UNBIND: FIGURING THE LAYERS OF BEING with the New York Studio School

Leaves, oil on canvas, 54 x 36 inches

Upon entering the exhibition I was struck at the presence every artist’s work had. While every piece was quite different from one another, they all shared similar conversations and offered viewers the opportunity to question human experience, histories, intimacy versus public viewing, and dealing with what it means to feel human. With nine artists, and diverse mediums, the complexities of being are shown clearly and each artist has their own take on “layers of being”.

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Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in June 2025

HIGHLIGHTS
Installation view of Tea Party at Locks Gallery, courtesy of Locks Gallery

As we get into the summer months, June exhibition picks for Philadelphia are vibrant, sensuous, and bold. Works currently on display at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Locks Gallery, and Moore College of Art touch on subjects surrounding how we see ourselves and each other, and the transitory nature of existence. All things physical and sensual ultimately act as a foil to death, and these surreal and vivid works offer the viewer insight into how each artist considers what makes us human. Whether created of glitter, paint, ceramic, velvet, or butterflies, the works in these exhibitions remind us that we are stardust, and golden.

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The Treasure Below Grand

ISammy Bennett, Above Grand (Echoes of Language as Code), 2025, photo courtesy of Flaneurshan Studio

Where Air Turns to Fog at Below Grand, curated by Ray Hwang, gathers Sammy Bennett, Anna Gregor, and Jesse Ng in a sometimes cheeky, but overall multivalent and sincere, investigation of visual perception and the machinery of capital-F/capital-A Fine Art presentation. With his characteristic casual abandon, Hwang exploits the gallery’s awkward architecture to its full potential, letting Bennett install an upside-down trompe-l’œil “group show” in the street-facing walk-in window display while reserving the closet-sized back room for a collection of Gregor and Ng’s paintings.

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Adriane Colburn: Seeing by Mapping

Adriane Colburn

Artist Adriane Colburn lived in San Francisco for over twenty years. That time was formative—personally and creatively. At the same time, she maintained a consistent presence on the East Coast. She’s from Vermont and has always spent summers there, with a lasting connection to that part of New England and its relationship to the land.

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The Bone and Muscle: A Conversation with Dona Nelson

In Dialogue
Dona Nelson in her studio

For decades, Dona Nelson has dissolved the formal boundaries of painting: refusing to apply pigment to just one side of the canvas, mounting the stretchers of her double-sided paintings on freestanding metal stands, and letting them occupy gallery floors like sculptural interlopers. In her current two-person show with Andrew Ross at Thomas Erben Gallery, however, the painter has ceded the floor space entirely, anchoring her three new works squarely to the wall.

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Art Spiel Picks NYC: Decentering the Human—Or at Least Trying To

Highlights
Installation view: Alicja Kwade: Telos Tales, Pace Gallery, New York, 2025. Photo courtesy of the gallery

It’s a rare joy to encounter immersive installations that truly activate space and affect the viewer both intellectually and viscerally. This spring, three standout New York exhibitions— Alicja Kwade at Pace, Anastasia Komar at Management, and Pierre Huyghe at Marian Goodman—do just that. Each exhibition envelops visitors in an environment that challenges the senses and pushes the boundaries of perception, while decentering the human’s place within it: Komar contemplates the primordial origins of life and the interconnectedness of all living things; Huyghe imagines a collaborative ecology where humans, animals, machines, and artificial intelligence co-create new realities; and Kwade abstracts away the human almost entirely, leaving behind only our systems for measuring and making as the scaffolding for a parallel, perhaps post-human world.

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Guy Nelson: Tales from the Understory at The North Dakota Museum of Art

Hot Air
Guy Nelson, The Road Not Taken, North Dakota Museum of Art

The North Dakota Museum of Art’s latest exhibition, Guy Nelson: Tales from the Understory, is a multidisciplinary solo show focused on the woodlands and prairies of the upper Midwest. Featuring sculpture, painting and video, the exhibition will be on display through July 20, 2025. This exhibition marks the tenth in the Museum’s Art Makers Series, an annual award for artists with connections to the region, which is underwritten by Dr. William F. Wosick of Fargo.

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Wherever I Lay My Head at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning 

In Dialogue
Group picture(Members in picture from left to right): Euijin V. Ra (artist), Julia D. Shaw (artist), Courteny Symone Staton (artist), Laura OsCam (artist), Sherwin Banfield (Program Manager), TEDF (artist), Marleen Moise (artist).

Wherever I Lay My Head, now on view at The Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning , began with an invitation to Indira A. Abiskaroon to curate the culminating ARTWorks exhibition. The offer came from Program Manager Sherwin Banfield and was formalized in conversation with Director of Program Operations Wendy Arimah Berot. Abiskaroon’s first priority was to spend time with the ARTWorks Fellows—to learn how their practices had developed over the course of the program and to hear what ideas had been resonating in their weekly sessions.

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Being There, with Weihui Lu

In conversation
Weihui Lu at Wave Hill, March 2025, photograph by Jan Dickey

Terra Keck and Jan Dickey caught up with artist Weihui Lu a couple of weeks after she completed a residency at Wave Hill in the Bronx. At the time, Weihui was reflecting on that experience while also preparing for her current solo show, when there is no longer a danger of frost, at Tempest Gallery in Ridgewood, Queens. An installation artist with roots in Chinese landscape painting, Weihui continues to explore impermanence, a delicate and sparing use of material, and humankind’s relationship to the natural environment. Her installation at Tempest draws its source material from an aging greenhouse she spent time contemplating during her residency at Wave Hill—understood as a physical embodiment of human systems of care, including their inevitable collapse and repair.

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Lance Rautzhan and Cabin Contemporary      

In conversation
Lance Rautzhan standing in front of Cabin Contemporary. Photo courtesy of Cabin Contemporary

Established in June 2022, Cabin Contemporary culls local, urban, and international artists for solo and group exhibitions, hosting contemporary art concepts and dialogue in a rural context, from April through October. Multidisciplinary artist and educator Lance Rautzhan curates exhibits of installation, new media, painting, and outsider art in an outbuilding on his family farm near the Appalachian Trail, Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, and Pennsylvania State Game Lands.

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