Art Exhibition Review

May 13, 2026May 12, 2026, by Mike Dressel

On the Edge of Meaning: Lucy Sante’s Collages

Interspersed throughout the stately library of the Academy of Arts and Letters in Washington Heights, in and around shelves holding works by Academy members like John Cheever, Pearl S. Buck, and Grace Paley, a new exhibition of collages by the cultural critic, essayist, and Dylanologist Lucy Sante is on display. Knots, organized by curator Kristin Poor, features mostly recent works from the last few years, save one, Haussmann, or the Barricades, which dates to 1979.

May 11, 2026May 9, 2026, by Elizabeth Johnson

Carol Diamond in her studio: Go Ahead, Make Me

During a studio visit with Carol Diamond before her upcoming exhibit, Carol Diamond: Go Ahead, Make Me (Equity Gallery), our discussion of her recent sculptures elicits the term “Janus heads”–not because she makes two-headed portraits, but because each dynamic work encapsulates a battle of competing forces that hint at varying degrees of figuration and diverse human backstories.

March 9, 2026March 7, 2026, by Deborah Wasserman

Qiu Xiaofei: The Theater of Wither and Thrive at Hauser & Wirth

At first glance, Qiu Xiaofei’s paintings appear weightless, washed in vaporous blues and fractured light. They hover between memory and dream, suspended in a luminous haze. But sustained looking alters the experience. The mist does not dissolve — it thickens. What seemed ethereal becomes anatomical. The viewer descends from the sky into the soil, and then further still into the ruptured systems, broken bodies, and unstable architectures that structure human existence. Beneath the atmospheric softness lies something closer to the bowels of what we call life: exposed nerves of paint, skeletal fragments, windows that stare back like watchful eyes. The work stages, narrates, and exposes modes of excavation.

March 3, 2026March 3, 2026, by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

The $650 Show Art History Forgot, Thirteen Women, One Wet Floor, Zero Permission

At 33 Bleecker Street, history does not politely vacate.

In the 19th century, Herman Melville grew up at this address, long before the current building rose here in 1900. A century later, Joel Shapiro kept an early studio in the building before moving on to larger quarters. This winter, the ground-floor gallery Zürcher has been restaging a 1972 exhibition titled 13 Women Artists. Museum curators made the trip to NoHo. Emails arrived from outside the city asking for more time.

March 2, 2026March 20, 2026, by Mer Mora

Cathleen Clarke: The Past Won’t Stay Put at Margot Samel

It had just rained in New York City when the smell of wet grass and pine in Central Park transported me somewhere else entirely: back in my hometown, a place I hadn’t lived in for a decade. I could’ve sworn I heard the same birds I woke up to every morning. The reminiscence was completely involuntary, but for a few seconds, I found myself caught inside an instant that felt like a different lifetime. This is the feeling that Episodes, Cathleen Clarke’s new exhibitionat Margot Samel, creates. There is no nostalgia or comfort, but instead, the disorienting realization that the past has intruded on the present uninvited.