In Dialogue – Art Spiel

October 22, 2026October 22, 2026, by Xuezhu Jenny Wang

Meet at the Ferris Wheel: Kathleen Beausoleil’s Plein Air Paintings Combine Psychology and Light

Painter Kathleen Beausoleil is enamored by her backyard, literally. The fair grounds and beaches that are synonymous to her home state, New Jersey, form her primary subjects. Visiting local fairgrounds each summer, she paints plein air, out in the open, and on view in her latest solo show at The Painting Center are works that beautifully capture the light, vibrancy, and togetherness of these places. After speaking with the artist, I understand that Beausoleil’s scenes are not only advanced in their painterly technique, but created through perspectives cleverly scaffolded by sociological terms around gathering and group behaviour.

October 15, 2026October 15, 2026, by Claire Haik

Two Shows in Dialogue: A Conversation with Tatyana Kazakova and Anna Shukeylo

New Jersey’s Watchung Arts Center brings together two distinct solo exhibitions: Entropic Flora by Anna Shukeylo and Symphony for the Unnoticed by Tatyana Kazakova. Both artists weave between abstraction and realism to create intimate portraits of nature, but their styles and vantage points diverge in dynamic ways. Kazakova fills the sprawling upstairs gallery with large drawings and paintings that pack the space with thickets, foliage, and tangled old growth, inviting viewers to contemplate the boundaries between wild spaces. In the lower gallery, Shukeylo’s compositions erupt with vibrant gestural brushmarks that capture fleeting moments of blooming flowers at their peak splendor. In this conversation, Kazakova and Shukeylo discuss their work, studio practices, and thematic vantage points, revealing the very different paths they take to create their images of nature.

October 7, 2026October 1, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Plumb Line: Irit Baniel and Alexis Granwell at Medium Rare

Medium Rare Project Space in DUMBO opens the season with Plumb Line, a two-person show pairing Irit Baniel’s paintings with Alexis Granwell’s sculptures. The two artists work with different materials and processes, but their work shares a concern with the body, vulnerability, memory, and grief. Medium Rare is an artist-led space rooted in making, looking and conversation. Surrounded by artists and studios, it has close ties to the Brooklyn art community and uses exhibitions, talks and workshops to connect artists with a wider public. In this conversation, co-founder Narelle Sissons discusses the curatorial process, the visual axis linking the two artists, the venue’s origins, and its plans for the year ahead.

October 1, 2026October 1, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Diane Burko: Extraction, A Dialogue of Extremes at Rowan

Diane Burko, Extraction, A Dialogue of Extremes, Installation Featured Image

Extraction, A Dialogue of Extremes, Diane Burko’s solo exhibition at Rowan University Museum of Contemporary Art, pairs two bodies of work: Arctic paintings based on NSF-funded climate research and works on Amazon mining and deforestation. The show was created as the research grant’s community engagement component. In this interview, curator Mary Salvante discusses how the exhibition came together, the tension between the two series, how the work uses beauty to address climate change, and what the museum hopes visitors take away.

September 29, 2026September 29, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Gamaliel Rodríguez: What is etched from what has been lived at Pace Prints

Gamaliel Rodríguez, Lo grabado de lo vivido (What is etched from what has been lived), Pace Prints, 2026. Artwork © Gamaliel Rodríguez. Photo by Garrett Carroll.

At first glance, Gamaliel Rodríguez’s monoprints look like postcards of tropical lands: saturated palms and skies that evoke Caribbean tourism imagery. The paradise turns more industrial and quite specific as you look longer: an ethanol plant in Medina, New York, the Bacardi distillery in Cataño, Puerto Rico. Following Rodriguez’s first solo show with Pace Prints, we discussed this new body of work.

September 24, 2026September 22, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Orly Cogan and Robert Mann: Behind the Lens & Through the Needle

Orly Cogan, installation view, photo by Daniel Menzo

Orly Cogan stitches, crochets, and paints directly onto photographs. Under her needle, figures loosen from their frames, and in some pieces the thread spills past the edge onto the floor. Her work on photographs owes much to twenty years alongside the photography dealer Robert Mann. The two met at an art fair, reconnected at a collector’s party, and had their first date in her studio talking about her work; across years of openings, fairs, and long studio hours since, each has shaped how the other looks. Cogan, trained as a painter, came to read a photograph as an object with its own history and materiality, while Mann, whose gallery was built on photography, became an advocate for embroidery and its feminist history. That shared education first reached his gallery walls in 2014.

Behind the Lens and Through the Needle gathers the work that grew from that exchange and opens Mann’s newly built West Chelsea space in his thirty-fifth year with a public gallery. In Cogan’s hands, the two mediums hold different kinds of time: the camera’s caught instant and the needle’s slow, cumulative one. The photograph gives her the frozen scene; the embroidery reopens it, adding labor, touch, and imagination until the captured moment seems to keep unfolding.

September 22, 2026September 18, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Joyce Polance: The Patient Looks Back: Portraits of My Therapist

Joyce Polance’s The Patient Looks Back: Portraits of My Therapist

Joyce Polance has spent three years painting the same therapist nineteen times, in oil with fingers, and always from photographs taken at the close of a session. Polance inverts a familiar asymmetry: in therapy, Polance is the one exposed and observed, and here the therapist is the subject of long study, a figure whose features have grown more familiar to Polance yet, in many ways, remain a stranger. That paradox drives this body of work and gives the exhibition its title, The Patient Looks Back. It opened this September at Vassar College’s James W. Palmer III Gallery. What began as a single painting became something more persistent: a reflection on how difficult it is to truly know another person, even under the closest attention.

September 19, 2026September 19, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Beyond the Sky

Beyond the Sky is an immersive, large-scale video installation projected at Art Cake through Monday, September 21st. The story behind it begins and ends with a spirit of collaboration—with the tragic note of the Red Hook fire in between. Simona Prives, the visual artist behind the project, shares her collaborative journey, beginning with her work alongside Kyle Luntz and Ryan Vahey.

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 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.