For Cutaway, curator Olivia Baldwin worked the way she does in her own studio — building from the ground up, beginning with the artists rather than a theme. She had followed Eleanor Anderson, J Stoner Blackwell, Lucy Kim, Kirstin Lamb, and Hai-Wen Lin for years, looking for where their materials might overlap and where they might productively rub against one another. Meeting with them, a shared concern surfaced: how each artist asserts and then loosens the limits of an object, a body, a pattern. Their means are strikingly varied — discarded plastic bags, cross stitch, dyed silk and chain, cast flounder and teeth, a kite pitched toward the upper windows — bound by saturated color and touch. The body recurs throughout, rarely pictured, more often left as a trace in the material. Baldwin discusses the show’s bottom-up beginnings, what its materials share, and the withholding behind its title.
Continue reading “Cutaway at Brandeis University”Jennifer Trask: What is perfect?

Jennifer Trask’s materials—whether bone, wood, metal, or antique fragments—function as collaborators in her sculpting process. Their physical properties and embedded histories guide her decisions, shaping how she responds to their density, grain, and structural limits.
Continue reading “Jennifer Trask: What is perfect?”Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in January 2025
HIGHLIGHTS

Out on the Main Line, the world of craft takes center stage at Wayne Art Center in two distinct but complementary shows. CraftForms 2024, 29th International Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Fine Craft and Japandi Revisited: shared aesthetics and influences, together invite viewers to contemplate the power of form, material, and cultural aesthetics. In Old City, at the Museum for Art in Wood, Mark Sfirri explores the many definitions of family through his exquisite woodworking in La Famiglia. Cerulean Arts Gallery and Studio in Center City pairs the dreamy drawings and paintings of two Philadelphia artists, Gary Grissom and Louise Vinueza, in A Day in The Life. Together, these four exhibitions offer a diverse range of artistic viewpoints from the global scope of contemporary craft to the exploration of family and nostalgia.
Continue reading “Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in January 2025”Linda Kamille Schmidt: Fiber Space at Garvey/Simon
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Linda Kamille Schmidt’s exhibition Fiber Space opens at Garvey|Simon Gallery on June 27, 2024. This is her first solo show with Garvey|Simon and her third in Manhattan. It showcases her semi-transparent fabric collages, ranging from large installations to smaller, intimate pieces.
Continue reading “Linda Kamille Schmidt: Fiber Space at Garvey/Simon”Tempestry Project: Emily McNeil and Asy Connelly with Amy Brady
hot air

Amy Brady published in her newsletter Burning World a conversation with Emily McNeil and Asy Connelly, a knitter and data scientist who founded the Tempestry Project, a fiber art collaboration that uses yarn and other fibers to create artful representations of climate data. This summer, they are partnering with Colossal Magazine and the Design Museum of Chicago in two different ways: first, their “Paleo New Normal Tempestry” will be exhibited in the museum’s group show, At the Precipice. And secondly, they’re collaborating with the museum to develop a Chicago Tempestry Collection that will be exhibited along with the Paleo piece. Amy Brady asked Emily and Asy about their work and what they hope viewers take away from their art.
Continue reading “Tempestry Project: Emily McNeil and Asy Connelly with Amy Brady”Judith Schaechter – Native to her Imaginary World

Judith Schachter at work
Art without craft is blind, craft without art is empty Judith Schaechter paraphrasing Kant
Continue reading “Judith Schaechter – Native to her Imaginary World”Amanda Thackray: Surface Tension at NJCU
Featured Artist

Amanda Thackray with A Tangle; A Swarm; A Precondition of the Plastisphere, 2021
In her solo exhibition at the Lemmerman Gallery in NJCU curated by Doris Cacoilo, Amanda Thackray presents her handmade paper installations, prints and sculpture which altogether comment on plastic pollution and the fragility of marine environment. The artist creates an allegorical environment which both reflects and distorts an aquatic world.
Continue reading “Amanda Thackray: Surface Tension at NJCU”Tina Struthers: Life in Fiber

Tina Marais Struthers, studio in Montreal, 2020, Photo courtesy of Josiane Farand
Tina Marais Struthers’ work develops from a rigorous, personal, and highly technical consideration of fiber as an evocative medium deftly addressing subjective experience, memories of place, and processes of change and growth. Struthers says she is fascinated by how fabric reflects and absorbs light, how it can entice us to touch, and feel comfort, or discomfort, by visual directing textures—”In this world during the pandemic, this need to touch, to feel textural comfort I think has really been amplified. I often challenge the notion of textile as being soft, in manipulating it to appear as metal sculptural forms.”
Continue reading “Tina Struthers: Life in Fiber”Bianca Severijns - Paper Transformations

Bianca Severijns is a Dutch born artist who lives in Israel. Her sculptural installation range from wearable sculpture to wall relief made of paper. Through an elaborate process she utilizes this medium with remarkable skills to create simultaneously playful and thought provoking sculptures which evoke reflections on displacement, the meaning of a safe home, and coping mechanisms. For instance, her Blanket sculpture which is currently showing at the recently opened TLV Biennial 2020 particularly resonates with the angst during the pandemic. Since we have finalized the interview process before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, we have recently re-visited our last question in order to bring her responses up to date.
Continue reading “Bianca Severijns - Paper Transformations”Elisa D’Arrigo – From the Inside Out

Elisa D’Arrigo‘s upcoming exhibition, “In the Moment,” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery will feature her new body of ceramic work. Her vessel forms breathe with inner life, their cylindrical shapes are both tumultuous and vivacious – like a body, organism, or life itself. The artist shares with Art Spiel some of her thought and work processes as well as some insight on her upcoming show.
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