimed to present a narrative of the West that didn’t depict it as a vast, empty land ready for settlement. I was thinking about this show and how art and the way institutions present it isn’t neutral when I saw Rope and Revolver: Artists Respond to Frederic Remington’s ‘The Broncho Buster’, the engaging exhibition at San Francisco’s Catharine Clark Gallery.

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Material Wonder: Jewish Joy and Mysticism at Drawing Rooms

A display of art on a white surface

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Anne Trabuen (left wall), Denise Treizman (right wall), Carol Salmanson (front)

At Drawing Rooms in Jersey City, Material Wonder: Jewish Joy and Mysticism in 2025 presents works that engage with Jewish identity, mysticism, and inherited traditions. Curated by Anne Trauben, the exhibition, on view from February 13 to April 5, 2025, features artists Carol Salmanson, Denise Treizman, Rachel Klinghoffer, Pesya Altman, and Trauben herself. Their works—encompassing drawing, painting, fiber, mixed media, and light-based sculpture—explore memory, ritual, and transformation.

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Ming Wang’s solo show Through Lingering Window at Fou Gallery

Ming Wang: Through Lingering Windows installation view. Photograph by Ken Lee ©Ming Wang, courtesy of Fou Gallery

Ming Wang’s solo exhibition, Through Lingering Window, curated by Ashley Ouderkirk at Fou Gallery, creates a meditative and healing enclave amidst the bustling streets of Union Square in New York. Located on the seventh floor of a Fifth Avenue building, the gallery becomes an intimate retreat where Wang’s oil paintings evoke a sense of stillness within the restless cityscape.

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Diane Burko: Bearing Witness at Cristin Tierney

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Installation View 4 Diane Burko Bearing Witness Cristin Tierney Gallery 2025 Adam Reich
Installation view

Diane Burko’s Bearing Witness at Cristin Tierney Gallery combines mixed-media paintings shaped by her experiences in extreme environments—glaciers, coral reefs, deserts, and rainforests. She has engaged with the shifting landscape for fifty years, responding to the accelerating changes that threaten these places. This marks a significant moment in her career—her first solo exhibition in New York in over forty years and her debut at Cristin Tierney Gallery.

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Robert Yarber- Regard and Abandon at Nicodim Gallery

Robert Yarber, Error’s Conquest, 1986, acrylic on canvas, 71 by 130 inches. Photo courtesy of Nicodim Gallery

Neon nights are brought to life within Robert Yarber’s paintings. The large-scale paintings in Nicodim Gallery’s survey of his works bring viewers along for a wild ride. Whether it’s pulling us into a dark hotel room, lit solely by the blue light of a droning, static television set, or throwing us outside, into the life of the party, and possibly, over the balcony and into the air- we are left in suspense of what comes next. It’s as if we were sitting in a dark movie theater, watching someone’s life story unfold.

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Jenny Hankwitz and Amanda Church at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects

Installation of “Intersection” at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects. Image courtesy of the gallery.

The current exhibition by Jenny Hankwitz and Amanda Church at Steven Harvey, running from February 8 to March 8, explores a subject central to painting since its inception. Independently, their work engages with abstraction and figuration, using color, surface, and shape as primary vehicles. When viewed in person, the exhibition demonstrates how each artist approaches their medium to address their own interest between abstraction and the figure. However, when this exhibition is viewed together in the digital realm, another issue emerges—one that was pivotal in art criticism during the 1980s and 1990s that deals with an issue that pre-occupied Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco: the topic of simulation and simulacra or simulacra and hyperreality.

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Art Spiel Picks: Boston Exhibitions in February 2025

Highlights
Constituent Parts at Boston University Art Galleries, Boston, MA

February is the depth of winter in Boston, but there are still many ways to stay warm, including seeing some great art that thaws the senses and pleases the soul. Several exhibitions are in full swing at various galleries, museums, and university galleries across the city. These highlights focus on a few of the university gallery shows and a gorgeous new exhibition at the MFA in Boston featuring the late John Wilson, a Boston native whose work celebrates fatherhood and the rich tapestry of Black life in Boston and beyond.

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Pat Lay at New Jersey City University

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A yellow and orange art piece on a white wall

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Installation view of Pat Lay’s exhibition at the Lemmerman Gallery, NJCU

At first sight, Pat Lay’s vertical scrolls sit comfortably within the soaring Gothic-style Lemmerman Gallery at New Jersey City University. Their mosaic or tapestry-like forms, in glowing red, blue, and gold, echo the tall grided window panes and the elaborate ceiling. Yet once it becomes clear that these scrolls are entirely digital, the contrast generates a sense of fertile dualities.

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Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in February 2025

HIGHLIGHTS
Carl Cheng, Alternative TV #3, 1974-2016. Plastic chassis, acrylic water tank, air pump, LED lighting and controller, electrical cord, aquarium hardware, conglomerated rocks, and plastic plants. Courtesy of the artist and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles

I often think about the first scientist who looked into a microscope and saw the dividing of cells, the jiggle of bacteria, and the movement of microorganisms. They must have marveled at the invisible worlds that were revealed. Similar to uncovering fossils of long-extinct species, we are humbled when we discover that we are only a tiny part of a much larger story. These monumental confrontations move us emotionally as much as they do intellectually, evoking within us a sense of awe and wonder. Close Encounters at Box Spring Gallery and Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses at the Institute of Contemporary Art both ask us to consider our position within the cosmos, drawing attention to the fragility of our existence and the complicated ecosystems in which we live. Turning inward, allow yourself to be nourished by Ann Wehrwein’s Tender Ground at Pentimenti, where she renders quiet moments of everyday life with layers of color and care.

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