Art Spiel – Page 2

June 30, 2026June 30, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

The Whole Water of a River at TSA Brooklyn with Byron Toledo

The Whole Water of a River, installation view

A dead opossum lying in a fetal position along a contaminated riverbank in Quito became, for Byron Toledo, both an encounter and a sculpture. That moment, tender and violent at once, is at the heart of The Whole Water of a River at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Brooklyn, an exhibition that follows the Machángara River from its mountain source through the city. Ceramic animals, distilled plant aromas, and sound recordings gathered along the watershed map the river as a living system that connects hills, ravines, plants, people, and the city itself. The project carries unusual stakes: in 2024, an Ecuadorian court ruled that the rights of the Machángara had been violated, a ruling for which Toledo’s own video work served as evidence. We spoke with the artist about walking the river, collaborating across disciplines, and what it means to make art inside an ecosystem fighting to survive.

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.

June 1, 2026June 1, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Kosuke Kawahara’s Without Innocence, Dissecting and Reassembling at RAINRAIN Gallery

Stepping into the exhibition Without Innocence at RAINRAIN gallery, you are greeted with a plethora of various mediums, ideas, influences, and experimentations. The paintings carry with them several levels of looking, small details to explore, and multiple dimensions within the edges. The photographs set the scene, allowing you to enter another space just as the paintings do, left to explore the worlds that Kawahara creates and builds within it all. The press release introduces a quote from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, “…we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system—from all work to all play, a deadly game (p 28).” This statement lingers alongside my thoughts throughout the exhibition, as I begin to notice more details, connections, and mechanisms that make this exhibition immensely similar to a cyborg in the making. Kawahara takes pieces of the body and fractions of different spaces within the canvas to build something entirely new out of all of these information systems.

May 25, 2026May 27, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Daniel Wiener at Satchel Projects: Out in front of the back of beyond

Out in Front of the Back of Beyond, the title of Daniel Wiener’s current solo exhibition at Satchel Projects, is a perfect pitch for the work on view. The notion of “front and back” strikes a strong chord throughout — explicit in the freestanding sculptures, hinted at in the wall pieces.

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.

May 8, 2026May 7, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Xinyu Liu’s Fool’s Hour at Art Cake: Finding a home to Carry Onward

Upon entering the exhibition, you are greeted by pieces of various sizes and mediums, full of intricacies and exploration. With the pieces being smaller in size, besides the Ferris wheel, you have to get close to see the small details or the depth of space that opens into a world of its own within each piece. Within the works, Liu offers locations such as cities, darkened spaces, carnivals, and other places of transition. Places that one may find themselves when they are beginning to traverse or transition into someplace new. I appreciated that each work was either on the wall or a shelf, giving each a sense of its own place. The space around the pieces gives them an opportunity to breathe and allows viewers to look closely at one and flow seamlessly into the next.

March 4, 2026March 4, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Kate Teale: Vanishing Points and New Places at Smack Mellon

The space in Smack Mellon’s back gallery welcomes you as Kate Teale’s exhibition, Vanishing Points, fills the room, bringing the history of Dumbo into the space. Teale expands space itself through her studies of edge, architecture, and place. The work is a seamless connection of drawings adhered to the walls using Tyvek, making the illusion of space and the real blur into one. The gallery is transformed into a combination of several places, and as visitors turn, they adjust to each new location, finding details offering hints of the places Teale wants us to wander into.