Exhibition Review by Will Kaplan

Unreliable Narrators: Rochelle Voyles

In Unreliable Narrators, Rochelle Voyles’s collages hold both a capacious nihilism and a hope to build stories from the void. From this fulcrum, I think of Joan Didion’s classic essay The White Album, and its opening truism: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”  Voyles’s compositions of found photographs extend to viewers, a branch, a bone, a tool in making sense of the randomness that seems to rule our lives. Cutouts layered into loops capture chaos, but the care in each cut, the curation, and the collision of hyperspecific images betray a belief in an idiosyncratic order. These works are at once figurative mazes of manifold meaning, and objects calculated to short-circuit our thinking and experience pure sensation. 

Exhibition Review by Hantian Zhang

The 15th Shanghai Biennale: Does the Flower Hear the Bees?

Botany, I read in Zoë Schlanger’s bestseller The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, is full of groundbreaking discoveries these days (Schlanger 2024). We now know that plants have cellular conduits that allow propagation of electrical charges, that some plants release chemicals in the air to alert neighbors of insects, and that evening primrose increases its nectar’s sweetness when it senses the frequency of the hum of bee wings. While such plant-feeling, plant-talking, and plant-listening are not sustained by the same biological apparatus as ours, the functional parallel is apparent. Perhaps it is time to broaden our understanding of intelligence. 

Exhibition Review by Michal Gavish

Zhang Huan: The Ash Paintings, at 125 Newbury Gallery

It has been over ten years since the last New York exhibition of the Chinese artist Zhang Huan, known for his edgy political performance pieces documented at the exhibition. What captured me on this visit was his ash paintings, which extended across the entire front hall of the gallery. It feels entirely appropriate that this social activist artist, who later turned to Buddhism, should exhibit these works in New York at such a tense moment. Ash, as a medium, touches on absolute destruction. It carries deep meaning in Buddhist practice, but these days it also pulls toward something harder to name: the daily accumulation of impure ash on the ground of cities being destroyed.

Exhibition Review by Melissa Stern

Reflections on The Outsider Art Fair 2026

I have been going to the Outsider Art Fair almost every year since it first opened at The Puck Building in 1993. As with most aspects of the art world, much has changed in the field of outsider art and at the fair, its leading annual exhibition. Long gone are the giddy days of discovering artists such as Howard Finster, Adolf Wolfli, Mary T. Smith, and Judith Scott (to name a few). These are now blue-chip outsider or self-taught artists whose work is collected by major institutions and collectors, and rightly so. “Outsider” has become insider and the genre a mainstay of the art world, A kind of artistic oxymoron, some of the most “established outsider artists” command major prices.

Exhibition Review by Lucas Moran

Vuillard Was Already in the Future

After the Impressionists blew open painting and reset Paris, rearranging everyone’s eyes, one might assume the dust would take a minute to settle. But almost immediately, a cluster of kids at the Académie Julian decided to reroute the whole thing again. Among them, Édouard Vuillard. To get to Vuillard, one must start with Paul Sérusier and Paul Gauguin standing by a lake in Brittany.

In Dialogue by Ella Jackson

Masako Miki: Midnight March – A Galaxy of Joyful Transformation

As the founding Executive and Artistic Director of the MassArt Art Museum (MAAM), Lisa Tung has continually focused on bringing immersive exhibitions to the public and establishing an institution that champions art education, contemporary art practices, and the accessibility of art. Having seen and admired the work of Masako Miki, Tung brought Miki’s imaginative creations to MAAM, where they come alive in Midnight March, curated by Alison Gass and Meghan Smith. 

Midnight March transforms the Paine Gallery into a galaxy, filled with Miki’s large-scale, felted interpretations of Japanese folklore spirits, yōkai. Through their materiality, scale, color, and design, the typically alienated spirits are presented through a contrasting portrayal from their traditionally frightening depiction, shown as playful, respected, and not so different from ourselves. Through an animistic approach, Midnight March reimagines myth, highlighting our similarities, spirituality, and the power of sculptural storytelling.

In Dialogue by Etty Yaniv

Kylie Heidenheimer: Attenuated Figuration

Kylie Heidenheimer came to painting through an early interest in art restoration. After high school, she attended Grinnell College in Iowa, where she studied chemistry, art history, and 2-D studio art. Following her freshman year, she spent the summer as an art restoration intern at the Museum für Völkerkunde in then West Berlin. While there, she began drawing and painting with gouache on paper on her own. By the end of that summer, she had decided to pursue art seriously. Not long after, her focus shifted to oil painting. 

Her path toward abstraction grew out of a strong foundation in figurative work. After her sophomore year at Grinnell, she returned to St. Louis to attend art school at Washington University. The core program was rigorous and heavily figurative, with intensive anatomy drawing and figure sculpture classes, followed by a return to painting.

In Dialogue by Ella Jackson

GODDESSES 3.0: Feminist Ritual and Resistance Across Generations

New York-based artist, curator, and filmmaker D. Kessinger explores feminism across history through oil paint, wax, and Liquitex on linen, alongside her curatorial approach that focuses on collaborative and inclusive practices. Her current curation, GODDESSES 3.0, is on view at the Berrie Center Galleries at Ramapo College of New Jersey. 

The exhibit highlights artists across generations who explore feminism within fine art, film, media, and the digital culture of the post-internet world. Kessinger’s curation not only echoes the past but also exhibits it alongside current feminist contemporary art, emphasizing the interconnected nature of multigenerational feminism. The exhibit meditates on ritual as reclamation, resistance, and resilience, and the body as a medium, message, and monument, a space where feminist ideologies harmonize across generations and set the tone for those to come.

Exhibition Review by Noa Charuvi

Call Of The Mountain

In Cynthia Daighnault’s exhibition at Olney Gleason, the walls are covered with different versions of the same subject: Denali, the tallest mountain in North America. A natural wonder and a national treasure at risk, Denali has lost over 60 percent of its glacier mass, and rising temperatures have accelerated permafrost thaw and disrupted local ecosystems, directly affecting the wildlife that depend on it. The paintings in this exhibition preserve their likelihood like the sculpture of the last three rhinos (by Gillie and Marc, now installed at 441 Ninth Avenue), but this documentation of endangered species contains an underlying criticism of American megalomania, without escaping the artist’s own American identity and ambitions. A big, beautiful white thing, Denali’s demise mirrors the nation’s uncertain future and the accumulative effect of its past. 

In Dialogue by Etty Yaniv

Spirit in the Flesh at Utopia

Spirit in the Flesh is on view at UTOPIA in Kingston, the gallery, bookstore, and studio space founded in 2025 by Lucia Cote. Curated by Saul Chernick, the exhibition brings together sculpture, painting, and works on paper by Courtney Puckett, Ben Pederson, and Chernick. The show treats art as a way of being, shaped by imagery rooted in intuition and dreams and carried into physical form through sustained attention to process. In a climate of constant noise and unrest, the works lean toward beauty, curiosity, and play. Curator and artist Saul Chernick tells us more about the exhibition and the venue.