Stepping into Rachel MacFarlane’s exhibition, Afterlight, you enter an atmosphere of radiant, sweltering landscapes and venture towards an unknown future. The unpredictable future of a natural world that is vibrant, strong, and resilient, continuing to grow despite the climate changes and ecological effects that have threatened it. MacFarlane expertly situates the viewer amid a vibrantly colored atmosphere, positioning them as an active participant in the environments the paintings create.
Continue reading “Rachel MacFarlane’s Mystical Spaces: Afterlight at Hollis Taggart Downtown”A Lure, A Lament at Gallery 456
A clamor of murmurs without end. Several ghostly strands twisted strangely yet remained formless, wispy, and clinging, yet never settling into anything definite. Moving, then halting; halting, then moving again. Soft as if boneless, without body heat, yet inducing a tremor from within: a sudden burn, gooseflesh blooming in patches, sticky, viscous—caught and entangled by a reckless surge of ghostly energy. One slips from the ordinary into a hollow. A Lure, A Lament offers, at first encounter, precisely such a sensation. And yet its murmuring voice continues to drift, recounting wave after wave of fragrant air.
Continue reading “A Lure, A Lament at Gallery 456”Tirtzah Bassel: I Put A Spell at A.I.R Gallery
In Tirtzah Bassel’s vibrant and challenging exhibition, I Put A Spell, the viewer is immediately confronted with the question: Can the power of witchcraft—rooted in both ancient wisdom and intuition—serve as a potent metaphor for reclaiming women’s agency in art and beyond?
Continue reading “Tirtzah Bassel: I Put A Spell at A.I.R Gallery”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.
Continue reading “Like Cotyledons Buckled with Loam: Conversations and Inspirations”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.”
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.
Continue reading “Making Room: Refusal and Collective Practice at The Living Space”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.
Continue reading “Bonny Leibowitz: Adventures in Plunderland”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.
Continue reading “Bonesetter: Dislocations, Connections and Synergies”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.
Continue reading “Rachel Rampleman’s “Life Is Drag”: An Epic Queer Archive at SoMad”Tom LaDuke’s Dream Sets for a Lost Message

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.
Continue reading “Tom LaDuke’s Dream Sets for a Lost Message”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