Michelle Mercaldo, an artist and master craftsperson in her own right, is hosting a strong group show in her jewelry showroom, featuring the work of Isabel Riley, John Guthrie, and Judy Riola. Michelle’s own practice is in fine metalwork, and that sensibility, precision, and materiality, with a feel for surface, inform whose work she chooses to put on her walls.
American Abstract Artists turns 90 this year, an unusual achievement for an artist-run group. Its anniversary show, Abstract by Definition: An Index, opened in April at Art Cake in Brooklyn, curated by Saul Ostrow, who brought 88 current members together under a single roof: a curatorial puzzle, an organizational feat, and a long-running argument about what abstraction can be. A companion exhibition at D. Wigmore Fine Art on West 57th Street focuses on the group’s founders and work made between 1936 and 1950 and runs through July. Here, painter Jacob Cartwright, who serves as AAA’s Secretary, reflects on the group’s nomination-only structure, how a show this size actually comes together, and where he wants AAA to go next.
Karla Black presents her first show in New York City since 2016, and inaugurates Rodder’s expanded Upper East Side gallery space.
Karla Black is a canonized Scottish artist known for working with basic art materials like plaster, paper, and chalk, alongside beauty products like bath bombs, rouge, Vaseline, and lipstick, all in shy pastel colors to create womb-like, abstracted dreamscapes. At Rodder, she creates a site-specific installation, painting Rococo silhouettes in light hues on mirrors as well as constructing monumentally delicate, scented sculptures that glide through the space, chiming in on somatic echoes of the building’s historical narrative, and celebrating feminine beautification rituals.
Few New York galleries build their programs around the kind of organizing principle that anchors Carter Burden Gallery. Since 2008, the Chelsea space has focused on artists with long careers that haven’t followed conventional commercial arcs. Here, Associate Executive Director Marlena Vaccaro and Assistant Director Sarah Leon discuss the gallery’s mission, the values guiding their curatorial choices, the thinking behind the current exhibition, Material Matters, and what that focus has opened up.
Kuu Moments of Circularity On View Through: April 30, 2026 Featuring Jinn Yagi and Mabo Curated by Vida Sabbaghi Empire Stores’ Gallery 55, Brooklyn, NY @cope_nyc @jinnjinny @mabo.works @iwgallery @empirestoresdumbo
Kuu Moments of Circularity brings together artists Jinn Yagi and Mabo from Japan to the US for the first time in a two-person exhibition curated by Vida Sabbaghi. Transforming the popular high-traffic area into a space of contemplation, Sabbaghi embraces the materially rich and expressive works of Mabo and Yagi in an installation that speaks to the richness of the structural beams, slick concrete, and industrial feel of the environment.
Artwork by Jinn Yagi; image courtesy of Luckey Cruz
Artwork by Mabo; image courtesy of Manonce
The images we see in the final presentation result from countless layers of reexamining prior photographs taken by Yagi, from the micro to the macro, delving into philosophical explorations of depth, time, space, and existence. As the textures of paint are built up, a Rorschach aesthetic emerges, inviting the viewer to find meanings through these abstract revelations. With breathtaking views of the river mere steps away, one is apt to remember how exceptional this particular geographical point is, and an opportunity to engage in the multilayered concepts presented by the artists is offered through these works.
The building up in Yagi’s process feels like a seamless dance with Mabo’s scraping away of the metallic surfaces to reveal discoveries beyond its gleaming facade. This push-pull of tension is an alchemical dialogue that opens up lines of inquiry between the viewer and artists. As abstracted images meld and sway, parallels with the woodgrain and metal fixtures they share space with emerge. Similarly to how nature is extracted and transformed into interior landscapes, so too are the materials that the artists incorporate and draw inspiration from. Yagi’s work combines photography and painting onto Juraku-shi, an eco-friendly paper derived from limestone. This dialogue between Mabo and Yagi that Sabbaghi brings together is seamless, sophisticated, and still very accessible to the wide audiences they serve within the bustling environment in which they commune. With Dumbo Open Studios approaching, it’s a welcome stop to weave into the weekend festivities.
One Blue Bead Sargent’s Daughters 370 Broadway, New York, NY Closes April 18, 2026 Featuring: Wendy Red Star @sargentsdaughters
Wendy Red Star’s One Blue Bead took shape as a powerful exhibition at Sargent’s Daughters. Centering stories, archives, ancestral knowledge, and lived experiences of tribal members of the Apsáalooke Nation, the artist retraced the colonized language, white-washed histories, and manipulative valuations used by the Dutch when the land was “purchased” from members of the Munsee tribe in exchange for beads in 1626. With no real record of said transaction, Red Star set out to explore the historical exchanges of beads through many forms, including trade routes, markets and values, production, and the aesthetics of beads as objects.
