At 33 Bleecker Street, history does not politely vacate.
In the 19th century, Herman Melville grew up at this address, long before the current building rose here in 1900. A century later, Joel Shapiro kept an early studio in the building before moving on to larger quarters. This winter, the ground-floor gallery Zürcher has been restaging a 1972 exhibition titled 13 Women Artists. Museum curators made the trip to NoHo. Emails arrived from outside the city asking for more time.
It had just rained in New York City when the smell of wet grass and pine in Central Park transported me somewhere else entirely: back in my hometown, a place I hadn’t lived in for a decade. I could’ve sworn I heard the same birds I woke up to every morning. The reminiscence was completely involuntary, but for a few seconds, I found myself caught inside an instant that felt like a different lifetime. This is the feeling that Episodes, Cathleen Clarke’s new exhibitionat Margot Samel, creates. There is no nostalgia or comfort, but instead, the disorienting realization that the past has intruded on the present uninvited.
Alice Pixley Young’s Still Life takes shape in semi-darkness at A.I.R. Gallery as an immersive meditation on ecological time, stratified and shadowed by industrial residue. Installed as a multisensory environment of video projection, sound, industrial scaffolding, and glass bell jars, the installation places viewers in a space where remediation and damage coexist. Suspended from tall black scaffolding, the glass containers move like dimly illuminated pendulums, casting shadows across the walls and establishing the installation’s temporal pulse from the outset.
The work’s rootedness in place is central. Young’s studio is located on an Ordovician fossil bed near a nuclear Superfund site in the Rust Belt. Her exhibition in Brooklyn hints at another Superfund site, the Gowanus Canal, linking two contaminated landscapes across geography. The central video shows horizontal strata in constant motion. Below the upper dusky blue sky, you can travel slowly through narrow moving bands — grasses and wildflowers filmed at the Fernald site in southwest Ohio — creating a lateral sense of passing through a remediated landscape. Alongside it, a thinner strip shows water seen from a bridge, evoking an industrial waterway shaped by contamination and cleanup. The cross sections are clean-cut and suggestive, tinged with a bluish monochrome.
Exhibition view, Alice Pixley Young, Still Life, 2026, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Photography by Matthew Sherman
Birds enter through sound and sight. The birds’ calls, recorded by the artist, continuously shift and reorganize, gradually overtaken by industrial noise. They suggest a tough migration. The suspended glass bell jars are engraved with imagery of Eastern Meadowlarks (one of the bird speciesin population decline). The glass pieces swing slowly like pendulums of grandfather clocks, casting moving bird shadows across the projection, encapsulating past, present, and future. These dome-shaped transparent jars are recognizable as decorative containers used to showcase collected specimens, typically placed on a safe shelf. In Young’s installation, they lose their ground, engraved on, and swing side to side hypnotically. Here, these fragile containers of life also signal warnings, becoming what she calls “active image-makers.” I can imagine those glass jars holding the souls of vanished birds. The birds’ blurred wings flicker as their cries reverberate through the space, at times piercing, at times distant.
Alice Pixley Young, Detail, Still Life, 2026, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Photography by Matthew Sherman
The birds’ imagery appears in motion, blurred and only partially formed, more hinted at than fully seen. The birds seem to move as if traveling between sites, from Young’s Rust Belt landscape toward Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, some vanishing along the way. The black scaffolding structure stands before the screen, geometric, imposing, and bare. It interrupts the projected space, holding the blurred flight behind it in tension with containment. Objects, shadows, and projected imagery fold into one another. The present physical space bleeds into its layered past, reaching toward an unknown future. The disappearing birds, the scientific monitoring of contaminated landscapes, and the broader theme of environmental time link seamlessly. Or as the artist says, the projection reads like a “cross-section connecting atmosphere, land and contaminated infrastructure.”
As projected forms lengthen and shift, they spill beyond the screen and into the room, animating the gallery with a haunting beauty that is eerie, grim, but not yet fatalistic. Still Life does not settle into elegy. It resists the stillness implied by its title. It operates as a poetic wake-up call.
Exhibition view, Alice Pixley Young, Still Life, 2026, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Photography by Matthew Sherman
Alice Pixley Young: Still Lifeat AIR, 155 Plymouth Street Brooklyn, NY 11201.On view throughMarch 15, 2026. Wed–Sun, 12–6 pm
About the Writer: Etty Yaniv is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, curator, and founder of Art Spiel. She works in installation, painting, and mixed media, and has shown her art in exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Since 2018, she has published interviews and reviews through Art Spiel, often focusing on underrecognized voices and smaller venues. @etty.yaniv
Language is having a moment—again—but it no longer behaves as it once did. Words now arrive compressed, automated, endlessly replicated, stripped of duration even as they multiply. Becky Brown has been tracking this condition for years, painting language not as message but as environment: something we live inside, skim through, and increasingly struggle to feel.
Nag champa. Sage. The faint illusion of burning wax.
The scent settles low and heavy, as if the room itself is breathing. The atmosphere feels dense and slow, yet charged. Fixed and fluid at once. Calm and alert. Sacred and unsettled.
This is not simply an exhibition to be viewed. It is a room to be entered with the whole body.
I walked into the PPOW gallery the morning my friend Riki died. The 182-panel illustrated small drawings by New York artist John Kelly, which extend as an open graphic memoir around the gallery, captured me instantly, letting me in on a personal journey of mortality, pain, and beauty. There was something generous in the way Kelly handed his notebook and shared the manuscript of his injury. It resonated with my thoughts of investigating and dwelling on mourning and mortality.
The exhibition titled Grit of the Hearth Beyond the Brambles creates a sense of place, wonder, and belonging. The title itself invites introspection, especially after reading the poem in the press release. It offers an exhale to the stressed, a release from tension, and a bright light to those who may be unsure.
To the Studio, a three-person exhibition at JJ Murphy Gallery in LES brings together paintings by Elisa Jensen, John Lees, and Liam Murphy-Torres, whose works collectively explore shared traditions of observation, light, and painterly practice. The title is inspired by a series of paintings by Frank Auerbach depicting a view of three artists’ studios, but also alludes to the New York Studio as an institution, tying them together. Both Jensen and Lees have been professors of Murphy-Torres at this historic institution.
Downtown in Tribeca, beneath the Derek Eller Gallery, the George Adams Gallery sits like a quiet afterthought. Easy to pass by. Down a short flight of stairs, away from the street glare, Elisa D’Arrigo’s recent sculptures gather in a small white room and hold their ground. The scale is modest. The presence is not.
As the vague New Year comes barreling in, trailing behind is a hazy fog that distorts perceptions of time and space, folding into one another like delicate parchment paper. It reads as hopeful uncertainty, especially as artists create in response to their surroundings. It is in those folds that art and dreams converge to inspire fantastical work that propels us into a new reality.
