Interviews – Art Spiel

September 15, 2026September 13, 2026, by Agnese Fanizza

Serena Scapagnini: Painting Memory

Serena Scapagnini, Saliency, La Memoria Cangiante

Memory is a fickle thing. However, when viewed through a neuroscientific lens, memory is also a biological process. Serena Scapagnini’s artistic practice, her recent Saliency, La Memoria Cangiante (2026) in particular, explores the retrieval of memory in its interdisciplinary entirety. Inaugurated on June 4th as a permanent installation at the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale University, Saliency, La Memoria Cangiante opens a wider reflection on the position of memory, whether as process or personal attachment, in Scapagnini’s work and current projects.

September 10, 2026September 9, 2026, by Cynthia Chen

This is Me Looking: In Dialogue with Wen-You Cai on Collaborating with Her Six-Year-Old Self

In 1996, a six-year-old child was given a camera and sent out to capture the world through her eyes. She aimed the lens at her father’s back against the Twin Towers, at her own blurred hand, at a sculpture in a museum, at Buddhist drawings on the wall. She had recently arrived in the United States, and the world in front of her was made of curiosity, novelty, and strangeness.

September 2, 2026August 29, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

The Pandora’s BoxX Project: Grace Roselli

Grace Roselli’s Pandora’s BoxX Project began as something personal: a way to reconnect with a world of artists she’d drifted from while raising two daughters, much of it as a single mother. She started by photographing the few women artists she still knew; each led her to another, and the project grew by conversation and recommendation rather than plan. Nearly 360 portraits later — of artists alongside curators, writers, historians, educators, and museum directors — it had become a record of a community whose influence has rarely been seen whole. Roselli photographs each sitter in their own home or studio, in available light. She then lets them choose the final image, because the portrait isn’t finished until both of them recognize the person in it. Roselli discusses the project’s origins, her way of working, and what nearly 360 encounters revealed.

September 1, 2026September 1, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Atay Ilgun and Jonathan Carmel on ./spiral at Fondazione Aversano

How does a field barely a decade old start to have a past? ./spiral takes up that question, gathering eleven artists who were present at the early days of AI, code, and blockchain art and asking each to pick up a formative work, tool, or loose end and carry it forward from where they are now. For co-curator Atay Ilgun, a London-based artist and technologist, the burst of new tools between 2017 and 2022 has only lately settled far enough into the past to be seen clearly. His fellow curator, SuperRare’s Jonathan Carmel, describes the return as a way of moving forward by first turning around. The works cross from screen into matter along the way, Helena Sarin’s ceramics drawing AI imagery toward ancient clay, Robbie Barrat’s Plexiglas prints nudging it back toward the glow of a monitor. Presented by SuperRare at Justin Aversano’s Fondazione Aversano in New York, September 3–10. Here, Ilgun and Carmel discuss how the show came together, the move from screen to object, and the histories their artists carry forward.

August 24, 2026August 25, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Serpentine Sibyls at Snug Harbor

Daniel Rothbart's Serpentine Sibyls, curated by Melissa West

A chance meeting in October 2024 set Serpentine Sibyls in motion. Wandering into the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Daniel Rothbart met its director and senior curator Melissa West, and a shared bond with the late critic and curator John Perreault — who ran the center in the 1980s — opened a collaboration that grew from the main pond to the two reflecting pools beside the Glass House. Rothbart’s floating forms in aluminum and glass, buoyed by salvaged Japanese fishing floats, drift and turn with wind, light, and water, so no two hours look alike. Named by West for the ancient prophetesses and for the serpentinite stone in Staten Island’s own hills, the work holds history and forecast at once, using the climate crisis as its undertow. Sited at a former sailors’ home along a tidal waterway, it runs through September 28 at Snug Harbor. The artist and curator discuss the project’s origins, its shifting forms, and the myth and history beneath the title.

August 17, 2026August 20, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Cutaway at Brandeis University

For Cutaway, curator Olivia Baldwin worked the way she does in her own studio — building from the ground up, beginning with the artists rather than a theme. She had followed Eleanor Anderson, J Stoner Blackwell, Lucy Kim, Kirstin Lamb, and Hai-Wen Lin for years, looking for where their materials might overlap and where they might productively rub against one another. Meeting with them, a shared concern surfaced: how each artist asserts and then loosens the limits of an object, a body, a pattern. Their means are strikingly varied — discarded plastic bags, cross stitch, dyed silk and chain, cast flounder and teeth, a kite pitched toward the upper windows — bound by saturated color and touch. The body recurs throughout, rarely pictured, more often left as a trace in the material. Baldwin discusses the show’s bottom-up beginnings, what its materials share, and the withholding behind its title.

August 5, 2026August 20, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Cantilevers at Roundabouts Now

Installation view of Cantilevers - Katy Fischer & Marie Lorenz

Katy Fischer and Marie Lorenz go back to the mid-90s and the printmaking department at RISD, where the sheer amount there was to learn on a technical level sealed both of their paths as artists. Cantilevers, their two-person exhibition at Roundabouts Now in Kingston, includes no printmaking at all — yet a printmaker’s habit of setting up a repeatable process and then letting it devolve runs through both bodies of work. Lorenz, who has operated a tide taxi in New York Harbor since 2005 in boats she designs and builds, shows kinetic, pendulum-based sculptures weighted with porcelain casts of objects found on the beach. Fischer’s script-like porcelain shapes and new mosaics draw on techniques with roots reaching back 1,500 years. In the conversation that follows, the two artists discuss their shared history, the systems behind their work, and the tension of balancing porcelain on a single point.

August 4, 2026August 4, 2026, by Meg Lipke

Polychrome at Bernay Fine Arts

Installation view: Polychrome, Bernay Fine Art

Polychrome, on view at Bernay Fine Arts, brings together paintings by Jenny Kemp, Audrey Stone, and Deborah Zlotsky in an exhibition on abstraction and geometric structure. Across three distinct practices, the artists use color as structure and sensory experience, although each arrives at abstraction through her own internal logic. Here abstraction is a form of concentration, examining the texture of experience: how can attention intensify and shift? How can time accumulate? How can systems hold together and slip apart? Artist Meg Lipke, a long-time colleague and friend of the artists, visited the show and addressed questions for the following conversation.

July 27, 2026July 27, 2026, by Michele Jaslow

Interview with Daina Higgins: On Graffiti, Risk, and the Art of Impermanence

Pioneer graffiti artist and painter Daina Higgins explores the shifting visual identity of urban spaces across the American Northeast. Our conversation, centered on Daina, also reads as a message to the emerging women graffiti artists she encounters on the streets. A how-to guide including the rules- yes, graffiti has rules- a way to value yourself as an artist, and a sisterhood joining the past and present.

July 20, 2026August 20, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Timothy Makepeace: From Thirty Feet to One Million Miles

Timothy Makepeace has spent nine years making art about one of the most complex machines humanity has ever built. Since his first visit to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in 2016, the artist has developed an expansive body of work in response to the James Webb Space Telescope — its gold-plated beryllium mirrors, its acoustic test chambers, the light it gathers from increasingly distant points in time. The culmination of that inquiry is Ghost in the Machine, on view at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC, through August 9, 2026. We spoke with Makepeace about working with NASA engineers, the formal decisions behind his square-format drawings, and what kept drawing him back to a telescope now orbiting the Sun a million miles from Earth.