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Almond Zigmund: A Dance Between Structure and Disruption

In Dialogue
Almond Zigmund, figure ground yellow, 2023, acrylic on paper, 36 x 53”, photo credit: Jenny Gorman

Almond Zigmund’s work occupies the charged space between structure and disruption. Moving fluidly across sculpture, painting, and installation, her practice explores the intersection of geometry, architecture, and lived experience—often in subtle yet powerful ways. I have the pleasure of discussing her work at the end of her recent exhibition at East Hampton’s Guild Hall. In this interview exchange, Zigmund speaks about the formative influences that shaped her, from growing up in a creative household to navigating the distinct geographies of Brooklyn, Las Vegas, and the East End of Long Island. The conversation delves into the improvisational roots of her approach, her ongoing engagement with spatial systems, and how tension—between control and spontaneity, place and perception, the built and the organic—continues to animate her work. With references to theorists, artists, Zigmund offers a thoughtful and richly textured account of how art can be both experiential and critical, formal and deeply human.

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DUMBO Open Studios 2025 with Kate Teale

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Photo: Kate in studio M01, 20 Jay St. with the wall drawing “Falls The Shadow”  in progress. Photo courtesy of David Henderson

On April 26th and 27th, from 1 to 6 pm, artists in DUMBO will open their doors to the public as part of DUMBO Open Studios, offering a rare look inside the art studios along the Brooklyn waterfront. Since the 1970s, DUMBO has been shaped by its vibrant art community. This interview series highlights a handful of participating artists in 2025. Each response offers a glimpse of what’s waiting behind the studio door. Kate Teale has been in DUMBO since January 2019. Her studio is at 20 Jay Street #M01.

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DUMBO Open Studios 2025 with Rodney Ewing

Studies for “The Architecture of Memory and Loss” 2024-2025, Drawings: Ink and Colored Pencil on Paper.

On April 26th and 27th, from 1 to 6 pm, artists in DUMBO will open their doors to the public as part of DUMBO Open Studios, offering a rare look inside the art studios along the Brooklyn waterfront. Since the 1970s, DUMBO has been shaped by its vibrant art community. This interview series highlights a handful of participating artists in 2025. Each response offers a glimpse of what’s waiting behind the studio door. Rodney Ewing has been in DUMBO since 2022. His studio is at 20 Jay Street, #M09.

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DUMBO Open Studios 2025 with Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong

Photo courtesy of Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong

On April 26th and 27th, from 1 to 6 pm, artists in DUMBO will open their doors to the public as part of DUMBO Open Studios, offering a rare look inside the art studios along the Brooklyn waterfront. Since the 1970s, DUMBO has been shaped by its vibrant art community. This interview series highlights a handful of participating artists in 2025. Each response offers a glimpse of what’s waiting behind the studio door. Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong has been in DUMBO since 2015. Her studio is at 20 Jay Street #M10B (mezzanine level).

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Ming Wang’s solo show Through Lingering Window at Fou Gallery

Ming Wang: Through Lingering Windows installation view. Photograph by Ken Lee ©Ming Wang, courtesy of Fou Gallery

Ming Wang’s solo exhibition, Through Lingering Window, curated by Ashley Ouderkirk at Fou Gallery, creates a meditative and healing enclave amidst the bustling streets of Union Square in New York. Located on the seventh floor of a Fifth Avenue building, the gallery becomes an intimate retreat where Wang’s oil paintings evoke a sense of stillness within the restless cityscape.

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The Burden Archives

Featured Project
Western Addition sign, photo Sheila Stover/Erni Burden circa 1960

A 1949 US Federal law set the stage for crisis-level upheaval. Cities across the country used the money it provided to launch “urban renewal” projects that often only added misery to the communities they professed to be helping. In San Francisco, a largely Black neighborhood in Western Addition was targeted on the premise that the vibrant ‘Harlem of the West’ was blighted. This misconception has gone unchallenged until now, thanks to the photographic documentation Ernest Burden III exposed in his late father’s immense photograph archive.

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Some Great Books

Book Review
Some Great Books by Paul D'Agostino

I didn’t have a mandate to compile anything along the lines of a ‘Best Books of the Year’ list, so I didn’t. There are plenty of those out there already anyway. Some even feature hundreds of titles. Hundreds! The restraint is impressive.

Nevertheless, I’d be remiss if I didn’t spread the word a bit about some books I really did relish reading this year, so what follows is a short list of standout titles and a few words about each. Limiting my picks to 12 – plus a couple brief extras I couldn’t resist folding into the mix – seemed logical enough, and they appear here in no particular order. My selections run a gamut and include fiction, nonfiction, essays, critical theory, humor, architecture, art, material history, and a charmingly assembled byproduct of social media. Additionally, several of the titles are books in translation, and ‘excellent syllabus material’ for various types of courses, especially interdisciplinary ones, would be a viable subcategory for nearly everything included here.

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Julia Szabo: Vision and visibility

In Dialogue
A person standing next to an older person in a wheelchair

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Journalist and author Julia Szabo is resolved to establish the world’s first museum to be built by women for women artists. MSeum is going to be a museum with a focus on overlooked artists (Know Unknowns), providing art storage space to creative women and their heirs and offering the most enriching museum experience for blind and low-vision visitors anywhere in the world, with a variety of tactile artworks and architectural features inviting touch, because loss of sight does not mean loss of vision.

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Noa Charuvi: Gal’Ed at York College Arts Gallery

Photo Story
A painting of a landscape

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Noa Charuvi, Cairn, 2023, oil on canvas, 36×72 inches

45 Jacob took a stone and erected it as a pillar. 46 He instructed his kin, “Collect some stones.” They gathered stones, formed a heap, and shared a meal beside it. 47 Laban named it Jegar Sahadutha, while Jacob named it Galeed. 48 Laban declared, “This heap stands as a witness between us today.” Hence, it became known as Galeed.

Genesis, Chapter 31, Verse 45

A Gal’Ed symbolizes a location marked by significant events—deathly moments or sacrifices. As it appears in the Old Testament, it signifies a covenant. In Hebrew, ‘Gal’ is a heap of stones, and it is the same word for ‘wave.’ ‘Ed’ means a witness. This heap of stones becomes an emblem of the pact between Jacob and his father-in-law: their agreement not to harm each other’s possessions or families. Serving as a symbol of shared promises, Jacob sanctifies it, offering to God on this stone.

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In Case of Sam Spillman at Ulterior Gallery

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Installation view, courtesy of Ulterior Gallery

Far from the palatial white cubes of Chelsea or the intimate townhouse spaces of the Upper East Side is a different type of gallery space – one that serves as a reminder of an earlier moment in the art world, and yet persists into the present – the SoHo loft. In his debut solo exhibition, Sam Spillman has created work that probes at this history in In Case Of Sam Spillman at Ulterior Gallery. 

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