artist interview – Art Spiel

November 3, 2026November 4, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Babs Reingold: Forest Bathing at Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art

For two decades, Babs Reingold has reflected throughout her mixed media work on the intersections of poverty, climate change, and beauty in the environment. In her current solo show, Forest Bathing at Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, Tarpon Springs, Florida, brings together two ongoing series, Hair Nest and Lost Trees. Both series mark a deliberate shift toward celebrating the beauty and resilience of nature. Whether confronting social inequities, ecological destruction, or the persistence of beauty amid crisis, her work arises from a deep belief that art can create both awareness and change. By transforming unconventional materials—human hair, salvaged wood, silk organza—into immersive environments, Reingold invites visitors to think about their place within larger systems of survival, destruction, and renewal. We discussed this exhibition in the context of her larger body of work.

October 22, 2026October 22, 2026, by Xuezhu Jenny Wang

Meet at the Ferris Wheel: Kathleen Beausoleil’s Plein Air Paintings Combine Psychology and Light

Painter Kathleen Beausoleil is enamored by her backyard, literally. The fair grounds and beaches that are synonymous to her home state, New Jersey, form her primary subjects. Visiting local fairgrounds each summer, she paints plein air, out in the open, and on view in her latest solo show at The Painting Center are works that beautifully capture the light, vibrancy, and togetherness of these places. After speaking with the artist, I understand that Beausoleil’s scenes are not only advanced in their painterly technique, but created through perspectives cleverly scaffolded by sociological terms around gathering and group behaviour.

October 15, 2026October 15, 2026, by Claire Haik

Two Shows in Dialogue: A Conversation with Tatyana Kazakova and Anna Shukeylo

New Jersey’s Watchung Arts Center brings together two distinct solo exhibitions: Entropic Flora by Anna Shukeylo and Symphony for the Unnoticed by Tatyana Kazakova. Both artists weave between abstraction and realism to create intimate portraits of nature, but their styles and vantage points diverge in dynamic ways. Kazakova fills the sprawling upstairs gallery with large drawings and paintings that pack the space with thickets, foliage, and tangled old growth, inviting viewers to contemplate the boundaries between wild spaces. In the lower gallery, Shukeylo’s compositions erupt with vibrant gestural brushmarks that capture fleeting moments of blooming flowers at their peak splendor. In this conversation, Kazakova and Shukeylo discuss their work, studio practices, and thematic vantage points, revealing the very different paths they take to create their images of nature.

September 10, 2026September 9, 2026, by Cynthia Chen

This is Me Looking: In Dialogue with Wen-You Cai on Collaborating with Her Six-Year-Old Self

In 1996, a six-year-old child was given a camera and sent out to capture the world through her eyes. She aimed the lens at her father’s back against the Twin Towers, at her own blurred hand, at a sculpture in a museum, at Buddhist drawings on the wall. She had recently arrived in the United States, and the world in front of her was made of curiosity, novelty, and strangeness.

September 1, 2026September 1, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Atay Ilgun and Jonathan Carmel on ./spiral at Fondazione Aversano

How does a field barely a decade old start to have a past? ./spiral takes up that question, gathering eleven artists who were present at the early days of AI, code, and blockchain art and asking each to pick up a formative work, tool, or loose end and carry it forward from where they are now. For co-curator Atay Ilgun, a London-based artist and technologist, the burst of new tools between 2017 and 2022 has only lately settled far enough into the past to be seen clearly. His fellow curator, SuperRare’s Jonathan Carmel, describes the return as a way of moving forward by first turning around. The works cross from screen into matter along the way, Helena Sarin’s ceramics drawing AI imagery toward ancient clay, Robbie Barrat’s Plexiglas prints nudging it back toward the glow of a monitor. Presented by SuperRare at Justin Aversano’s Fondazione Aversano in New York, September 3–10. Here, Ilgun and Carmel discuss how the show came together, the move from screen to object, and the histories their artists carry forward.

August 5, 2026August 20, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Cantilevers at Roundabouts Now

Installation view of Cantilevers - Katy Fischer & Marie Lorenz

Katy Fischer and Marie Lorenz go back to the mid-90s and the printmaking department at RISD, where the sheer amount there was to learn on a technical level sealed both of their paths as artists. Cantilevers, their two-person exhibition at Roundabouts Now in Kingston, includes no printmaking at all — yet a printmaker’s habit of setting up a repeatable process and then letting it devolve runs through both bodies of work. Lorenz, who has operated a tide taxi in New York Harbor since 2005 in boats she designs and builds, shows kinetic, pendulum-based sculptures weighted with porcelain casts of objects found on the beach. Fischer’s script-like porcelain shapes and new mosaics draw on techniques with roots reaching back 1,500 years. In the conversation that follows, the two artists discuss their shared history, the systems behind their work, and the tension of balancing porcelain on a single point.

August 4, 2026August 4, 2026, by Meg Lipke

Polychrome at Bernay Fine Arts

Installation view: Polychrome, Bernay Fine Art

Polychrome, on view at Bernay Fine Arts, brings together paintings by Jenny Kemp, Audrey Stone, and Deborah Zlotsky in an exhibition on abstraction and geometric structure. Across three distinct practices, the artists use color as structure and sensory experience, although each arrives at abstraction through her own internal logic. Here abstraction is a form of concentration, examining the texture of experience: how can attention intensify and shift? How can time accumulate? How can systems hold together and slip apart? Artist Meg Lipke, a long-time colleague and friend of the artists, visited the show and addressed questions for the following conversation.

July 20, 2026August 20, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Timothy Makepeace: From Thirty Feet to One Million Miles

Timothy Makepeace has spent nine years making art about one of the most complex machines humanity has ever built. Since his first visit to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in 2016, the artist has developed an expansive body of work in response to the James Webb Space Telescope — its gold-plated beryllium mirrors, its acoustic test chambers, the light it gathers from increasingly distant points in time. The culmination of that inquiry is Ghost in the Machine, on view at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC, through August 9, 2026. We spoke with Makepeace about working with NASA engineers, the formal decisions behind his square-format drawings, and what kept drawing him back to a telescope now orbiting the Sun a million miles from Earth.

July 2, 2026June 28, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Dakota Gearhart: All Matter Is Alive

Dakota Gearhart grew up on a Florida coastline where algae blooms, sewage outflows, and bikini contests share the same shoreline, and her work has been carrying that mix of beauty, decay, and amusement into a much bigger frame ever since. Across animation, sculpture, performance, and sound, she builds video worlds where pixels sing, electricity becomes sentient, and the nonhuman shows up on equal footing with the rest of the cast. Her ongoing animated series Life Touching Life is hosted by Tiffany, a half-algae, half-woman figure who guides viewers through episodes shaped with collaborators — poets, scientists, activists, caretakers — whose lives already reflect the worldview the work is reaching toward. It’s funny, strange, and serious in roughly equal measure, which turns out to be the right register for the worlds it stages.

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.