DUMBO Open Studios 2025 with Tessa Greene O’Brien curating at Platform Project Space

Tollef Runquist, Panther, Oil on canvas, 40” x 40”, 2024, photo courtesy of the artist

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. Platform Project Space has been in DUMBO since 2018 at 20 Jay Street #319.

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Metamorphosis at Taplin Gallery, Arts Council of Princeton: Yasmeen Abdallah with Anna Shukeylo

In dialogue
Installation view

Metamorphosis at the Arts Council of Princeton brings together 4 mid-career artists whose work artist and curator Anna Shukeylo has long admired—and envisioned sharing the same space. Each piece explores transformation or shapeshifting in its own way, reflecting the theme that gives the exhibition its name. Since its initial conception, the show has undergone some changes, with some works so new they haven’t even fully cured. Shukeylo invites the artists to interpret the theme freely and engages them in the selection process, though she makes the final curatorial decisions. I spoke with Shukeylo about her process and how the show has evolved.

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Art Spiel Picks: Manhattan Exhibition in February 2025

HIGHLIGHTS
Hassan Sharif, Gathering at Alexander Gray Associates

Alternative worlds abound, collide, and gravitate in a transfixing lineup that is circumspect of the new year and ruminations of what lies ahead. Unique in presentation, yet united in exploring the vulnerabilities of coexistence amidst a delicate balance, their clandestine orbits intersect and align around the precarity of humanity. Shape-shifting, portals, relics, and worlds collide and mystify in alchemical formulations. As our planet spins on an axis beyond human capacity, one can find solace and pleasure in the mystery and adventure that awaits through these masterful and delightful odysseys of discovery. Michael Brennan and Matthew Deleget create pathways of knowledge through otherworldly means. David Dixon melds stories seamlessly that serve as portals into realms that might exist in such a world.

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Prayer / Pattern / Prayer at Morgan Lehman

Installation view of Prayer / Pattern / Prayer

Installation view of Prayer / Pattern / Prayer

Prayer / Pattern / Prayer at Morgan Lehman offers a mesmerizing view of patterns as a deeply seated human instinct. Fittingly, a radial symmetry unfolds from the vertex of the L-shaped room. Yet curator Jan Dickey balances this evenness with a syncopated rhythm of paired artworks and bold standalone pieces. In creating a pattern of patterns, this show offers a metonymic view of artists running with different strands from the fabric of a species-wide impulse toward order and adornment.

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Abstraction by Any Other Name at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation

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Installation of Abstraction By Any Other Name, Part I. Photo courtesy of Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York

The exhibition Abstraction by Any Other Name, curated by Dan Cameron at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, celebrates the diverse approaches to abstract painting among eight contemporary artists: Jane Fine, Matthew Kolodziej, Regina Scully, Lui Shtini, Louise Belcourt, Iva Gueorguieva, Jill Moser, and Frank Owen. The show, running from September 6, 2024, to February 8, 2025, is presented in two parts, each highlighting different artists.

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Art Spiel Picks: Just for Laughs Exhibitions in December 2024

Nancy Elsamanoudi, Donut Dog at Dog House Gallery, courtesy of the the artist
HIGHLIGHTS

From Manhattan to Brooklyn, there is funny business happening in the galleries this holiday season, quite literally. Portraits of humorous creatures in a solo exhibition titled Donut Dog by Nancy Elsamanoudi at Doghouse Gallery are an opening act to the performances at the Brooklyn Comedy Collective. Slightly absurd paintings of “Lost” posters by Jeffrey Morabito crack a joke in a two-person exhibition titled Flat Theater at Space 776 (CLOSING DECEMBER 18th), while a humorous undertone sets the mood in the Paintings and Chairs group exhibition at Zepster Gallery.

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Mindscape: Patterns of Identity at L’Space

A couple of men in a room

Description automatically generated
Moran Kliger, Installation

In the group show Mindscape: Patterns of Identity at L’Space, people, animals, and places shift and juxtapose, coming together like pieces of a map—one that charts the shared inner terrain of memory, trauma, and identity. Curated by Noa Rabinovich Lalo and Carolina Werebe, with L’Space founder Lily Almog, the show, as Almog puts it, draws on “a shared Israeli heritage and a deep connection to the contemporary art scene in Israel, a country with a rich cultural history and traditions amidst ongoing uncertainty.” And it’s that sense of uncertainty that pulls everything together—voids and absences linger in the air. Even when the work seems rooted in specific places, the setting remains layered and elusive, offering more questions than answers. This is evident in Netta Lieber Sheffer’s sweeping charcoal drawing installation of Sigmund Freud’s Vienna clinic, where he lived and worked for 47 years before fleeing the Nazis in 1938.

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A Glimpse into Elza Kayal Gallery: with Eniko Imre

In Dialogue
Gallerist Eniko Imre with the artwork (photo by David X. Levine). Artwork: Katie Heller Saltoun, Endless Ordering (Virgin Mary Cupboard), 2020, ink wash & pen on paper, 51.5” x 77”

Throughout her fifteen years in the art world—spanning fairs, events, curation, and non-profits—Eniko Imre built her career on a deep passion for art, a close-knit community of artists, and the trust many placed in her discerning eye. A year after COVID, during a visit to Tribeca, she was struck by the neighborhood’s burgeoning gallery scene. “Small one-woman spaces were thriving alongside multinational galleries, the blocks around Broadway bursting with art,” she recalls. Inspired by this wave of reemergence, she felt determined to carve her own path and be a part of it—on her own terms.

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In and Out of Lineage: Tracing Artistic Heritage Through SUNY New Paltz Faculty 

Eva Zanardi, the guest curator of the group show—In and Out of Lineage: Tracing Artistic Heritage Through SUNY New Paltz Faculty—observes that many times in her life, art has raised her awareness and consequently even made her reconsider her point of view on important issues. Zanardi says that the prerogative that should belong to most art is to be thought-provoking; as the educator and activist Cezar A. Cruz says, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” Eva Zanardi shared some of her curatorial process and gave us here a brief guide through the show.

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Aggregate at Studio 9D

Installation view of Bradley Milligan’s Scrimmage, 2023, tinted joint compound, scrap wood, used drop cloth, oil on panel, cotton thread, hardware. 79 x 49 x 51 inches; Down the River, tinted joint compound, scrap wood, automotive polish, hardware. 85 x 71 x 5 inches

In the three person show Aggregate at Studio 9D, artists Sammy Bennett, Bradley Milligan, and James Bertucci channel New York streetscapes and detritus to relay an earnest and affecting impression of the city. Bertucci’s trompe l’oeil paintings, Bennett’s fabric installation, and Milligan’s rugged sculptures overlap in a reverence for craftsmanship. Labor and construction are this show’s subject and, in many ways, its medium. In its use of material and representation Aggregate is boldly literal in its translation of the city’s chaos and beauty.

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