PeepSpace: Five Years Later

Featured Project
PeepSpace’s Co-Directors meeting on Zoom

PeepSpace, a contemporary art gallery in Tarrytown, was founded in 2020 by artists Monica Carrier and Jane Kang Lawrence, who set out with a clear idea: artists creating space for other artists. They signed the lease on March 1, just as COVID-19 gripped New York, and by June, they were masked up and hosting their first show PlusOne—pushing forward when most things had come to a halt. Five years and 21 exhibitions later, PeepSpace has held its ground and grown. Now under the co-leadership of Jess Blaustein, Monica Carrier, Ian Etter, Kristen Jordan, Jacquelyn Strycker, and Rachel Sydlowski, the gallery has become a steady fixture for artists and their work.

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Art Spiel Picks for January 2025: The Earthly and Celestial in Manhattan

HIGHLIGHTS

Lorna Simpson, did time elapse, 2024, acrylic and screenprint on gessoes fiberglass @Lorna Simpson

Cecilia Vicuña, Lorna Simpson and Nour Mobarak powerfully and eloquently broach heavy subject matter with diligent research in their attempts to preserve significant stories amidst the burdens of colonialism. Each artist speaks to various experiences as they contend with complicated histories of peoples, lands, and the dynamics between them in an array of circumstances. These exhibitions take on the task of engaging with past and present, depicting resourcefulness and perseverance amid the tangled threads of imperialism that wreak havoc across the globe. Viewers are offered context as they enter works that embody life through organic matter, curious objects, and ethereal modalities.

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Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in December 2024

HIGHLIGHTS
“Shared Vision: Portraits from The CCH Pounder-Koné Collection at The African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP). Photo courtesy of The African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP) 

December is a gift of a month for exhibitions in Philadelphia. Those currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, African American Museum of Philadelphia, and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery are not to be missed. From macro scale celebrations to quiet personal yearnings in intimate moments, the works in these exhibitions explore the fullness and complexity of artists within and alongside Black contemporary life.

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Art Spiel Picks: Boston Exhibitions in December 2024

 Highlights
Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore at Museum of Fine Arts, Bosto

It’s the end of 2024 and a new year is upon us. As we go into the holiday season to celebrate, reflect, and make resolutions for a new year, let’s also remember to take time to see all the amazing art on view. In Boston, there are several knockout shows to catch while you’re out and about. Whether you’re gathering with friends or going to your favorite gallery’s holiday party, you’ll be spending time with family – chosen and inherited – to feel centered, grounded, and a sense of belonging. Family can be wondrously complicated and beautifully complex in its array of characters.

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Mindscape: Patterns of Identity at L’Space

A couple of men in a room

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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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Shiva Ahmadi – Tangle at Shoshana Wayne

Installation view, Tangle
Installation view, Tangle

First thing that pulled me into Shiva Ahmadi’s Tangle exhibition were the pressure cookers. It took me a moment to recognize them: from a distance, they appeared as intricate decorative objects and archaeological relics simultaneously. While the vintage pressure cookers evoked associations of domestic warmth and memories of my grandma’s kitchen, their surfaces etched with Arabic calligraphy and floral ornamentation recall artifacts from a Persian or Arabic cultural heritage museum. The patience and meticulous craft of such engraving parallels the labor of generations of women who spent countless hours in the kitchen crafting their family’s meals.

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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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Stephanie Beck: Bough in Wave Hill

hot air

If you haven’t visited the little paradise up in the Bronx called Wave Hill recently, now is the time to go there, not only to experience the beautiful gardens but to see exhibitions that are not to be missed, one of them being Stephanie Beck’s Bough. Beck, who has always been a risk-taking sculptor, either building cities out of paper or manipulating wood into gravity-defying constructions, speaks with me about her latest body of work constructed from materials found at Wave Hill and bringing to light crucial environmental issues beautifully and elegantly. This is the last week to see the show, which runs through December 1st, 2024.

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Suzanne Wright: The Alchemy of Equals at Tappeto Volante

Suzanne Wright, Supreme (with arsenic), 2023, Vinyl Flashe paint, Fleur paint and Acrylic, Linen mounted wood panel, 36 × 36, photo courtesy of Tappeto Volante

Alchemy is an age-old mode of science that seeks to transform matter, turning it into something else, something new. It remains a relevant practice, prevailing as the medieval genesis of chemistry, which only went on to titillatingly promise a universal elixir to the denizens of the Renaissance. For centuries, alchemists lacked the scientific language to describe what they were observing in their experiments, as a result they projected their own subjectivity and personal processes onto external chemical operations – in this vein, the exhibition’s work at hand achieves its success. Through alchemy, lead is turned into gold, and as an 18th-century practitioner wrote with alchemists in mind: “Wherever thou art, all is brought to perfection; may the realm of thy Knowledge become subject unto thee. May our will in all our work be only thee, self-moving Power of Light! And as in the whole of Nature thou accomplishest all things, so accomplish all things in our work.”[1] Here, a connection to the material world reigns supreme.

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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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