Contemporary Art and Culture
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rose Briccetti’s interdisciplinary and intermedia practice combines deep historical, artistic, and scientific research with artmaking to re-present natural and cultural histories to question systems of power. Her work surrealistically weaves together strange truths, biology, museology, cultural myths, internet culture, and personal experience using humor and vivid visuals.
When I first heard about the pairing of Jai Hart and Kelly Worman in a two-person show at Freight + Volume, I was puzzled. Their formal vocabularies appeared too distinct, too dissonant. But upon entering the exhibition, my skepticism dissolved. Their differences are not discordant—they are dialectical. Both artists, working through abstraction and form, propose modes of seeing and making that are sensitive, inquisitive, and quietly defiant. While their materials and gestures diverge, Hart and Worman converge in a feminist-postmodern sensibility that challenges the hegemonic logics of painting, and, more subtly, the gendered histories that underpin it.
As a textile artist, I am drawn to works that uphold the tradition of fibers vis a vis labor, technique, material, craftsmanship and innovation. In this presentation put forth by Bravin Lee Programs, The Golden Thread 2 displays fiber-themed works taking various forms. Filling the old seaport building from floor to ceiling, room after room reveals different interpretations on what constitutes a “textile” work.
The grand halls of Milan’s Palazzo Reale currently host a seminal tribute to artistic defiance and fierce individuality. On view from February 26 through June 22, 2025, Io Sono LEONOR FINI (I Am LEONOR FINI) presents one of the most comprehensive retrospectives dedicated to an artist whose untamed, rebellious gaze still challenges and mesmerizes viewers from across the temporal divide.
On The Spot is a terrific new web series that seeks to document the histories of women artists in NYC from the 1950s to the 2000s. The ambitious mission is to document and present in three-minute videos the history of later 20th-century artists who have often been overlooked and underrepresented in the larger art world. They call themselves “a feminist art history nonprofit.” There are 40 videos so far produced, with plans for a great many more. The videos are a free public resource, accessible on the organization’s website.