Interviews – Page 2

June 5, 2025June 6, 2025

The Bone and Muscle: A Conversation with Dona Nelson

In Dialogue

For decades, Dona Nelson has dissolved the formal boundaries of painting: refusing to apply pigment to just one side of the canvas, mounting the stretchers of her double-sided paintings on freestanding metal stands, and letting them occupy gallery floors like sculptural interlopers. In her current two-person show with Andrew Ross at Thomas Erben Gallery, however, the painter has ceded the floor space entirely, anchoring her three new works squarely to the wall.

June 2, 2025May 27, 2025

Guy Nelson: Tales from the Understory at The North Dakota Museum of Art

Hot Air

Guy Nelson, *The Road Not Taken,* North Dakota Museum of Art

The North Dakota Museum of Art’s latest exhibition, Guy Nelson: Tales from the Understory, is a multidisciplinary solo show focused on the woodlands and prairies of the upper Midwest. Featuring sculpture, painting and video, the exhibition will be on display through July 20, 2025. This exhibition marks the tenth in the Museum’s Art Makers Series, an annual award for artists with connections to the region, which is underwritten by Dr. William F. Wosick of Fargo.

May 27, 2025May 28, 2025

Wherever I Lay My Head at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning

In Dialogue

Group picture(Members in picture from left to right): Euijin V. Ra (artist), Julia D. Shaw (artist), Courteny Symone Staton (artist), Laura OsCam (artist), Sherwin Banfield (Program Manager), TEDF (artist), Marleen Moise (artist).

Wherever I Lay My Head, now on view at The Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning , began with an invitation to Indira A. Abiskaroon to curate the culminating ARTWorks exhibition. The offer came from Program Manager Sherwin Banfield and was formalized in conversation with Director of Program Operations Wendy Arimah Berot. Abiskaroon’s first priority was to spend time with the ARTWorks Fellows—to learn how their practices had developed over the course of the program and to hear what ideas had been resonating in their weekly sessions.

May 26, 2025May 19, 2025

Being There, with Weihui Lu

In conversation

Weihui Lu at Wave Hill, March 2025, photograph by Jan Dickey

Terra Keck and Jan Dickey caught up with artist Weihui Lu a couple of weeks after she completed a residency at Wave Hill in the Bronx. At the time, Weihui was reflecting on that experience while also preparing for her current solo show, when there is no longer a danger of frost, at Tempest Gallery in Ridgewood, Queens. An installation artist with roots in Chinese landscape painting, Weihui continues to explore impermanence, a delicate and sparing use of material, and humankind’s relationship to the natural environment. Her installation at Tempest draws its source material from an aging greenhouse she spent time contemplating during her residency at Wave Hill—understood as a physical embodiment of human systems of care, including their inevitable collapse and repair.

May 21, 2025May 18, 2025

Lance Rautzhan and Cabin Contemporary

In conversation

Lance Rautzhan standing in front of Cabin Contemporary. Photo courtesy of Cabin Contemporary

Established in June 2022, Cabin Contemporary culls local, urban, and international artists for solo and group exhibitions, hosting contemporary art concepts and dialogue in a rural context, from April through October. Multidisciplinary artist and educator Lance Rautzhan curates exhibits of installation, new media, painting, and outsider art in an outbuilding on his family farm near the Appalachian Trail, Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, and Pennsylvania State Game Lands.

May 13, 2025May 11, 2025

Naomi Lev and the Art of Process Curating

In Dialogue

Installation view with Naomi Lev at *The Space Between Knowing* exhibition at The TL Studio. Photographed by Argenis Apolinario. Left (top to bottom): Shony Rivnay, *The Loss of Innocence Squared,* 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 43.3 x 43.3 inch; Shony Rivnay, *Keep Movin’,* 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 43.3 x 43.3 inch. Right: Shony Rivnay, *Initiation of Movement No.1*, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 61 x 77 inch.

Naomi Lev is a curator, cultural program director, and arts writer based in New York City. She works closely with living artists and calls her approach “Process Curating”—a method that follows a project from its earliest stages through final installation. It’s about long-term exchange and staying present as ideas shift.

May 12, 2025May 9, 2025

Into the microVerse – Micrographia with Shae Nadine|| SubtleFlux

In Dialogue

_I8A1922 anemone up small.jpg — into the microVerse – Mutualism, 2024. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Inspired by scientist and illustrator Robert Hooke’s seminal book, Micrographia, published in 1665, into the microVerse – Micrographia invites viewers into an immersive interdisciplinary installation where projected and printed microscopy act as a vehicle to witness the beauty of nature and our environment through magnified images of plant cells, microorganisms, and organic structures to transform our perspective of the familiar. Through this microscopic and material journey, the exhibition encourages a renewed perspective on our role as stewards of Earth’s delicate ecosystems and biodiversity, asking us to reimagine how we might preserve and protect these intricate natural systems for generations to come.

May 12, 2025April 29, 2025

Duae Lingua at the Romanian Cultural Institute

In Dialogue

Curator Daniela Holban with artists Adina Andrus, Alex Wolkowicz, Katya Grokhovsky, Lilian Shtereva, Elena Kalkova, and Luisa Tuntuc – Deputy Director of the Romanian Cultural Institute, at the *Duae Lingua* exhibition, Brâncuși Gallery, 2025. Image Courtesy of the Romanian Cultural Institute. © Johnny Vacar

The group show Duae Lingua at The Brâncuși Gallery in the Romanian Cultural Institute began as a personal reflection on curator Daniela Holaban’s migration journey from Romania to the United States and gradually evolved into a broader curatorial inquiry into dual identity and cultural translation through the lens of Eastern European women artists. “Initially, I was interested in the dissonance between linguistic and cultural fluency—how even after mastering a language, true belonging can remain elusive,” says Holban. In this interview with Art Spiel, Daniela Holban elaborates on how that concept became the foundation for the exhibition, using language as both metaphor and framework to explore themes of identity, memory, and assimilation.

May 9, 2025May 8, 2025

Mark Dagley at Abaton Project Space

In Conversation

Mark Dagley and Lauri Bortz of the Abaton Project Room

Mark Dagley is an artist who has exhibited his paintings and sculptures, which explore the intersection of abstraction and materiality, in New York and Europe since the 1980s. Lauri Bortz is a playwright and author whose farcical tragedies have been performed in theaters in New York, and over the past decade, she has created a series of children’s books. Abaton Project Room, or APR, is a temporary exhibition space conceived by Lauri, located at 11 Broadway, in the historic Bowling Green Office Building in Lower Manhattan. Over a one-year period (August 2024-2025), APR is alternating monthly presentations of Mark Dagley’s work—paintings, sculpture, and works on paper—with thematic group exhibitions as well as selections from Mark and Lauri’s personal collection.

May 8, 2025May 7, 2025

West Chelsea Artists Open Studios 2025

© 2025, West Chelsea Artists Open Studios

The West Chelsea Artists Open Studios presents its 16th annual artists open studios tour on Saturday & Sunday, May 10th and 11th, from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. The event offers a look inside the art studios at the iconic building at 526 West 26th Street. Art Spiel conducted brief interviews with three artists who will participate in the event.