Yi Hsuan Lai: The Ontology of the Body at SoMad

Yi Hsuan Lai, Rubber, Rubber. Installation view in SoMad, 2025. Imagery courtesy of SoMad and the artist

Yi Hsuan Lai exhibits her works in a solo show at SoMad, a femme- and queer-led art space that serves as a platform for emerging artists to experiment, collaborate, and challenge conventions. SoMad comprises a combined gallery and artist residency program, a production house, and an event space. The name “SoMad” reflects both the physical location — south of Madison Square Park — and the collective’s frustration with the current landscape of resources and support structures available for emerging artists, particularly artists from marginalized communities.

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DUMBO Open Studios 2025 with Ellie Krakow

Ellie Krakow with several pieces from her series Comfort Corners, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, photo by Kay Hickman, courtesy of the artist.

On April 26th and 27th, from 1 to 6 pm, artists in DUMBO will open their doors to the public as part of DUMBO Open Studios, offering a rare look inside the art studios along the Brooklyn waterfront. Since the 1970s, DUMBO has been shaped by its vibrant art community. This interview series highlights a handful of participating artists in 2025. Each response offers a glimpse of what’s waiting behind the studio door. Ellie Krakow has been in DUMBO since 2024. Her studio is at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, 20 Jay Street, #720.

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Lilac Madar: Poppy Pink in Central Park

Featured Project
PoppyPink New York [Rehearsal], June 2024, Participatory Performance, Central Park, New York, NY. Photo: Yonatan H. Mishal

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.

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Hedwig Brouckaert / Peel / Examining the Layers

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Peel (Flowering) 2023 paper on ceramic tiles 77 ½” x 5’ x 1” Photography by Michael Hnatov

Peel (America), a new series by Hedwig Brouckaert, which was supported by a Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation Grant, embodies a significant evolution of her practice that integrates life-defining experiences. The title suggests removing a protective coating which is integral to the artist’s physical process and emotional journey of making the work. Peel (America) is on view at Project: ARTspace, 99 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, from December 19, 2023 to February 20, 2024.

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At the Limits: Elena Dahn at Revolver

Dahn Performance

Thin, translucent layers of shaped and stretched natural latex are mounted onto walls or wooden boards to extend the limits of painting—these are Elena Dahn’s New Bodies, on view at the Buenos Aires-based artist’s first New York exhibition. Hosted by Revolver, a contemporary art venue launched in 2008 by Giancarlo Scaglia in Lima and subsequently in Buenos Aires and on the Lower East Side, the exhibition is an invitation to rethink the relationship between body and painting, performance and mark-making, space and surface.

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Emily Culver: The Idea of a Thing

In Dialogue

Portrait, photo courtesy of the artist

Virginia-based artist Emily Culver’s background is as multifaceted as her artwork. With a father who is a carpenter and contractor and a mother who transitioned from being a midwife to a nursing professor, she was raised in a world that merged craft and body. This upbringing influenced her own creative direction. Adept at procedural tasks, she nonetheless felt a pull towards a less constrained form of expression. College introduced her to painting, but she soon sought more than just surfaces, finding herself intrigued by the interplay of gravity, physics, and mechanics.

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Nancy Bowen: Sometimes a Body is Not Just a Body at WCC Art Gallery

Featured Artist

Nancy Bowen with “Third Eye” and “Throat” from Chakra Series, 2009, mixed media on paper, photo by Lindsay Walt

What links Nancy Bowen’s work at Westchester Community College Art Gallery—from abstract to narrative work—is the presence of the female body in some form. “I will always be compelled to create work from a feminist point of view, work that needles or asks questions, and given our current political and social climate, that seems even more necessary than ever,” Bowen says. The show runs through April 12th, 2023.

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Brie Ruais: Recording with Clay

In Dialogue with Brie Ruais


“Brie Ruais: Movement at the Edge of the Land”, installation of exhibition, courtesy The Moody Center for the Arts and albertz benda gallery. Photo by Nash Baker

Brie Ruais [b. 1982, Southern California] lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 2011. Ruais’ movement-based practice is legible through the scrapes, gouges, and gestures embedded in the surfaces and forms of the ceramic works. Each sculpture is made with the equivalent of her body weight in clay, resulting in human-scale works that forge an intimacy with the viewer’s body. Through her immersive engagement with clay, Ruais’s work generates a physical and sensorial experience that explores a new dialogue between the body and the earth.

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