Contemporary Art and Culture
Located along the central artery of Little Italy, amid a glut of red sauce joints with checkered tablecloths, sits the new home of Fugue Gallery. Having recently relocated from Canal Street to Mulberry Street, the space, a 1,000-square-foot brick loft, eschews white box sterility for something more atypical.
Continue reading “Fugue Gallery Finds a New Home with Forbidden Fruit”
What began as Nancy Pantirer’s studio in 1996 has grown, over nearly three decades, into a gallery with a clear sense of purpose. Rooted in years of open studios and informal salon gatherings, 81 Leonard formalized its public presence in 2019, building a platform shaped by artists, for artists. Co-run with Hannah Rothbard, the gallery supports emerging and mid-career artists at pivotal moments in their careers, with a program that prizes beauty, technical competence, and community. Group shows grow organically from the artists themselves. We spoke with Nancy Pantirer and Hannah Rothbard about how 81 Leonard came to be, what drives its program, and what it means to run a gallery with no plans to be anywhere else.
Continue reading “A Studio That Became a Gallery: 81 Leonard”
In the exhibition Funny Weather, curated by Imogen Aukland, four artists present distinct takes on reconstructions and uncertainty. A timely, unsettled feeling meanders through the space — sculptures that depict typically threatening objects unexpectedly softened, or photos that capture moments that physically change as you walk around them. Both the unexpected and a sense of upheaval are prominent themes throughout, whilst also giving us a “weather forecast” that changes by area, mood, and experience. This grants viewers the opportunity to question what art does: what an art object stirs within us, and how much our assumptions about something can shift when viewed from different perspectives.
Continue reading “Funny Weather at Kunstraum: Upheavals and new assumptions”
What does a gallery look like when the artists are in charge? Founded in 2013, Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG) is an artist-run collective with no fixed curatorial line and a non-hierarchical structure shared equally among its eight co-directors. Since 2023, it has become the annual New York home for Cornell University’s MFA thesis exhibition — a partnership built on a simple premise: artist-run spaces value experimentation, innovation, and risk-taking, giving graduate artists the freedom to present work without commercial constraints or curatorial imperatives.
Continue reading “Run by Artists, Built for Artists: OyG and the Cornell MFA”
Stepping into the exhibition Without Innocence at RAINRAIN gallery, you are greeted with a plethora of various mediums, ideas, influences, and experimentations. The paintings carry with them several levels of looking, small details to explore, and multiple dimensions within the edges. The photographs set the scene, allowing you to enter another space just as the paintings do, left to explore the worlds that Kawahara creates and builds within it all. The press release introduces a quote from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, “…we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system—from all work to all play, a deadly game (p 28).” This statement lingers alongside my thoughts throughout the exhibition, as I begin to notice more details, connections, and mechanisms that make this exhibition immensely similar to a cyborg in the making. Kawahara takes pieces of the body and fractions of different spaces within the canvas to build something entirely new out of all of these information systems.
Continue reading “Kosuke Kawahara’s Without Innocence, Dissecting and Reassembling at RAINRAIN Gallery”
The most subtle acts are often the most cathartic. In times of relentless upheaval and injustice, simple moments can feel Herculean by measure. The current exhibition at Freight and Volume, It Takes A Village, focuses on daily ritual as a gate of entry. Artists Andrea Castillo, Nancy Elsamanoudi, and Baran Shafiey blend nuanced elements with doses of surreality, resulting in invitations into spaces that delightfully offer more questions than answers. Each work is a reckoning with the quietude of in-betweenness. Each artist is a painter working in figuration; yet the similarities end there, and the departures are as varied as one can imagine.
Continue reading “It Takes a Village at Freight and Volume”
Upon entering the exhibition, you are greeted by pieces of various sizes and mediums, full of intricacies and exploration. With the pieces being smaller in size, besides the Ferris wheel, you have to get close to see the small details or the depth of space that opens into a world of its own within each piece. Within the works, Liu offers locations such as cities, darkened spaces, carnivals, and other places of transition. Places that one may find themselves when they are beginning to traverse or transition into someplace new. I appreciated that each work was either on the wall or a shelf, giving each a sense of its own place. The space around the pieces gives them an opportunity to breathe and allows viewers to look closely at one and flow seamlessly into the next.
Continue reading “Xinyu Liu’s Fool’s Hour at Art Cake: Finding a home to Carry Onward”
Galleries and museums play a pivotal role in shaping the careers of the artists they represent, often hosting dinners designed to promote artists and connect them with collectors and curators. This treatment, however, is mainly afforded to well-established artists. Arts professional Anna Yi Xie witnessed this phenomenon firsthand while interning at Gagosian in New York City. In 2024, Xie set out to create an alternative to the gallery-hosted dinner, a platform that offers early-career artists the opportunity to show their work and meet influential figures in the art world. After all, the social and professional networks that artists develop can further their careers just as much as showing their work.
Continue reading “Happenings Brings Artists to the Table”
“The world is flat” is perhaps humans’ most primitive sense of physical surroundings. It was also a cosmological conclusion drawn from honest bodily perception, because the land beneath our feet is indeed still and level, and the universe unfolds as an infinitely extending plane. This perceptual honesty is where Jong Oh begins.
Continue reading “Departing From The Flat World: Jong Oh’s Sixth Solo Exhibition At Marc Straus Gallery”
The Artist in Residence program at The Oyster Point Hotel was launched in 2020 and curated by Ellen Martin, with the support of Kevin Barry, the hotel’s President. Its premise is straightforward: contemporary art belongs not only in galleries but in the spaces where people actually live, rest, and move through their days. Each year, a selected artist’s work inhabits the hotel’s guest rooms, common areas, and the fabric of the place itself, encountered by thousands of visitors during their stay.
Continue reading “Cynthia Pareja Dubin at the Oyster Point Hotel “