Contemporary Art and Culture
This month’s Manhattan highlights focus on artists tapping into the natural world, where these practices converge with the man-made in a clash of stunning reinvention and compelling engagement. These exhibitions channel the experimental through exploratory processes that harness our attention and hold us in their spell.
Continue reading “Art Spiel Picks: Manhattan Exhibitions in May 2025”
An energetic jaunt through the various art fairs over the past week revealed curious findings and trends: Relational aesthetics, atmospheric landscapes, the human psyche, and acts of care are on view in the forms of plants, animals, & organisms. Rendered in splashy colors, text-based media and kitschy coolness, the various moods are quirky and earnestly expressed through painting, sculpture/ceramics, textiles and installations. Here is a roundup of some booths that hit the mark and kept it refreshing.
Continue reading “Art Spiel Picks: Manhattan Art Fair Week”
Immi C. Storrs is obsessed with depth: she manipulates it, refusing to render it as-is. Instead, her adventures in depth-perception range from steeply sloping forests—her favorite subject— to thickly layered glass light-box dioramas, and to truncated and oddly meshed animal forms in bronze. While the animals merge together into multi-legged seemingly mythological beasts, or emerge pseudo-two dimensionally from a bronze cube, it’s less about the creatures themselves—horses, sheep, and oxen, but more of a slow-down lugubrious space in which forms melt together and time becomes unpredictable.
Continue reading “Into the woods – Immi C. Storrs at The Century Association”
Inspired by scientist and illustrator Robert Hooke’s seminal book, Micrographia, published in 1665, into the microVerse – Micrographia invites viewers into an immersive interdisciplinary installation where projected and printed microscopy act as a vehicle to witness the beauty of nature and our environment through magnified images of plant cells, microorganisms, and organic structures to transform our perspective of the familiar. Through this microscopic and material journey, the exhibition encourages a renewed perspective on our role as stewards of Earth’s delicate ecosystems and biodiversity, asking us to reimagine how we might preserve and protect these intricate natural systems for generations to come.
Continue reading “Into the microVerse – Micrographia with Shae Nadine|| SubtleFlux”
Rose Briccetti’s interdisciplinary and intermedia practice combines deep historical, artistic, and scientific research with artmaking to re-present natural and cultural histories to question systems of power. Her work surrealistically weaves together strange truths, biology, museology, cultural myths, internet culture, and personal experience using humor and vivid visuals.
Continue reading “Puns, Paint, and Post-Truths: Rose Briccetti’s Museum of Almost-Natural History”
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.
Anne Neely has been in DUMBO since November 2024 as part of the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program at 20 Jay Street, #720.
Curator Fran Beallor presents Water’s Voice and Our Fragile Moment at Hudson Guild in Chelsea, two exhibitions that focus on environmental damage—melting ice, polluted waters, deforestation, plastic waste, extreme weather, and species extinction. The goal is to make these vast and often abstract issues accessible to the wide public.
Continue reading “Water’s Voice and Our Fragile Moment at Hudson Guild”
Marisol: A Retrospective at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) presents a comprehensive overview of the artist’s career, ranging from works she produced in art school in the fifties to her last works. In doing so, the exhibition centers and decenters Marisol’s status within the Pop art sphere, where she never fully situated herself. Her works are too brutal and too strange (in the best sense of the word) for Pop. She was undoubtedly exhibiting with Pop artists and part of their networks, as her films with Andy Warhol included in the exhibition attest. However, she was somewhere else, too. Her works contain the brute force of politics, history, culture, and climate change, and, in her practice, she engages with how those forces take place primarily upon the bodies of women. The body morphs and sometimes breaks under these forces.
Continue reading “Marisol: A Retrospective at the Dallas Museum of Art”
In The Tale of Lost Waters at Five Points Arts in Connecticut, Susan Hoffman Fishman exhibits seven vertical scrolls resembling satellite imagery. Four are layered in deep, earthy browns—recalling land formations and dry blood—pressing against vibrant blues reminiscent of water. The bodies of water seem suspended between presence and disappearance, drifting toward an undefined space—a light or a void.
Continue reading “The Tale of Lost Waters – Susan Hoffman Fishman at Five Points Arts”
Water moves. It reflects, absorbs, distorts. It never repeats itself. River-Rising, a four-channel video installation by Ellen Kozak and Scott D. Miller, is built on these elements. Filmed along three river estuaries—the Garonne in France, the Bilbao Estuary, and the Hudson River—the work isolates the shifting surfaces of water.
Continue reading “Ellen Kozak and Scott D. Miller: River-Rising at Hunterdon Art Museum”