Grace Roselli’s Pandora’s BoxX Project began as something personal: a way to reconnect with a world of artists she’d drifted from while raising two daughters, much of it as a single mother. She started by photographing the few women artists she still knew; each led her to another, and the project grew by conversation and recommendation rather than plan. Nearly 360 portraits later — of artists alongside curators, writers, historians, educators, and museum directors — it had become a record of a community whose influence has rarely been seen whole. Roselli photographs each sitter in their own home or studio, in available light. She then lets them choose the final image, because the portrait isn’t finished until both of them recognize the person in it. Roselli discusses the project’s origins, her way of working, and what nearly 360 encounters revealed.
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.
Galleries and museums play a pivotal role in shaping the careers of the artists they represent, often hosting dinners designed to promote artists and connect them with collectors and curators. This treatment, however, is mainly afforded to well-established artists. Arts professional Anna Yi Xie witnessed this phenomenon firsthand while interning at Gagosian in New York City. In 2024, Xie set out to create an alternative to the gallery-hosted dinner, a platform that offers early-career artists the opportunity to show their work and meet influential figures in the art world. After all, the social and professional networks that artists develop can further their careers just as much as showing their work.
PeepSpace, a contemporary art gallery in Tarrytown, was founded in 2020 by artists Monica Carrier and Jane Kang Lawrence, who set out with a clear idea: artists creating space for other artists. They signed the lease on March 1, just as COVID-19 gripped New York, and by June, they were masked up and hosting their first show PlusOne—pushing forward when most things had come to a halt. Five years and 21 exhibitions later, PeepSpace has held its ground and grown. Now under the co-leadership of Jess Blaustein, Monica Carrier, Ian Etter, Kristen Jordan, Jacquelyn Strycker, and Rachel Sydlowski, the gallery has become a steady fixture for artists and their work.
Artists in residence in a training session at the Golden Lab
In 2012, the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts introduced a one-of-a-kind residency program dedicated to the art of paint. Situated in the heart of central New York, mere steps from the Golden Artist Colors manufacturing facility, a 19th-century barn was transformed into a space that seamlessly blends history and modernity. It offers spacious studios and private apartments, providing a haven for artists to engage with materials and technologies that define contemporary artistic practice. The Golden Foundation Residency Program is a deliberate endeavor to aid professional artists in their quest to explore and master innovative materials and techniques. Each year, the Foundation hosts six Exploratory Residency Sessions, each lasting four weeks and accommodating three artists at a time.
Portrait of Paul Behnke in the studio with Gloria’s Guardian, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 62 x 60 inches, photo courtesy of Robin Stout.
Paul Behnke is a champion of painting – and he does it with evident gusto. His paintings come from idiosyncrasies, life experience, and a process that begins as intuitive, mixed with periods of sharp critical gaze. His paintings have evolved from early contained and minimalistic bold-color geometries, to more recent chaotic forms and layered complexity, at times almost explosive.
At the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency by Collar Works, Granville, NY, July 2019, Photo by Monica Hamilton
Will Hutnick is an artist, curator, co-director of Ortega Y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn from 2015 to 2020 and Director of Artistic Programming at the Wassaic Project upstate NY. In his paintings Will Hutnick is using rollers, and includes other mono-printing-like methods to create repetitive passages which form playful and unexpected relationships between shapes and colors. He shares with Art Spiel some of his work process, reflections on the ways his paintings have developed, and some of his other art related practices.
The roots of a tuft of wild grass pulled up from the ground form an intriguing network of living fibers, interlaced with earth. This tenacious nest is a fitting visual for the perennial phenomena of women’s grass roots art collectives found around the world. Springing forth in the ‘70s collectives such as SOHO20, Artemisia, Women’s Building, Guerilla Girls, Las Damas de Arte, and WARM have provided support and opportunities for women not otherwise readily available in the staunchly patriarchic art world. In the subsequent decades women’s art collectives have proven to be a fertile, popular and diverse multi-purpose force, although unfortunately mainstream institutions have under-acknowledged their impact. Art Historian Kathleen Wentrack, PhD, observes, “[The] numerous exhibitions devoted to feminist art in the last decade or so [devote] little attention to collectives, and [there is] a lack of historical studies of collectives and their influence on contemporary art practices, which continue to be influential to the present day.” This exhibition, “Slečny od maliarskeho stojana,” which translates as “Ladies of the Easel,” presents an opportunity to document the origins of a thriving women’s art collective called LP (formerly known as Lady Painters) founded in 2015 by Jenn Dierdorf and Kelsey Shwetz in Brooklyn, NY. When conceiving of the show, curator Juliana Mrvová used LP as a resource for selecting work. Paintings by Dierdorf and Shwetz, among others, are included in the exhibition, which is presented from June to November 2019 in four cities in Slovikia: Bratislava (the capital), Banská Bystrica, Trebišov and Rimavská Sobota. As an early and on-going member of LP, I’m pleased to have the opportunity to interview Dierdorf and Shwetz about their motives and goals for the LP collective.
Anne Sherwood Pundyk is a painter and writer based in Manhattan and Mattituck, NY. She stains, crops and sews unstretched canvas to construct her work calibrating the interplay of spontaneity and control. She is a proud member of LP.
The Green Door gallery was created at the Divine Mercy Cultural Center to foster a sense of community in the Williamsburg neighborhood. The venue was initiated by Father Thomas Vassalotti, who, along with Father Paul Anel of Heart’s Home, reached out to the artist and curator Elisa Jensen with the wish to connect to the many artists in the neighborhood.
