Exhibition Review by Taylor Bielecki

Narratives and expressive figures in Judy Glantzman’s Playing with Dolls at P.P.O.W

Glantzman’s heroically scaled works immerse viewers in the energetic world that she creates. I really appreciate the diversity in scale of the works in this show. The smaller-sized canvases offer a snapshot, still detailed but a more compact telling of the world she is creating. Whereas the larger works allow viewers to step in and entangle themselves within the forms, narratives, symbols, and ideas that Glantzman offers. Walking into the gallery brought an immediate sense of excitement, wonder, and a need for exploration and adventure within the pieces. The paintings introduce the characters and scenes, while the ceramics are the pieces Glantzman chooses to pluck directly from the compositions and bring into 3D forms. 

Exhibition Review by Deborah Wasserman

Qiu Xiaofei: The Theater of Wither and Thrive at Hauser & Wirth

At first glance, Qiu Xiaofei’s paintings appear weightless, washed in vaporous blues and fractured light. They hover between memory and dream, suspended in a luminous haze. But sustained looking alters the experience. The mist does not dissolve — it thickens. What seemed ethereal becomes anatomical. The viewer descends from the sky into the soil, and then further still into the ruptured systems, broken bodies, and unstable architectures that structure human existence. Beneath the atmospheric softness lies something closer to the bowels of what we call life: exposed nerves of paint, skeletal fragments, windows that stare back like watchful eyes. The work stages, narrates, and exposes modes of excavation.

Exhibition Review by Taylor Bielecki

Kate Teale: Vanishing Points and New Places at Smack Mellon

The space in Smack Mellon’s back gallery welcomes you as Kate Teale’s exhibition, Vanishing Points, fills the room, bringing the history of Dumbo into the space. Teale expands space itself through her studies of edge, architecture, and place. The work is a seamless connection of drawings adhered to the walls using Tyvek, making the illusion of space and the real blur into one. The gallery is transformed into a combination of several places, and as visitors turn, they adjust to each new location, finding details offering hints of the places Teale wants us to wander into. 

Exhibition Review by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

The $650 Show Art History Forgot, Thirteen Women, One Wet Floor, Zero Permission

At 33 Bleecker Street, history does not politely vacate.

In the 19th century, Herman Melville grew up at this address, long before the current building rose here in 1900. A century later, Joel Shapiro kept an early studio in the building before moving on to larger quarters. This winter, the ground-floor gallery Zürcher has been restaging a 1972 exhibition titled 13 Women Artists. Museum curators made the trip to NoHo. Emails arrived from outside the city asking for more time.

Exhibition Review by Mer Mora

Cathleen Clarke: The Past Won’t Stay Put at Margot Samel

It had just rained in New York City when the smell of wet grass and pine in Central Park transported me somewhere else entirely: back in my hometown, a place I hadn’t lived in for a decade. I could’ve sworn I heard the same birds I woke up to every morning. The reminiscence was completely involuntary, but for a few seconds, I found myself caught inside an instant that felt like a different lifetime. This is the feeling that Episodes, Cathleen Clarke’s new exhibitionat Margot Samel, creates. There is no nostalgia or comfort, but instead, the disorienting realization that the past has intruded on the present uninvited.

In Dialogue by Etty Yaniv

Women Sculptor Group: In the End, Everything Gives

At Silver Art Projects, In the End, Everything Gives brings together more than thirty artists from the Women Sculptors Group (WSG), a New York–based network of women-identifying and non-binary sculptors that now includes over 350 members. Installed within the residency spaces at 4 World Trade Center, the exhibition carries the energy of a working community—artists connected through an ongoing commitment to sculpture and material inquiry.

In Dialogue by Ella Jackson

Lacey McKinney: Where Bodies Blur

Born and raised in New York, Lacey McKinney is a New York-based fine artist whose work explores the tensions between interspecies dynamics, gender and ecology, the paradox of life and death, and bodily transformation and decay. Having exhibited nationally, received major grants such as the NYFA/NYSCA Project Grant, and completed residencies including the McColl Center, McKinney’s practice continues to evolve. Her work meditates on the complexities of existence, as self and in relation to others, unraveling the differences that separate us, and highlighting the interdependence entangled within all species, ecosystems, and identities. 

McKinney’s gestural material application and stylistic dynamism merge, meld, reconfigure, and transform figures, flora, and fauna, creating liminal compositions that blur where form begins and ends. Her pigments and paints examine the relationship between predator and prey, a relationship that, though antagonistic, still relies on reciprocity to survive. Insides become outsides, differences become diffused, and touch becomes transformative.

Soft Instructions, Yshao Lin, Soomin Kang
In Dialogue by Chunbum Park

FanFlus: a cross-cultural curatorial collective

Fanfan Yuxuan is a New York–based curator who has worked with galleries and art fairs in Paris and New York. Through this experience, she became attentive to how exhibitions shape the presentation and understanding of artists’ work, and to the gaps that can emerge between artistic intention and exhibition context. Fan develops projects that create platforms for artists, including those connected to graduate programs in the New York metropolitan area, and approaches curating as an evolving practice informed by collaboration and the logistical realities of exhibition-making.