#art – Art Spiel

October 5, 2026October 2, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Confluence: A Synergetic Vision at UrbanGlass

Nancy Cohen and Anna Boothe Breach, 9 x 27 x 15 inches, Glass, 2026. Third View. 9 x 27 x 15 inches. Photo credit of Edward Fausty

Artists Anna Boothe and Nancy Cohen met more than twenty-five years ago, and that serendipitous meeting grew into a lasting collaboration. Confluence, their current show at UrbanGlass, features their new body of work. It grew out of joint research and material studies they began in 2024 during a Creative Glass Fellowship at WheatonArts in Millville, New Jersey, where they studied the region’s glassmaking history from the 18th century to the present, with emphasis on how the industry affected the local ecology, waterways, and inhabitants. As Dr. Ferris Olin notes in the exhibition essay, glassmakers settled along the Maurice River for the quality of its sand and its route to market. The industry grew alongside Philadelphia’s pharmaceutical companies and their need for glass containers, which helps explain why scientific glass is prominent in this work.

September 23, 2026September 23, 2026, by Art Spiel

Tim Kent’s Sojourn Was Never Actually a Rest

Tim Kent, PASSY, 2026, oil on canvas, 56 x 60 in ( 142.2 x 152.4 см)jpg, photo courtesy of Tim Kent

Sojourn, a new body of work by Canadian-American painter Tim Kent, opened recently at Hollis Taggart’s Chelsea location runs through October 17. Ask Kent what the show is about. He gives you a clean, simple answer. The main idea is just taking a break from working too hard. It’s the kind of respite that chronically overworked New Yorkers rarely give themselves.

In Kent’s telling, rest isn’t relaxation. It’s rebellion.

September 21, 2026September 18, 2026, by Eva Zanardi

AMEN : NEMMEN — The Discipline of Listening

The opening of AMEN : NEMMEN, Vince Briffa’s installation on faith and belief, fell on the first rain of the year, closing out a hundred-and-twenty-day drought and the first completely dry Maltese summer in six years. I had not yet met the island’s infamous heat, and on September 14th, as if the island had been holding its breath, the grip finally let go. The narrow stone bridge into Fort St Elmo and the Chapel of St Anne, the exhibition’s site, act as a conduit through time, folding centuries and space into a single, intimate passage of entry. Fort St Elmo’s honey-hued limestone stood monumental, solemn, and unbothered in the late-summer light, the kind of backdrop that makes an installation about faith feel almost inevitable.

September 11, 2026September 10, 2026, by Art Spiel

Laurie Nye at Uffner & Liu

The liminal space between abstraction and figuration—between the defined and the loose, the restrained and the free—is the terrain of Laurie Nye’s first solo exhibition at Uffner & Liu in New York. In her new paintings, which range from intimate, jewel-like compositions to modestly monumental canvases, Nye proposes that everything we see can be two things at once: a flower and a portal, a tree and a cosmic axis, a landscape and a state of mind.

June 2, 2026June 1, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Run by Artists, Built for Artists: OyG and the Cornell MFA

What does a gallery look like when the artists are in charge? Founded in 2013, Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG) is an artist-run collective with no fixed curatorial line and a non-hierarchical structure shared equally among its eight co-directors. Since 2023, it has become the annual New York home for Cornell University’s MFA thesis exhibition — a partnership built on a simple premise: artist-run spaces value experimentation, innovation, and risk-taking, giving graduate artists the freedom to present work without commercial constraints or curatorial imperatives.