ink drawing – Art Spiel

September 17, 2025September 16, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

Magnum O-Pspsps at Cornell

In Dialogue

Curator Michael Morgan with George Boorujy’s *Dredger* (2017) in the Foundry, home to Cornell’s MFA studios. Photo courtesy of Michael Morgan

Curating an exhibition at Cornell doesn’t require waiting until after graduation or climbing a long academic ladder. The Art Department makes the process unusually accessible—for undergraduates, graduates, and faculty alike. Within the department, there are two dedicated galleries, and under the larger umbrella of the AAP College, a third gallery also accepts exhibition proposals. Each semester, a committee comes together to review applications for the following term. It was within this framework that two graduate students took on the challenge of organizing a large group exhibition. Michael Morgan, who co-curated the exhibition with Elina Ansary, tells us about the process behind the show.

August 28, 2025August 31, 2025, by Taylor Bielecki

MIST – Fleeting moments and Summer Sensibilities at Helm Contemporary

Installation view, Sylvia Schwartz, *Temperature Gauge and Word Landscape and Green, photo courtesy of Helm Contemporary*

In MIST, four artists are brought together to take the inspiration of summer, and find a way to break through the heatwaves that have recently hit New York. There is a dialogue between the artists and their various takes on works on paper, bringing forth summer sensibilities, airiness, freshness, and a feeling of being free. Each artist offers a different series of works.

June 12, 2025June 9, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

Matthew Wong – Vincent van Gogh: Painting as a Last Resort at Albertina

Matthew Wong: The Space Between Trees, 2019, 60 × 50 cm, Oil on canvas (Collection of Judith and Danny Tobey © 2025 Matthew Wong Foundation / Bildrecht Vienna, 2025)ץ Photo: Matthew Wong Foundation

Matthew Wong and Vincent van Gogh shared more than a self-taught path into painting. Both began relatively late, worked in compressed time spans, and turned to painting as a lifeline. The superb exhibition Painting as a Last Resort, now on view at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, brings their work into intimate and revealing dialogue. The exhibition presents approximately 44 paintings and 12 works on paper by Wong alongside a smaller selection by van Gogh. Organized in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Kunsthaus Zürich, and the Matthew Wong Foundation, the exhibition gives Wong space to be seen on his own terms. His paintings feel jittery, open, and emotionally charged.

April 22, 2025April 21, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

DUMBO Open Studios 2025 with Jenny Polak

*Mattress 2 (We Who Believe In Freedom Cannot Rest) 2024*, detail. Photo courtesy 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. Jenny Polak has been based in DUMBO since February 2025, previously participated in the BRIC residency in 2022, and returned this year to 20 Jay Street—now working from Studio #310B—through the Cultural Space Subsidy Program.

February 10, 2025March 11, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

T.D. Motley: The Art of Farming

In Dialogue

Thomas Motley’s first novel, The Art of Farming: Sketches of a Life in the Country, is rooted in stewardship—a shared responsibility for the earth, animals, and one another. This theme has become more central to his paintings over time, though respect for nature has always been part of his work. His non-fiction writing and lectures on organic farming have also reflected this idea.

December 9, 2024December 8, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

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.

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.

October 10, 2022October 10, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Alice Zinnes: Inner landscapes of Light

Alice Zinnes in her studio, with charcoal drawings behind

Alice Zinne‘s paintings draw from literature and mythology to create dramatic landscapes in which light and dark interplay as main protagonists. Her oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings often depict floods of light intertwined with fragmented darker patches, evoking dense and fluid inner spaces.

April 11, 2022November 2, 2022, by Amy Brady

An Interview with Artists Amanda Maciuba, Jen Morris & Jessica Tam

A picture containing dark

Description automatically generated — *Tip of the Iceberg by Amanda Maciuba, Jen Morris, Jessica Tam, dimensions variable, vinyl on glass and wall, 2021*

This month, I have a wonderful interview with three artists for you. Amanda Maciuba, Jen Morris, and Jessica Tam are all visual artists working in different mediums. However, they share a fascination with how ecological language (surge, spike, wave, etc.) has worked its way into news reports’ descriptions of large phenomena such as crowds, pandemics, and political movements. They recently closed a show at the A.P.E., Ltd. Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts titled WAVE/SURGE/SPIKE.

October 4, 2021October 1, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Maggie Nowinski -Drawing (un)limited

A picture containing text, book, indoor

Description automatically generated — Maggie Nowinski, Be Spilled, My Heart, 2021 detail installation view with artist for scale, wHoles are acrylic and India ink on canvas, double sided, installation approximately 20’x30’x10’

About a decade ago, Maggie Nowinski shifted her focus from site specific project-based installation to her studio as the primary site of her work. She made this shift after realizing that her connection to the work had become too fragmented. She needed her studio work to become more accessible and her creativity more meditative. Since drawing has always been at the core of her work, focusing on drawing with limited materials and themes, enabled her to process a lot of the ideas she had been working through in her large-scale installations. “I was craving a way to immediately access creativity, to be in a place where if I had an hour I could walk into my studio and pick up where I’d left off on a drawing,” she says.