Jaynie Crimmins: Busywork at Garage Art Center

Jaynie Crimmins’s Busywork turns junk mail, catalogs, and security envelopes into exquisite objects: cones, ovals, and circles arranged across the walls, the larger pieces standing alone and the smaller ones mounted on panels. The show fills Garage Art Center, a converted garage in a Bayside house, now a clean, narrow gallery. The work asks for close looking, and the room is built for it.

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At Some Point, Every Household Object Stops Being Innocent

No one ever thinks the plate is going to become a problem.

A plate survives three apartments and one bad Thanksgiving. A suitcase gets hauled across borders or shoved beneath beds; sometimes it is packed in hope, sometimes because someone has no choice. An iron presses school clothes and funeral clothes, then outlives its usefulness and sits in a closet somewhere, still holding the pressure of human hands.

That is the animating idea behind extraORDINARY things, the quietly arresting exhibition at the Flinn Gallery in Greenwich Library.

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On the Edge of Meaning: Lucy Sante’s Collages

Interspersed throughout the stately library of the Academy of Arts and Letters in Washington Heights, in and around shelves holding works by Academy members like John Cheever, Pearl S. Buck, and Grace Paley, a new exhibition of collages by the cultural critic, essayist, and Dylanologist Lucy Sante is on display. Knots, organized by curator Kristin Poor, features mostly recent works from the last few years, save one, Haussmann, or the Barricades, which dates to 1979.

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Carol Diamond in her studio: Go Ahead, Make Me

During a studio visit with Carol Diamond before her upcoming exhibit, Carol Diamond: Go Ahead, Make Me (Equity Gallery), our discussion of her recent sculptures elicits the term “Janus heads”–not because she makes two-headed portraits, but because each dynamic work encapsulates a battle of competing forces that hint at varying degrees of figuration and diverse human backstories. 

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Xinyu Liu’s Fool’s Hour at Art Cake: Finding a home to Carry Onward

Upon entering the exhibition, you are greeted by pieces of various sizes and mediums, full of intricacies and exploration. With the pieces being smaller in size, besides the Ferris wheel, you have to get close to see the small details or the depth of space that opens into a world of its own within each piece. Within the works, Liu offers locations such as cities, darkened spaces, carnivals, and other places of transition. Places that one may find themselves when they are beginning to traverse or transition into someplace new. I appreciated that each work was either on the wall or a shelf, giving each a sense of its own place. The space around the pieces gives them an opportunity to breathe and allows viewers to look closely at one and flow seamlessly into the next. 

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Happenings Brings Artists to the Table

Hafsa Nouman, Dastarkhwaan

Galleries and museums play a pivotal role in shaping the careers of the artists they represent, often hosting dinners designed to promote artists and connect them with collectors and curators. This treatment, however, is mainly afforded to well-established artists. Arts professional Anna Yi Xie witnessed this phenomenon firsthand while interning at Gagosian in New York City. In 2024, Xie set out to create an alternative to the gallery-hosted dinner, a platform that offers early-career artists the opportunity to show their work and meet influential figures in the art world. After all, the social and professional networks that artists develop can further their careers just as much as showing their work.

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Yuyo- Julián Kreimer at the Sarah Lawrence Heimbold Visual Arts Center

Yuyo- Julián Kreimer at the Sarah Lawrence Heimbold Visual Arts Center

Before his artist talk, Julián Kreimer set a small brown valise on the table and opened it. Inside, folders held drawings on paper, each made in response to a photographic slide from his parents’ archive. The valise was not part of the exhibition; it was the working material behind it, a private archive he had been drawing through for years. Encountering it set the terms for the room next door: Yuyo is what happens when that interior is opened out.

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Learning Where There Is No Bottom: On the Thresholds of Swim Lessons

When I first learned how to swim as a child, my instructor told me to hold onto the edge of the pool and practice kicking. He counted the rhythm aloud, occasionally adjusting the angle of my body. Water kept splashing into my face, yet I could not make myself move forward. The actions had been broken down into steps: kicking, stroking, breathing, and I seemed to complete each one, but they never came together as a whole. Then, at some point, I stopped sinking. I still cannot say what exactly happened in that moment.

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How Malta Biennale 2026 Reimagines Site-Specificity

One is never prepared for the Maltese archipelago and its vertiginous dichotomy of antiquity and modernity; an exhilarating compound of ethnicities, languages, and cultures. Though one might consider it diminutive, during the three-day press preview, I traversed the main island, Malta, and its quieter, more pastoral and bucolic sister island, Gozo, in a flurry of taxis, ferries, and buses. (Comino, a nature lover’s sanctuary, remains largely uninhabited.) Malta occupies a distinctly liminal position within the Mediterranean world: a central island shaped across centuries by exchanges among Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. Situated a mere 60 miles south of Sicily and roughly an hour’s flight from Tunis, it has long functioned as a site of passage, encounter, and cultural layering—a geographic palimpsest upon which successive civilizations have inscribed themselves again and again.

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