gowanus – Art Spiel

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December 1, 2025December 1, 2025, by Will Kaplan

Beamsplitter curated by David Shaw at Field of Play

Installation view of *Beamsplitter* featuring *Unnamed, Stable and True Penetrates Being with Sight in Hand*. (Gavin Wilson) and *Bleap* (Lauren Anaïs Hussey)

The artwork in Beamsplitter, a six-person show at Field of Play, functions as a series of portals. Named for a scientific device that both transmits and reflects light, Beamsplitter opens up spectrums of material, concept, and time. Using a mix of large and small works from artists across generations, curator David Shaw expands the Gowanus gallery’s 9 x 15-foot footprint into a dynamic array of gateways. The recurrence of circular forms and apertures presents a menu of windows to the artist’s interiority or world-view. Field of Play’s signature astroturf floor provides an idiosyncratic arena to home these loci.

July 23, 2025July 21, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

Susan Mastrangelo: The Beat Goes On at Kathryn Markel

In Dialogue

Susan Mastrangelo’s solo show, The Beat Goes On, at The Pocket Gallery of Katherine Markel Fine Arts features work completed from 2022 to 2025, with the majority of the pieces completed in 2025. Mastrangelo creates bold reliefs that transform a variety of materials into bold abstract and biomorphic forms.

May 22, 2023May 19, 2023, by Amanda Millet-Sorsa

Paige Beeber – on Phantom Thread

In conversation

By Amanda Millet-Sorsa

A person sitting in front of a large painting

Description automatically generated with medium confidence — Paige Beeber. Photo credit: Sharon Kendrick

Prior to her exhibition, Phantom Thread at Freight+Volume, Paige Beeber spoke with Amanda Millet-Sorsa at the artist’s studio in Brooklyn. Nestled into a Cube Smart storage space building in Gowanus on the edge of Red Hook, the studio is part of TI Studios. Beeber’s long family roots in Brooklyn date back to the early 1900s, as she continues to live and work in this borough. Her new work evolved from experiences she had at residencies in 2022 (DNA Residency in Provincetown, SARP in Sicily, and recently completed her fellowship at The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation). Her work exists between narration, figuration, and abstraction and largely uses the repurposing of her own past paintings that transform into new patterns, motifs, and imagery in new paintings. Ritual and community play an essential role in the stitching of new narratives.

April 1, 2022March 31, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Shuffling Liminal Episodes at Project: ARTspace

Previewing

A picture containing text, indoor

Description automatically generated — Michelle Weinberg, A Personal Situation, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 20 3/4” x 16″

The two-person exhibition Shuffling Liminal Episodes at Project: ARTspace features drawings by artists Leslie Kerby and Michelle Weinberg, whose works on paper and vellum resemble snapshots of settings, some of specific places, some imagined, capturing an arrested moment from daily life. Both storytellers at heart, the two artists draw objects as protagonists in their visual tales. A desolate bench, a studio table with a lamp, a tiny figure stepping out of a big house —random belongings, furniture, activities of daily life come to the forefront, projecting an inner life while also hinting at human life outside their inanimate existence—always with a lingering whiff of humor. Kerby and Weinberg also share a collage aesthetic which works well to unify their fragmented narratives.

June 25, 2020November 2, 2022, by Catherine Kirkpatrick

Artists on Coping: Susan Mastrangelo

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

1-Myself In My Studio In Catskill #1.jpg

Susan Mastrangelo

Susan Mastrangelo was born and raised in New York City and Washington D.C. She studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the New York Studio School, and received her MFA from Boston University under the tutelage of Philip Guston. Based in New York since graduate school, she has shown nationally and internationally, and is a recipient of a Rockwell Grant as well as two grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation. She has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, a guest at Civitella Raneri, and a resident at Yaddo, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Ragdale Foundation, The Triangle Workshop (as a student of Anthony Caro), and the Tyrone Guthrie Center. For 27 years she taught and chaired the Art Department at the Buckley School in New York City, and now works as a full time multidisciplinary artist at the Can Factory in Gowanus, Brooklyn.

March 31, 2020March 30, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Artists on Coping: Mary Mattingly

During the coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

*Swale*, *Concrete Plant Park* 2018, Photo: Subhram Reddy

Mary Mattingly works with photography and sculpture. She is currently artist in residence at the Brooklyn Public Library. In 2016, she founded Swale, an edible landscape on a barge to circumvent New York City’s public land laws, and in 2018 dismantled a military vehicle and deconstructed its mineral supply chain with BRIC Arts. Her work has been exhibited at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Storm King, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Palais de Tokyo. It has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times, Le Monde, New Yorker, NPR, Art21, and included in books such as MIT Press Documents of Contemporary Art, and Henry Sayre’s A World of Art.

March 29, 2020November 2, 2022, by Catherine Kirkpatrick

Artists on Coping: JoAnne McFarland

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

JoAnne McFarland is an artist, poet, curator, and independent publisher. She is the Artistic Director of Artpoetica Project Space in Gowanus that exhibits work exploring the intersection of visual art and literature. She is the former Exhibitions Director of A.I.R. Gallery in DUMBO. She has exhibited her artwork nationally and internationally for over 30 years, and is the author of ten poetry books, chapbooks, and libretti. Her most recent curatorial project, co-curated with Sasha Chavchavadze, is SALLY, a multi-venue, muti-year exhibition that showcases lost histories of women artists and philosophers, and contemporary artists whose work exemplifies passionate inquiry.

November 7, 2019November 15, 2020, by Heather Topcik

Karen Mainenti: Message in a Bottle at Ground Floor

Message in a Bottle, installation view at Ground Floor Gallery, 2019, photo courtesy of Jordan Rathkopf

In Message in a Bottle, the current solo installation show at Ground Floor Gallery in Park Slope, the Gowanus based artist Karen Mainenti transforms the gallery into what at first glance looks like an upscale beauty boutique. Mainenti uses this platform to explore the mechanisms at work in the packaging and marketing of beauty products over time, drawing on her own complex relationship to the products themselves. Much of Mainenti’s work examines the subtle but powerful societal expectations of women that show up in ordinary objects. The delicately cast porcelain replicas of her own cosmetics highlight the way objects can be gendered, even when reduced to their elemental forms. Often using humor as a sly way to invite the viewer in, her drawings of creams, lotions and serums using marketing language from real products highlight the inherent contradiction in the ways we read these messages as absurd, yet suspend that disbelief at the cash register when we buy them. Having visited the show when it opened, I was delighted to have the opportunity to chat with Karen about how this exhibition came together and how the various series within it have developed over time.

January 31, 2019February 1, 2019, by Katie Hector

Ben Pederson: Some Stuff You Forgot About at Ortega Y Gasset Projects

The Skirt “reality tunnel” installation. Image: courtesy of Ortega y Gasset Projects

“Please Watch Your Head” reads a curious sign taped to the metal door of Ortega y Gasset Projects in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Opening the door I realize how this instruction is essential to navigate the jewel toned gauntlet of brick-a-brack curtains cascading from the ceiling in a slender corridor that leads to the main gallery space. Ben Pederson’s solo show “Some Stuff You Forgot About” represents two mature bodies of work which reveal the depth of Pederson’s philosophical approach, as well as the synergy between the artist and the curator Eleanna Anagnos.