Donna Conklin King: Fifty-Eight Feet Down the Ocean

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“Bubbly Barnacles” after launch photo, courtesy of UMAFL

Sculptor Donna Conklin King draws on the philosophy of Kintsugi, the centuries-old Japanese art that highlights an object’s imperfections by emphasizing its cracks with gold leaf. She works primarily with concrete, experimenting by casting forms from unconventional materials such as tin ceiling tiles, food containers, and fabric. Her sculptures often incorporate delicate elements like doilies and 24-karat gold leaf, exploring the relationship between nature, architecture, and the inevitable decay of civilization. In her recent focus on public sculptures, Conklin King’s pieces are “openly cracked and repaired,” evolving and enduring over time. They reflect themes of resilience, history, and archaeology.

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Sari Carel: A More Perfect Circle

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Sari Carel, A More Perfect Circle, 2024. Courtesy KODA, photo by Argenis Apolinario.

Artist and activist Sari Carel created A More Perfect Circle, a series of ceramic sculptures inspired by the single-use coffee cup, a ubiquitous object that brings into focus people’s daily experience of interacting with trash. Lentol Garden in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, hosts its first public art project that includes columns built of stacked ceramic forms and disks in the shape of plastic cup covers. The handmade, intentional, and individualized quality of each unit contrasts with the mass-manufactured coffee cup that inspires this project. Some of the drawings, experiments and observations that inform the installation are on view at the Greenpoint Library. A series of programs with 350Brooklyn and Climate Families NYC accompany the exhibition. Find out more here. The project is organized by KODA, a New York-based nonprofit arts organization dedicated to mid-career artists of diverse backgrounds. It is curated by Jennifer McGregor, who interviews Sari Carel for the Hot Air section in Art Spiel.

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Judy Hoffman: Evolvers and Wildtypes at Sculpture Space

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A person standing next to a sculpture

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The artist with Big Yellow, 18″ x 11″ x 7.5”; ceramic; 2017. Photo Credit: Linda Cunningham

Ten years ago, Judy Hoffman became enthralled with clay and hand-building. The current exhibition Evolvers and Wildtypes at the Long Island City Sculpture Space is her first solo show of these ceramic sculptures. Hoffman’s ceramics’ imagery and forms tap into a previous installation work made from sculpted paper pulp, natural materials, and man-made debris. Paper clay techniques permit the bonding of wet clay to fired forms, enabling the construction of diverse configurations. These components are conjoined to initiate a dialogue between organic and mechanical elements, yielding imagery that defies expectation. The artwork evolves through a rhythm of construction and deconstruction, encapsulating cycles of creation, deterioration, and renewal. Viewers are meant to encounter an elemental rawness, surprise, and a touch of humor.

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Tatiana Arocha: Mama Coca

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Hojas en movimiento sobre el fuego [Leaves in motion over the fire], 2023. Soft Ground etching on Hahnemühle and pigment print on Kozo paper, hand-painted with acrylic. Triptych, each 35 1/4 x 26 1/2 inches. Photograph by Etienne Frossard

Tatiana Arocha is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice has focused on installations that include rubbings, photographs, and drawings of plants and landscapes taken from the many ecological niches of her native Colombia. Increasingly, her art and advocacy have focused on the coca plant, notorious for its role in the war on drugs, which has destroyed indigenous communities and their territories across South America. Informed by her research, her current installations and publications highlight the coca plant’s ceremonial role in the indigenous cultures that cultivate it, pushing back on the demonization it has endured in the West. Her work also suggests new avenues for how the plant can be a force for good in the Global North and South.

