Contemporary Art and Culture
Curator Fran Beallor presents Water’s Voice and Our Fragile Moment at Hudson Guild in Chelsea, two exhibitions that focus on environmental damage—melting ice, polluted waters, deforestation, plastic waste, extreme weather, and species extinction. The goal is to make these vast and often abstract issues accessible to the wide public.
Continue reading “Water’s Voice and Our Fragile Moment at Hudson Guild“
Metamorphosis at the Arts Council of Princeton brings together 4 mid-career artists whose work artist and curator Anna Shukeylo has long admired—and envisioned sharing the same space. Each piece explores transformation or shapeshifting in its own way, reflecting the theme that gives the exhibition its name. Since its initial conception, the show has undergone some changes, with some works so new they haven’t even fully cured. Shukeylo invites the artists to interpret the theme freely and engages them in the selection process, though she makes the final curatorial decisions. I spoke with Shukeylo about her process and how the show has evolved.
Continue reading “Metamorphosis at Taplin Gallery, Arts Council of Princeton: Yasmeen Abdallah with Anna Shukeylo“
In following Martin-Nuss’ work for a few years now, I was always mesmerized by the way they could establish and build a living landscape using both physical spaces and water reflections. A living landscape by means of movement, layers, and currents. This exhibition shows works that each establish their own space and carry with them their own evolutions into an entirely new space the longer you look at them.
Continue reading “Sarah Martin- Nuss: Future Currents- At Rachel Uffner Gallery“
Lilac Madar, best known for her photomontages and assemblages exploring feminist themes, turned to performance in the wake of October 7, 2023, as she began to grapple with mounting evidence of atrocities committed during the Hamas-led massacre in Israel—including the rape, sexual brutalization, and murder of women. Her grief made creation feel impossible—until a vision emerged: she was lost in Central Park, leaving a trail of pink thread behind her. PoppyPink, for her, is an act of remembrance—a body unraveling in real time, marking the absence and memory of the women violated and silenced. Named in part for artist Inbar Haiman (Pink), murdered at the Nova festival, the performance aims to affirm what art demands: to witness, to endure, to insist on presence. In this interview, we take a closer look at the project and its origins.
Continue reading “Lilac Madar: Poppy Pink in Central Park“
In Scott Sueme’s latest collaboration with Uprise Art, the artist asks, “If you are called to look, what do you see?” In fact, I pose the question to you right now. As you lie in bed reading this when you really should be asleep or as you doomscroll art news to avoid doomscrolling national news, Sueme calls you to look with the consideration of someone devoted to noticing the breath within the breath, the moment within the moment.
Continue reading “Field in The Wind: Scott Sueme at Uprise Art“
I am happy to speak with Lauriston Avery following his successful recent exhibition at Dutton. Avery is an artist whose work challenges traditional notions of material and space. Through an intuitive and deeply personal process, he transforms unconventional materials—often those found in everyday life—into evocative, textured works that feel both raw and, at times, meditative. His practice blurs the lines between structure and spontaneity, embracing limitations as a source of discovery rather than restriction. In this conversation, we discuss Avery’s approach to materiality, the role of intuition and experimentation in his work, and how the idea of space has become a vital element in his practice. His work invites us to reconsider what we see and feel in our environments.
Continue reading “Lauriston Avery with Riad Miah“
Fanny Allié’s exhibition A Longing at Kaliner presents a series of works made from the materials of daily life. Using worn clothing, domestic linens, and fabric remnants from her own surroundings, Allié constructs layered compositions that speak to human connection, memory, and what remains after use. Her figures, built from these fragments, feel both familiar and distant—suspended in stillness, shaped by lived experience.
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Lior Modan’s work invites touch—but not quite. On the somber, richly textured surfaces of velvet, patterns emerge, outlining everyday objects and settings: a watch, Dinner Gallery’s glass door leading to the courtyard, a table under an archway, and various indecipherable but seemingly familiar architectural forms. They are punctuated with scraps of domesticity and quotidian life: lace strips, tree branches, and old-timey tablecloth designs. In the artist’s solo exhibition titled The Foundations, each monochromatic piece quietly outlines the theatricality of everyday life. Oscillating across the terrains of sculpture, frottage, performance, and assemblage, Modan’s work gently unpacks the categorical pretense behind techniques of making.
Continue reading “The Foundations: Lior Modan at Dinner Gallery“
Marisol: A Retrospective at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) presents a comprehensive overview of the artist’s career, ranging from works she produced in art school in the fifties to her last works. In doing so, the exhibition centers and decenters Marisol’s status within the Pop art sphere, where she never fully situated herself. Her works are too brutal and too strange (in the best sense of the word) for Pop. She was undoubtedly exhibiting with Pop artists and part of their networks, as her films with Andy Warhol included in the exhibition attest. However, she was somewhere else, too. Her works contain the brute force of politics, history, culture, and climate change, and, in her practice, she engages with how those forces take place primarily upon the bodies of women. The body morphs and sometimes breaks under these forces.
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“You should do it,” said a friend, and on that speculative basis, I showed up on West 8th Street, sculpting apron in hand, butterflies in stomach. I’d made a small sitting man before, but this was my first try at a life-size figure. […]By lunch break, sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park among chess players and musicians, I was already feeling like a secret sculptor. – Giles Goodhead, Summer 2024 NYSS Sculpture Marathon with Brandt Junceau
Continue reading “New York Studio School Marathons “