Contemporary Art and Culture
In The Tale of Lost Waters at Five Points Arts in Connecticut, Susan Hoffman Fishman exhibits seven vertical scrolls resembling satellite imagery. Four are layered in deep, earthy browns—recalling land formations and dry blood—pressing against vibrant blues reminiscent of water. The bodies of water seem suspended between presence and disappearance, drifting toward an undefined space—a light or a void.
The two-person show of luminous abstract wall works at Atlantic Gallery offers viewers a dynamic sensory experience where light, shadow and unexpected materials form a conversation about how we see and engage with the world.
Dance the Distance: Anne Berlit and Michele Foyer at Atlantic Gallery.
Curated by Suzan Shutan. It runs through March 23, 2025
Barbara Friedman’s first solo exhibition at FROSCH&CO presents commanding paintings—unsettling, visceral, and electric—resembling a Rorschach test on acid. Poured paint mutates into shifting forms: eyes, rabbit ears, chicken legs. The grotesque, the horrific, the sublime, and the comical coexist, each intensifying the other.
A cavernous cubbyhole with a variety of enigmatic gunmetal stalagmites emerges from the relative monotony of the urban backdrop of St. John’s Place in Crown Heights. Janet Goldner’s collection of sculptures, called Zigzags, populate FiveMyles’ exterior space, and while the viewer can enter this space through the gallery, the initial impression of jagged edges, pent-up energy, and the cold solidity of the welded metal objects makes one relieved there is a metal gate between us, the viewer, and them, the sculptures.
Currently on view at Nunu Fine Art’s New York Project Space is View from My Window, a solo exhibition by Taiwanese painter Guan-Hong Lu. The exhibition features over 20 small oil paintings, predominantly 13” x 10” in size, and is housed in the gallery’s lower level—below ground—intensifying the sense of intimacy in both subject matter and conceptual approach. Lu’s subject matter, at first glance, appears as fleeting moments captured in time, but upon closer inspection, they reveal layers of surrealism, irony, and political undertones.
Water moves. It reflects, absorbs, distorts. It never repeats itself. River-Rising, a four-channel video installation by Ellen Kozak and Scott D. Miller, is built on these elements. Filmed along three river estuaries—the Garonne in France, the Bilbao Estuary, and the Hudson River—the work isolates the shifting surfaces of water.
In February 2025, at a gathering of artists and friends, William Norton learned that two gallery spaces—#104 and #108—at 37 North 15th Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn had become available. He had one week to assemble two exhibitions. He accepted the challenge.
Simphiwe Mbunyuza’s ceramic sculptures are a powerful synthesis of ancestral traditions, personal history, and contemporary expression. His recent exhibition, UMTHONYAMA, at David Kordansky Gallery in New York (January 16 – February 22, 2025), presented a body of work that transforms the physical space of the gallery into one of spiritual reflection, cultural storytelling, and artistic innovation.
This past weekend New York saw the latest iteration of the Outsider Art Fair. Started in 1993, it has become a NYC institution and seems to be thriving after a few lean pandemic years. The Fair serves a field that has evolved a great deal over the past 30 years, and I really felt that this year more than in the past. As the number of now “blue chip” or “Old Master Self-Taught” artists dwindle, there’s been an influx of both younger artists and some who push against the definitions of self-taught in the first place. It’s a sticky subject and one that I have no answer to.
Spatial dynamics and human hybridity are central to this month’s roundup of highlights in New York. From monumental sculpture to works intimately interspersed within the home, all things great and small commune and offer reflection upon their relationships to the environments in which they currently reside. The hierarchy between the natural and the manmade is in conversation within this selection of shows through shifting currents of tenuous and harmonious moments.