This thoughtful investigation included enlarged, scaled-up versions of beads on the floor, as well as walls lined with stunning watercolor studies of beads. Upon entering the gallery, visitors were welcome to take the interactive newspaper that contained important historical context and information, such as the valuations of beads and routes they would have been traded along. This exhibition contemplated and challenged institutionalized colonization in an engaging way, while reflecting on place and the many aspects of Manhattan that remain at the center of it all.
Listening All Night to the Rain On View Through: April 25, 2026 Lisson Featuring John Akomfrah 508 W 24th St. New York, NY @lisson_gallery
Listening All Night to the Rain, featuring a multi-channel installation by John Akomfrah,is a captivating experience, drawing together powerful footage of social uprisings across the globe, highlighting freedom and independence movements, including the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya; Nigeria’s fight for nationhood;the Congo’s fight for independence from Belgium; and the 1947 Partition of India.The United States is also centered on an examination of action around civil rights, women’s liberation, and non-violent protest, particularly through the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).The culling together of this footage is interwoven with natural habitats, lush and green, stormy and watery, dynamic and meditative. Voices narrate, and a range of vibrant sounds craft elevated ways of connecting to the content in visceral ways that expand beyond the visual and auditory, into an elevated state of consciousness. The lived experiences on screen are heartened, and in a sense, prescient. The experience is just as much about listening as it is about watching. More importantly, it is about feeling. In the dark environment, the expansive projections envelop visitors on all walls of the viewing room. Through this capsule, we are transported, transfixed, and hopefully, transformed. It is a melding of archival footage, set in a cinematic setting that resonates deeply with its audience through the audio and visual components that depict the many emotions and experiences that have been defined and forever changed through human actions and interactions. Liberation and devastation are connected through geopolitical decisions that can feel distant, yet so immediate. With the title inspired by Su Dongpo’s poetry, a millennium later, we are asked to reckon with how and what has changed in all these years since. As we continue to fight back against the age-old war machine and colonial limbs of the wicked empire, we must study past movements to organize, exercise rights, and continue to build upon the hard and brave work started by our predecessors. This is a must-see that should be on everyone’s list.
About the writer: Yasmeen Abdallah is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator, and educator examining history, contemporary culture, materiality, allegory, and space. She has been an artist/lecturer at institutions including New Museum, Pratt Institute, Sarah Lawrence College, Residency Unlimited, BRIC, Kean University, Parsons, Columbia University, Children’s Museum of NYC, El Barrio Artspace, Fairleigh Dickinson, and University of Massachusetts. She holds Bachelor’s degrees in Anthropology (focus in Historical Archaeology) and in Studio Art with honors, with a Minor in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies from the University of Massachusetts; and received an MFA in Fine Arts, with distinction, from Pratt Institute. Exhibitions include Art in Odd Places; the Boiler; Bronx Art Space; Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center; Cornell University; Ed Varie; Elizabeth Foundation; NARS Foundation; Open Source; Pratt Institute; PS122 Gallery; Spring Break Art Show; University of Massachusetts; and Westbeth. Publications include Anthropology of Consciousness; Ante Art; Art Observed; Bust Magazine; Emergency Index; Hyperallergic; Papergirl Brooklyn; Free City Radio; Radio Alhara; Tussle Magazine; the Urban Activist; and Transborder Art. Her work is in public, private, and traveling collections in the U.S. and abroad. @86cherrycherry
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.
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.
Tom LaDuke, Chain, 2015, Acrylic and canvas over panel, 87” x 153”
Across trippy, iridescent seas, massive, eerie interiors, and uncanny, translucent forms, Tom LaDuke composes intimate “letters” to the cultural ghosts that shaped him—poetic reflections on perception, memory, and the subtle currents of emotional drift.
Love letters straight from your heart Keep us so near while apart I'm not alone in the night When I can have all the love you write
Installation view, photo courtesy of the Shirley Project Space
Walking into this show on a cold, blustery night, you are greeted by large windows illuminated out by gallery light. Inside, you are met with a collection of color, light, and energy. Each piece in the exhibition Spectral Evidence uses mainly acrylic to illuminate new spaces by dissolving edges, blending colors, and allowing gradients to calmly and smoothly envelope the space within the works. While each artist in the show has their own take on creating their own spaces, they use many conventions of painting and abstraction to create new forms and environments to experience, and each piece seems to flow well into the next. The gallery layout lends itself to a meandering space.
Tom McGlynn, This Here, installation view, Rick Wester Fine Art, New York
Tom McGlynn continues to grow a decade-long train of thought with a new selection of paintings in This Here at Rick Wester Fine Art. Consistent with his oeuvre, he arrays a selection of color rectangles suspended within various fields of color. An acquaintanceship with the origin of this direction, accompanied by a fresh pair of eyes, will enable a viewer to put aside the parallels with Mondrian, Albers, or even Hans Hoffmann, and see these works anew.
