Photo Story by Etty Yaniv

Public Events in all Five Boroughs

Local Artists and Cultural Organizations in Each Borough to Host Outdoor, Socially Distanced Press Conferences with Performances March 18-19

One year after New York City’s arts and cultural sector suddenly shut down over the period of one week in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, events in each borough will mark the somber anniversary. Comprised of speeches by local elected/cultural leaders and performances by New York artists, this day of programming memorializes the shut down while looking forward to the needs of a resilient NY artistic community. The events are united by the dual themes of #CultureRemembers and #CultureForward, and will take place on Thursday, March 18, and Friday, March 19. Local leaders and artists will participate in all of them.

Photo Story by Etty Yaniv

Beth Dary at The Front Room Gallery

Art Spiel Photo Story

The Front room Gallery hosts an online tour of “Aqua/Terra”, the beautiful and evocative solo exhibition of sculpture, installation, photograms, layered egg tempera and encaustic drawings by New York Artist, Beth Dary. The artworks in “Aqua/Terra” explore the power of water throughout natural forms and forces of nature, as a force to shape the land, sustain life, and destroy it. Beth Dary’s work also responds to the effect of human activity on land and water – bubbles of ancient carbon dioxide captured in Arctic ice, the rising tides due to the climate crisis, and fractal patterns formed by the liquid contaminants in urban runoff – in transition due to our culture’s impact on the environment.  

Artist Interview by Alicia Puig

Rituals & Reflections with Ceramic Artist and Painter Jen Dwyer

In the several years preceding the pandemic, Jen Dwyer completed her MFA in Ceramics at the University of Notre Dame, exhibited at Miami Context in 2019 as well as in back-to-back iterations of Spring/Break, and saw her work profiled by Forbes and Architectural Digest. Then, when the rapidly increasing toll of the coronavirus caused the collective art world to press pause on what promised to be yet another whirlwind year, she took the slower pace of life as an opportunity to embrace deeper introspection in her studio practice. This newfound creative intuition wove its way into the production of her most recent collection of sculptures and paintings, which the artist recently debuted at Wassaic Project in New York.

Exhibition Review by Adam Aslan

On the Beauty of Collaboration – The Border and Home Gallery Co-Exhibition “Last Wash at Midnight”

At a time when one would have to work 78 hours at minimum wage to afford a studio apartment in most of the US, the idea of a rusting laundromat provides a fitting theme for an exhibition to reflect the struggles faced by so many in the US. While the show curated by Jamie Martinez evokes layers of meaning, the sagging laundry machine of Chelsea Nader, provides an ethos for the current state of the world grappling with economic stress in a pandemic.

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Exhibition Review by Sophia Ma

Belonging to P.A.D. (Project Art Distribution)

The artist-run Project Art Distribution (better known as P.A.D. or @project_art_distribution on Instagram) hosts day-long outdoor exhibitions on versatile packing 72”x80” pads. Set up in Soho, one of New York’s art and retail hubs, the padded surfaces become the metaphorical and physical exhibition space of the usual pristine white cube galleries. Unlike the current Soho rental clientele of luxury brands and gallery spaces, P.A.D. has no walls. Lacking barriers in more than one way, the sidewalk gallery provides the public, the artists, the curators, and the organizational collaborators a welcomed openness to art and discussion. The project creates an ongoing network that ever-expands its community.

Artist Profile by Etty Yaniv

Joy Curtis: With Every Fiber at Pelham Art Center

Joy Curtis was born in Valparaiso, Indiana, and grew up in rural Indiana and Iowa. In college, she studied painting while making objects outside the medium. Later, Curtis earned her MFA at Ohio University where she studied sculpture. In 2002, she moved to Bushwick, Brooklyn, and has been living and working there since that time. Curtis has been represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend since 2010, and has had 5 solo shows with them. She has been included in other recent exhibitions at the Pelham Art Center, Ceysson and Bénétière, the Aldrich Museum (CT), and T.S.A (Brooklyn). Curtis is the recipient of fellowships from Socrates Sculpture Park and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her work has been reviewed in the New Yorker, Hyperallergic, ArtCritical, and Saatchi Online, and she has been featured on Gorky’s Granddaughter and James Kalm’s Rough Cut video blogs. Currently Curtis is working on a large, outdoor sculpture made of fabric that will be included in a summer show.

Artist Profile by Jen Pepper

Shari Urquhart: Selections from the Fuzzy Museum and other warm worlds

Shari Urquhart produced visual narratives from candy-like yarns that seem to glow. Each piece presents sensual fields that we can easily get lost in, absorbing each story as it slowly unfurls. The colorful works are made from fibers of wools, rayons, angoras, mohairs, metallics, fake fur, plastic and even Urquhart’s own dog’s hair. Each of her tapestries exhibits a brevity of controlled execution, awareness of composition that is meticulously constructed, making each piece monumental.

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In Dialogue by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

Heather McLeod: Hide and Seek

In Dialogue with  Heather McLeod

Heather V McLeod is an artist exploring identity and the psychology by which we perceive others. Interested primarily in portraiture and representative work, McLeod creates pieces with the intent of capturing the character of the figure portrayed. She plays with the use of symbolism and concealment to enhance the narrative and evoke a playful yet ominous side to portraiture.

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Artist Interview by Etty Yaniv

Babs Reingold: Palette of Materials

In her multi layered installations Babs Reingold‘s brings together drawing, sculpture, found objects, and at times video, to create potent environments alluding to the body, the environment, and the passage of time. Equipped with a fine tuned sensibility to materiality and an imaginative approach to spatiality, Babs Reingold’s installations inhabit spaces as an alternate force of nature and take a life of their own.

Exhibition Review by Patricia Miranda

Alexander Rutsch, The Voluptuous Eye at Kenise Barnes Fine Art

My first encounter with the work of the artist Alexander Rutsch was through his daughter, the artist Alexandra Rutsch Brock (Alexi), a friend and one of my fellow co-founders of the London Calling Collective. I visited the Rutsch family home in Pelham where she grew up and where her mother still lives. The home, an eccentric, polymathic cacophony of hand-hewn art and embodied life, reflects my experience of Alexi as a passionate and energetic artist, teacher, and friend. A labyrinthine artist’s house- the type that real estate brokers abhor, is brim-full of paintings, sculptures, built-in furniture, object d’art, hand-tiled stone walls, curved nooks, hallways to a warren of rooms, and Alexander Rutsch’s overflowing attic studio, where the work from this exhibition came. I marvel at the fecundity of imagination a childhood in that house must have fostered. This history makes it a special honor to step back and review the exhibition, Alexander Rutsch, a Pop-Up, at Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Larchmont, NY, on view March 4-7 and March 11-14. 2021. The exhibition includes paintings on panel, works on paper, sketchbook pages, and whimsical bronze sculptures cast from industrial materials and found objects.