Contemporary Art and Culture
Simphiwe Mbunyuza’s ceramic sculptures are a powerful synthesis of ancestral traditions, personal history, and contemporary expression. His recent exhibition, UMTHONYAMA, at David Kordansky Gallery in New York (January 16 – February 22, 2025), presented a body of work that transforms the physical space of the gallery into one of spiritual reflection, cultural storytelling, and artistic innovation.
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This past weekend New York saw the latest iteration of the Outsider Art Fair. Started in 1993, it has become a NYC institution and seems to be thriving after a few lean pandemic years. The Fair serves a field that has evolved a great deal over the past 30 years, and I really felt that this year more than in the past. As the number of now “blue chip” or “Old Master Self-Taught” artists dwindle, there’s been an influx of both younger artists and some who push against the definitions of self-taught in the first place. It’s a sticky subject and one that I have no answer to.
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Spatial dynamics and human hybridity are central to this month’s roundup of highlights in New York. From monumental sculpture to works intimately interspersed within the home, all things great and small commune and offer reflection upon their relationships to the environments in which they currently reside. The hierarchy between the natural and the manmade is in conversation within this selection of shows through shifting currents of tenuous and harmonious moments.
Continue reading “Art Spiel Picks: All Around NYC Exhibitions in March 2025”
Odeta Xheka, an artist, curator, and mother, has been an avid advocate for women in the fine arts. Her latest endeavor is an ambitious and exciting one, as she opened OXH Gallery in the heart of Tampa’s Ybor City Historic District just a few months ago. I’m sitting down with Odeta to discuss her new gallery, her mission, exciting collaborations, and the current two-person show Time Shards, which will be on view through March 20th, 2025.
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In 2023, I saw Ansel Adams in Our Time at San Francisco’s de Young Museum. Along with Adams’ famous gelatin silver photographs of national parks and the Southwest, the show had work by contemporary photographers such as Binh Dahn and Meghann Riepenhoff, and it aimed to present a narrative of the West that didn’t depict it as a vast, empty land ready for settlement. I was thinking about this show and how art and the way institutions present it isn’t neutral when I saw Rope and Revolver: Artists Respond to Frederic Remington’s ‘The Broncho Buster’, the engaging exhibition at San Francisco’s Catharine Clark Gallery.
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L.W.D. sees himself as an observer of modern society—a world that has, in many ways, passed him by over the last three decades. L.W.D.’s work is rooted in the assertion of his personal identity within the fractured American society. His art reflects the painful shift from childhood to adulthood, a transformation that feels almost brutal, marked by the loss of innocence in the face of America’s historical realities. His perspective of the American way of life, capturing both the disappointments and fleeting joys, recalls the social commentary of Philip Guston—particularly in the simplicity of his cityscapes, yet with a distinctive handwriting, palette, and choice of subjects. L.W.D.’s visual language fuses the emotional character originating from blues lyrics and the iconic symbolism of Roy Lichtenstein’s pop art. Working within the tradition of the naive picturesque narrative, L.W.D. incorporates the humor of a comic book while maintaining his focus on the historical and the social.
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At Drawing Rooms in Jersey City, Material Wonder: Jewish Joy and Mysticism in 2025 presents works that engage with Jewish identity, mysticism, and inherited traditions. Curated by Anne Trauben, the exhibition, on view from February 13 to April 5, 2025, features artists Carol Salmanson, Denise Treizman, Rachel Klinghoffer, Pesya Altman, and Trauben herself. Their works—encompassing drawing, painting, fiber, mixed media, and light-based sculpture—explore memory, ritual, and transformation.
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Ming Wang’s solo exhibition, Through Lingering Window, curated by Ashley Ouderkirk at Fou Gallery, creates a meditative and healing enclave amidst the bustling streets of Union Square in New York. Located on the seventh floor of a Fifth Avenue building, the gallery becomes an intimate retreat where Wang’s oil paintings evoke a sense of stillness within the restless cityscape.
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Diane Burko’s Bearing Witness at Cristin Tierney Gallery combines mixed-media paintings shaped by her experiences in extreme environments—glaciers, coral reefs, deserts, and rainforests. She has engaged with the shifting landscape for fifty years, responding to the accelerating changes that threaten these places. This marks a significant moment in her career—her first solo exhibition in New York in over forty years and her debut at Cristin Tierney Gallery.
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Neon nights are brought to life within Robert Yarber’s paintings. The large-scale paintings in Nicodim Gallery’s survey of his works bring viewers along for a wild ride. Whether it’s pulling us into a dark hotel room, lit solely by the blue light of a droning, static television set, or throwing us outside, into the life of the party, and possibly, over the balcony and into the air- we are left in suspense of what comes next. It’s as if we were sitting in a dark movie theater, watching someone’s life story unfold.
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