What Remains: in dialogue with Arghavan Khosravi

Arghavan Khosravi

Altarpieces—historically sites of devotion, revelation, and spiritual certainty—become something altogether different in Arghavan Khosravi’s What Remains, currently on view at Uffner & Liu through July 2. The exhibition brings together large-scale wall works, a freestanding sculpture, and an intimate suite of new altar-inspired paintings that continue Khosravi’s ongoing exploration of the forces that shape women’s lives under political, cultural, and religious systems of control. Drawing equally from Persian miniature painting and medieval European iconography, the artist constructs layered worlds where architectural structures become psychological spaces, symbols migrate across histories, and moments of resistance emerge within conditions of constraint. Rather than offering resolution, the works linger in states of suspension—between freedom and captivity, memory and displacement, devotion and doubt.

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No Walls Required: Stay Frosty Comes to Kingston

Stay Frosty Kingston

The gallery is a parking lot. The walls are car hoods, trunks, dashboards, and glove compartments. That is the premise of Stay Frosty, the itinerant art project launched by New York’s BravinLee programs that arrives in Kingston this June as part of Upstate Art Weekend, in collaboration with ArtPort Kingston. After a debut edition in Harlem that transformed a parking lot into a temporary neighborhood, Stay Frosty is now on home ground — a community where the car is less symbol than necessity, and where ArtPort Kingston has spent years weaving contemporary art into everyday public life. We spoke with BravinLee’s Karin Bravin and John Lee, and ArtPort Kingston’s Laurie De Chiara, about what brought them together, what they’re building, and why some of the most exciting art right now might be happening in a parking lot.

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Voices In Minor Keys: 2026 Venice Biennale

In Minor Keys, the central exhibition of the 61st Venice Biennale, arrived with a quiet proposition. The late curator Koyo Kouho envisioned a show that reflects practices requiring time and sustained commitment — some of them lifetime, even generational — and in doing so created a deliberate antithesis to the Biennale spectacle. Drawing almost exclusively on artists from Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean, the exhibition is anchored in political concerns — identity, immigration, the environment — yet so many of the works felt personal, while reaching toward art history and even toward Venice itself. What follows is an account of its visual depth and strength.

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A Studio That Became a Gallery: 81 Leonard

What began as Nancy Pantirer’s studio in 1996 has grown, over nearly three decades, into a gallery with a clear sense of purpose. Rooted in years of open studios and informal salon gatherings, 81 Leonard formalized its public presence in 2019, building a platform shaped by artists, for artists. Co-run with Hannah Rothbard, the gallery supports emerging and mid-career artists at pivotal moments in their careers, with a program that prizes beauty, technical competence, and community. Group shows grow organically from the artists themselves. We spoke with Nancy Pantirer and Hannah Rothbard about how 81 Leonard came to be, what drives its program, and what it means to run a gallery with no plans to be anywhere else.

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Funny Weather at Kunstraum: Upheavals and new assumptions

In the exhibition Funny Weather, curated by Imogen Aukland, four artists present distinct takes on reconstructions and uncertainty. A timely, unsettled feeling meanders through the space — sculptures that depict typically threatening objects unexpectedly softened, or photos that capture moments that physically change as you walk around them. Both the unexpected and a sense of upheaval are prominent themes throughout, whilst also giving us a “weather forecast” that changes by area, mood, and experience. This grants viewers the opportunity to question what art does: what an art object stirs within us, and how much our assumptions about something can shift when viewed from different perspectives.

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Hospitality, Narrative Grace, and the Warm Head

Derrida once pursued the question of hospitality. Can you welcome someone whose name you do not yet know? Can you open the door before knowing who is arriving? If you can, the welcome is sincere; if you cannot, hospitality has already become part of border management. Unconditional hospitality is therefore always impossible: if the host retains sovereignty, they cannot be fully open; if they become fully open, they are no longer the host. The name thus becomes the first step in the subject’s enclosure. This exhibition is built precisely upon this impossibility.

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Run by Artists, Built for Artists: OyG and the Cornell MFA

What does a gallery look like when the artists are in charge? Founded in 2013, Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG) is an artist-run collective with no fixed curatorial line and a non-hierarchical structure shared equally among its eight co-directors. Since 2023, it has become the annual New York home for Cornell University’s MFA thesis exhibition — a partnership built on a simple premise: artist-run spaces value experimentation, innovation, and risk-taking, giving graduate artists the freedom to present work without commercial constraints or curatorial imperatives.

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The Absence is in the Fingers 

There are exhibitions shaped less by what is installed than by what fails to arrive. I did not plan for this to be one of them. Where Form Remembers was conceived as a two-person presentation: Julie Gladstone’s mixed-media works traveling from Toronto, Avani Patel’s drawings from Brooklyn. The premise was a dialogue between two practices in proximity, each distinct enough that the distance between them would produce something worth engaging over time. What it became was different.

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Daniel Wiener at Satchel Projects: Out in front of the back of beyond

Out in Front of the Back of Beyond, the title of Daniel Wiener’s current solo exhibition at Satchel Projects, is a perfect pitch for the work on view. The notion of “front and back” strikes a strong chord throughout — explicit in the freestanding sculptures, hinted at in the wall pieces.

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