humor in art – Art Spiel

July 2, 2026June 28, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Dakota Gearhart: All Matter Is Alive

Dakota Gearhart grew up on a Florida coastline where algae blooms, sewage outflows, and bikini contests share the same shoreline, and her work has been carrying that mix of beauty, decay, and amusement into a much bigger frame ever since. Across animation, sculpture, performance, and sound, she builds video worlds where pixels sing, electricity becomes sentient, and the nonhuman shows up on equal footing with the rest of the cast. Her ongoing animated series Life Touching Life is hosted by Tiffany, a half-algae, half-woman figure who guides viewers through episodes shaped with collaborators — poets, scientists, activists, caretakers — whose lives already reflect the worldview the work is reaching toward. It’s funny, strange, and serious in roughly equal measure, which turns out to be the right register for the worlds it stages.

April 30, 2026April 30, 2026, by Sivan Lavie

When I Stopped in Feldwood: Jeff Feld at Marquee Projects

Jeff Feld’s invented, minimalist island of Feldwood transports its audience into a tropical, still space that is at once childlike and naive, holy in its fetishizing of the pathetic object and rooted in place.

April 24, 2023April 18, 2023, by Melissa Stern

Out of Character at Pierogi in Brooklyn

James Eber.jpg — *James Esber- Ladybug. 2016. Acrylic on panel. 40 x 40 inches.*

A droll and aptly named group exhibition opened at Pierogi in Williamsburg in early April. Entitled Out of Character, the exhibition has been curated from local artists all working in and around the figure and focused on a humorous take on the human condition.

June 2, 2021May 31, 2021, by michelle weinberg

Down and Dirty at Duck Creek Arts

Installation view, photo courtesy of Gary Mamay

Down and Dirty, recent works by Bonnie Rychlak and Jeanne Silverthorne on view at Duck Creek Arts in East Hampton, NY, is a vaudevillian collection of subtly crafted works that tickle our collective psyche. The narrative of banal objects formed largely from wax and rubber elicits empathy, provokes thought and causes laughter, a complex jumble visually and emotionally. Arranged on the floor in the massive wooden barn, rejecting the hierarchical placement of art on pedestals, the works address a child-sized viewer, or perhaps an imp. They deftly implicate our inner child. The worn wood panels and flooring of the barn are complicit with Rychlak’s and Silverthorne’s works, collaborating to generate an experience in which the “feeling” or “haptic” sense is awakened, enriching the viewing experience. That Down and Dirty also blurs the boundaries between the works of the two artists is gleefully conspiratorial, the word defined here as “to breathe together.” It is a feminist gesture which includes an actual collaborative work titled Grate of Unintentional Consequences.