charcoal drawing – Art Spiel

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 15, 2026July 14, 2026, by Thomas Motley

How Unexpected: Encounters With the Divine, Emelie Stenhammar

Emelie Stenhammar’s works echo the aims of Elizabeth Murray to reshape our relationship with painting. Cozy rectangular formats are denied. Twisted Perspective prevails. Both artists’ depictions of domestic spaces reflect a mutual fondness for cartoons and whimsy. Stenhammar paints compelling allegory about the human condition, with a compassionate gaze akin to that of Kathe Kollwitz.

February 24, 2026February 23, 2026, by Ella Jackson

Lacey McKinney: Where Bodies Blur

Born and raised in New York, Lacey McKinney is a New York-based fine artist whose work explores the tensions between interspecies dynamics, gender and ecology, the paradox of life and death, and bodily transformation and decay. Having exhibited nationally, received major grants such as the NYFA/NYSCA Project Grant, and completed residencies including the McColl Center, McKinney’s practice continues to evolve. Her work meditates on the complexities of existence, as self and in relation to others, unraveling the differences that separate us, and highlighting the interdependence entangled within all species, ecosystems, and identities.

McKinney’s gestural material application and stylistic dynamism merge, meld, reconfigure, and transform figures, flora, and fauna, creating liminal compositions that blur where form begins and ends. Her pigments and paints examine the relationship between predator and prey, a relationship that, though antagonistic, still relies on reciprocity to survive. Insides become outsides, differences become diffused, and touch becomes transformative.

December 9, 2024December 8, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

Mindscape: Patterns of Identity at L’Space

A couple of men in a room

Description automatically generated — Moran Kliger, Installation

In the group show Mindscape: Patterns of Identity at L’Space, people, animals, and places shift and juxtapose, coming together like pieces of a map—one that charts the shared inner terrain of memory, trauma, and identity. Curated by Noa Rabinovich Lalo and Carolina Werebe, with L’Space founder Lily Almog, the show, as Almog puts it, draws on “a shared Israeli heritage and a deep connection to the contemporary art scene in Israel, a country with a rich cultural history and traditions amidst ongoing uncertainty.” And it’s that sense of uncertainty that pulls everything together—voids and absences linger in the air. Even when the work seems rooted in specific places, the setting remains layered and elusive, offering more questions than answers. This is evident in Netta Lieber Sheffer’s sweeping charcoal drawing installation of Sigmund Freud’s Vienna clinic, where he lived and worked for 47 years before fleeing the Nazis in 1938.

August 12, 2024August 8, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich / I am Me at the Neue Gallerie

A room with art on the wall

Description automatically generated — Installation views of “Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich / I Am Me” at Neue Galerie New York. Photography by Annie Schlechter, courtesy Neue Galerie New York

German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, born in 1876, is relatively unknown in the United States. This is quite surprising, considering she painted the first nude self-portraits known to have been made by a woman. Many of these audacious portraits capture her own pregnancy—another first among Western women artists, paving the way for later figures like Alice Neel. Modersohn-Becker’s portraits of women spanning all ages—bold in their composition, subtle in their detail, and utterly present—strike a powerful note throughout the first major retrospective of her art in the United States, curated by Jill Lloyd at the Neue Galerie New York, and fittingly titled Ich bin Ich / I Am Me.

May 6, 2024December 7, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

Jeanne Ciravolo – the resistance in making do

In Dialogue

A person standing in front of a wall with paintings

Description automatically generated — Residency at the Anderson Center, 2019, Red Wing, MN

In her mixed-media work, Jeanne Ciravolo integrates collage, print, and stitching, materializing the stories of her female relatives—their stories of loss and hope. The female figures often reference representation of women in art history, such as medieval carvings or paintings from the Renaissance. The figure imagery is based on Ciravolo’s sketches, figure drawings, photos from newspapers and magazines, or photos she took.

August 29, 2023August 29, 2023, by Meg Hitchcock

Martha Bone and Janice Caswell: Two Solo Shows at Garrison Art Center

A painting of a snake

Description automatically generated — Martha Bone, Mapping the Invisible #3, 2020, acrylic, aluminum enamel, charcoal, joint compound, pastel on pieced paper, 63 x 88 in., photo courtesy of the artist.

Two artists currently showing at Garrison Art Center use scale, structure, and geometry to examine and reinterpret their respective environments. Martha Bone’s large-scale paintings and assemblages express a sweeping view of the cosmos, bringing the macrocosm within our reach, while Janice Caswell’s small-scale sculptures find the infinite within the microcosm, showing us the vast potential in all forms. Both Bone and Caswell photograph their natural and man-made landscapes, later referring to these images when creating their works. And both artists construct their forms as improvisations inspired by their observations, although neither artist is interested in a literal interpretation of nature. But this is where the similarities end, their distinctive styles diverging toward an expansive contemplation of form and space and an intimate exploration of the fabricated structures that inhabit our lives.

April 24, 2023April 18, 2023, by Melissa Stern

Out of Character at Pierogi in Brooklyn

James Eber.jpg — *James Esber- Ladybug. 2016. Acrylic on panel. 40 x 40 inches.*

A droll and aptly named group exhibition opened at Pierogi in Williamsburg in early April. Entitled Out of Character, the exhibition has been curated from local artists all working in and around the figure and focused on a humorous take on the human condition.

October 10, 2022October 10, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Alice Zinnes: Inner landscapes of Light

Alice Zinnes in her studio, with charcoal drawings behind

Alice Zinne‘s paintings draw from literature and mythology to create dramatic landscapes in which light and dark interplay as main protagonists. Her oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings often depict floods of light intertwined with fragmented darker patches, evoking dense and fluid inner spaces.

November 10, 2020November 10, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Eunice Golden: Metamorphosis at SAPAR Contemporary

In Dialogue with curator Aliza Edelman

Eunice Golden painting *Metamorphosis #20* in her East Hampton studio. Photo: © 2007 Walter Weissman

The excellent current exhibition Eunice Golden: Metamorphosis at SAPAR Contemporary, rigorously curated by scholar and curator Aliza Edelman, Ph.D., features paintings and photographs by the 93 years old prolific artist from 1979 to 2009. Based in the West Village and in East Hampton, New York, Eunice Golden has made throughout five decades an outstanding and bold body of work with consistent commitment to her artistic vision and to feminism, while keeping her work admirably fresh and urgent all the way. In her later paintings the body is fragmented and anthropomorphized into a landscape, described by the artist as a philosophical and spiritual outgrowth of her earlier radical oeuvre of sexual body landscapes. Golden says on these recent works, “I am concerned with tactility and the sensation of touch, but also of thought on a primal level, where there are no boundaries and where natural phenomenon are blurred by processes of metamorphosis.” In this interview Aliza Edelman elaborates on the genesis of this show and the ideas behind Eunice Golden’s work.