Colorful, mixed-media exhibitions bring vibrancy to the winter season with splashes of exhilaration and discovery.
Continue reading “Art Spiel Picks: NYC Exhibitions in December 2025”Maureen McCabe: Feminine Surrealism, Witch Culture and the Original Goth
I’ve never been to a séance; however, walking into Maureen McCabe’s exhibition Fate and Magic at the William Benton Museum of Art invokes strong séance vibes. Artworks on black slate whisper, engravings of shooting stars, goddesses, brew potions, and long-forgotten stage magicians appear at the Benton like reliquaries of the past. For over six decades, Maureen McCabe has been an overlooked alchemist of memory, transmuting her personal experiences and arcane cultural references into this intimate magical retrospective.
Continue reading “Maureen McCabe: Feminine Surrealism, Witch Culture and the Original Goth”Earth Suits and Beast Machines
The two-person exhibition Earth Suits and Beast Machines at Cove Street Arts in Portland, Maine, orchestrates a compelling conversation between Boston painter Jennifer Amadeo-Holl and Maine sculptor Mike Libby. This thoughtfully curated show rewards careful attention, presenting work that resists easy consumption and demands genuine engagement from viewers willing to slow down and look deeply.
Continue reading “Earth Suits and Beast Machines”Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in August 2025
HIGHLIGHTS
Across the city, artists are focused on the meaning of visible labor and extracting the potential in the most innocent of found materials. Through unconventional mediums and reclaiming disregarded items like paper or rubber bands, artists are able to tap into universal experiences that inject value and sacredness into everyday objects. At PEEP Projects, Maria Ah Hyun constructs layered paper vessels to serve as ritual objects and gateways into cultural landscapes. Gabrielle Constantine transforms Blah Blah Gallery into a romantic archive of working class textures and sensibilities that honor the excesses of labor. Museum of Art and Wood presents the 2025 cohort for their Windgate Arts Residency program, inviting experimentation and individual perspectives in wood in A Plank in a Shipwreck.
Continue reading “Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in August 2025”Those Who Fulfill the Infinite Labor of Love
Photo Story
The group exhibition titled Those Who Tend at the Warnes Contemporary in Brooklyn is an occasion in which 22 artists come together to celebrate their shared philosophy towards work and life. The title refers to the fact that all the artists here care for others in one form or another, whether they are parents of young children, grownups caring for their elderly parents, or supporting staff for people with disabilities.
Continue reading “Those Who Fulfill the Infinite Labor of Love”The Golden Thread, Part 2
Featured Exhibition
As a textile artist, I am drawn to works that uphold the tradition of fibers vis a vis labor, technique, material, craftsmanship and innovation. In this presentation put forth by Bravin Lee Programs, The Golden Thread 2 displays fiber-themed works taking various forms. Filling the old seaport building from floor to ceiling, room after room reveals different interpretations on what constitutes a “textile” work.
Continue reading “The Golden Thread, Part 2”Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in May 2025
HIGHLIGHTS
I always love that Earth Day is situated right when the city is exploding with new flowers and life. These spring exhibitions show appreciation for our planet by working with found and repurposed materials, honoring their origins while building something new. At the Museum for Art in Wood, Katie Hudnall constructs delightful and “mechanically improbable” animals and curiosity cabinets of found objects in her show, The Longest Distance between Two Points. Drexel University’s Pearlstein Gallery showcases CONTEMPORARY RUIN future visions, a collection of work that meditates on the realities of decay in our cities, offering both a poetic reflection on our everyday lives and practical approaches toward building a more resilient future. South of the city, Lavett Ballard’s solo show at Rowan University, The People Who Could Fly, features striking mixed-media collages that recast stories of African-American folklore and history using layers of imagery.
Continue reading “Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in May 2025”Lilac Madar: Poppy Pink in Central Park
Featured Project
Lilac Madar, best known for her photomontages and assemblages exploring feminist themes, turned to performance in the wake of October 7, 2023, as she began to grapple with mounting evidence of atrocities committed during the Hamas-led massacre in Israel—including the rape, sexual brutalization, and murder of women. Her grief made creation feel impossible—until a vision emerged: she was lost in Central Park, leaving a trail of pink thread behind her. PoppyPink, for her, is an act of remembrance—a body unraveling in real time, marking the absence and memory of the women violated and silenced. Named in part for artist Inbar Haiman (Pink), murdered at the Nova festival, the performance aims to affirm what art demands: to witness, to endure, to insist on presence. In this interview, we take a closer look at the project and its origins.
Continue reading “Lilac Madar: Poppy Pink in Central Park”The Foundations: Lior Modan at Dinner Gallery
Lior Modan’s work invites touch—but not quite. On the somber, richly textured surfaces of velvet, patterns emerge, outlining everyday objects and settings: a watch, Dinner Gallery’s glass door leading to the courtyard, a table under an archway, and various indecipherable but seemingly familiar architectural forms. They are punctuated with scraps of domesticity and quotidian life: lace strips, tree branches, and old-timey tablecloth designs. In the artist’s solo exhibition titled The Foundations, each monochromatic piece quietly outlines the theatricality of everyday life. Oscillating across the terrains of sculpture, frottage, performance, and assemblage, Modan’s work gently unpacks the categorical pretense behind techniques of making.
Continue reading “The Foundations: Lior Modan at Dinner Gallery”Up: Janet Goldner’s Zigzags at FiveMyles
A cavernous cubbyhole with a variety of enigmatic gunmetal stalagmites emerges from the relative monotony of the urban backdrop of St. John’s Place in Crown Heights. Janet Goldner’s collection of sculptures, called Zigzags, populate FiveMyles’ exterior space, and while the viewer can enter this space through the gallery, the initial impression of jagged edges, pent-up energy, and the cold solidity of the welded metal objects makes one relieved there is a metal gate between us, the viewer, and them, the sculptures.
Continue reading “Up: Janet Goldner’s Zigzags at FiveMyles”