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Hovey Brock-Daniella Dooling-Valerie Hegarty at Catskill Art Space

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A close-up of a carpet

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Hovey Brock, A Golden Spike for the Anthropocene, 2020, 30” x 40”, acrylic media on panel

Hovey Brock was a member of the Catskill Art Society (CAS) before its rebranding as the Catskill Art Space. Originally a low-key regional arts center, the transformation began under the guidance of Executive Director Sally Wright. In October 2022, Wright inaugurated the new exhibition halls, featuring on-loan installations by Sol Lewitt and James Turrell, signaling CAS’s ambition to bring world-class arts programming to Livingston Manor. This initiative marked a significant milestone in the cultural revival sweeping the entire Catskill region, with CAS playing a pivotal role. “Since so much of my work is about the Catskills, I am thrilled to have this opportunity to show my pieces at CAS, especially in the company of fellow artists Daniella Dooling and Valerie Hegarty,” Brock says.

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Embodied Futures and the Ecology of Care at BioBAT Art Space

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A room with a large wall with a painting on it

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Installation view of Katie Hubbell’s, Slow Down Soft Body, Stay with Me, and, Subsuming Solids, photo courtesy of Flaneurshan Studio

In the heart of Sunset Park, within the historic Brooklyn Army Terminal, BioBAT Art Space stands as a pioneering gallery that blurs the lines between art and science. The current exhibition, Embodied Futures & the Ecology of Care, Curated by Elena Soterakis & Eve Barro, showcases eleven artists whose work merges research methods and materials from scientific practices such as genetics, mycology, microscopy, and bacterial cultivation with artistic creation. By using living yeast as their palette and mushrooms as their sculpting medium, these artists challenge conventional artistic norms.

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In the End, a Devastating Beauty at Stand4 Gallery

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Susan Hoffman Fishman (l) and Leslie Sobel @ Five Points Center for the Arts Artist Residency, June 2022

Susan Hoffman Fishman and Leslie Sobel met in 2019 at a virtual “mixer” sponsored by SciArt Initiative for artists and scientists who either were already working together or who wanted to work together collaboratively. Hoffman and Sobel quickly determined that their mutual interests in water and the climate crisis overlapped. Looking for ways to collaborate, they applied for and were awarded a joint residency in 2021 during the height of the COVID pandemic at Planet Labs, a global satellite imaging company based in San Francisco. Planet had created its residency program to see what happened when artists were given access to their scientists and satellite resources. Because of COVID, the three-month residency ended up being entirely virtual.

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Watershed—Grace Mitchell in conversation with Mary McCoy

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A landscape with a river and a blue sky

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Grace Mitchell-Eternal Return IV, Oil on panel, 30”x30”, 2022

The deep, rich colors and textures of Grace Mitchell’s oil paintings will draw you in, but it’s often the title that sets you thinking. Interweaving layers of color glow through the marsh grasses in her newest series, Watershed Assessment. You could get lost in the sheer beauty of these paintings with their glints of tidal water and shadowy mountains looming in the distance, all saturated with a moist, misty atmosphere that seems to glow with fecundity. But the title gives pause. These lush, luminous landscapes are meant to be “assessed,” and careful observation finds them full of scars and flaws.

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Rachel Frank: Ritual and Rehabilitation

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A collage of hands holding a clay dog

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Rewilding Franconia Sculpture Park, Participatory Performance as part of 4Ground: Midwest Land Art Biennial, Franconia Sculpture Park, 2022. Photographer: Rachel Frank

Rachel Frank is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice includes sculpture, video, and performance. Her art explores our shifting perspectives towards natural history, climate change, and relationships with non-human species. She grew up near Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, the birthplace of American paleontology, where large mammoth and other megafauna fossils were found, altering Western views on extinction and evolution. She works as a staff wildlife care manager at The Wild Bird Fund, a wildlife rehabilitation center in Manhattan.

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Donna Zarbin-Byrne: Like Water from a Rock at Arts Fort Worth

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Donna Zarbin-Byrne, Like Water from a Rock. Here Once Was Ocean, still image from augmented reality animation. Photo courtesy, Donna Zarbin-Byrne

In her installation-based exhibition, Like Water from a Rock, at Arts Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX, Donna Zarbin-Byrne responds to the landscapes of the Chihuahuan desert of West Texas and the West Maui mountains, connecting material sites with an internal process. Western art traditions often portray the landscape as an idealized place to conquer and expand. Zarbin-Byrne frames the landscape as a place to experience the sensate.

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