artistic process – Art Spiel

June 23, 2026July 15, 2026, by Art Spiel

What Remains: in dialogue with Arghavan Khosravi

Altarpieces—historically sites of devotion, revelation, and spiritual certainty—become something altogether different in Arghavan Khosravi’s What Remains, currently on view at Uffner & Liu through July 2. The exhibition brings together large-scale wall works, a freestanding sculpture, and an intimate suite of new altar-inspired paintings that continue Khosravi’s ongoing exploration of the forces that shape women’s lives under political, cultural, and religious systems of control. Drawing equally from Persian miniature painting and medieval European iconography, the artist constructs layered worlds where architectural structures become psychological spaces, symbols migrate across histories, and moments of resistance emerge within conditions of constraint. Rather than offering resolution, the works linger in states of suspension—between freedom and captivity, memory and displacement, devotion and doubt.

May 5, 2026May 4, 2026, by Claire Haik

Philadelphia Artist Studio Visits: Deirdre Murphy 2026

I met Dierdre Murphy for our studio visit at Rolling Hill Park on one of the first true days of spring. She strode up the forested lane with a bright smile, and I followed her to a yellow cottage nestled among the trees and many meandering hiking trails. Bathed in the sound of tweeting of birds, Murphy explained her long history of working with the Lower Merion Conservancy both as a volunteer and as their Climate Artist-in-Residence. There, she has created several site-specific works, including a spectacular mural translating bird migration data into bright organic shapes.

June 5, 2025June 6, 2025, by Jan Dickey

The Bone and Muscle: A Conversation with Dona Nelson

In Dialogue

For decades, Dona Nelson has dissolved the formal boundaries of painting: refusing to apply pigment to just one side of the canvas, mounting the stretchers of her double-sided paintings on freestanding metal stands, and letting them occupy gallery floors like sculptural interlopers. In her current two-person show with Andrew Ross at Thomas Erben Gallery, however, the painter has ceded the floor space entirely, anchoring her three new works squarely to the wall.

February 6, 2023March 1, 2023, by Amy Talluto

Whisperings from the Wormhole with @talluts

How is an Artist Like TV’s Columbo?

A picture containing person, person, green, male

Description automatically generated — Publicity photo of Peter Falk from the television program “Columbo,” NBC Television

Do you remember how people were bingeing TV shows like The Sopranos or Mad Men during those long pandemic days and nights? Well, I was also bingeing–but on that old television chestnut, Columbo. If you’ve never watched it, Columbo is a detective murder mystery show, but…it’s an anti-whodunnit. The show always opens with all of us witnessing the villain committing the crime (off-camera—which is much appreciated by the squeamish). It’s a unique formula for a detective show because we know right from the get-go who the killer is. The audience watches Peter Falk as Detective Lt. Columbo, guilelessly but cunningly noticing clues, making connections, and solving the case, all the while hilariously pestering the murderer to distraction.