land art – Art Spiel

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January 20, 2025January 10, 2025, by Sophia Ma

Expanding Asian Voices: Alchemyverse Leads the Inaugural Exhibition at Nunu Fine Art’s Project Space

Featured Project

Installation view of *Networks of Kisses*, photo credit Alchemyverse, images courtesy of Nunu Fine Art

The fall 2024 New York art season spotlighted exhibitions by the Asian diaspora, with prominent showcases like NYU 80WSE’s Legacies, featuring 90 artists and collective of Asian descent working between the 1970s and 1990s, and AS/COA New York’s The Appearance, which highlighted 33 Asian artists working in the Americas. Alongside these institutional exhibitions, numerous solo, dual, and group presentations were hosted across commercial galleries, while new spaces like SK Gallery emerged to center Asian artists in their programming. Among these efforts, Nunu Fine Art New York launched “Project Space: Asian Voices,” a platform to elevate experimental artistic expressions from Asia and its diaspora.

December 11, 2023December 24, 2023, by Hovey Brock

Rachel Frank: Ritual and Rehabilitation

Hot Air

A collage of hands holding a clay dog

Description automatically generated — *Rewilding Franconia Sculpture Park,* Participatory Performance as part of 4Ground: Midwest Land Art Biennial, Franconia Sculpture Park, 2022. Photographer: Rachel Frank

Rachel Frank is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice includes sculpture, video, and performance. Her art explores our shifting perspectives towards natural history, climate change, and relationships with non-human species. She grew up near Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, the birthplace of American paleontology, where large mammoth and other megafauna fossils were found, altering Western views on extinction and evolution. She works as a staff wildlife care manager at The Wild Bird Fund, a wildlife rehabilitation center in Manhattan.

January 23, 2023December 30, 2022, by Susan Hoffman Fishman

Keeper of the Waters

A city next to a body of water

Description automatically generated with low confidence — *A Living Water Garden*, Chengdu, China

For the last 50+ years, eco-artist and environmental activist Betsy Damon has devoted herself to community building – the coming together of individuals to achieve a common purpose. Since the 1980s, after a decade of engaging the public through public performances in New York City, she has worked at the intersection of art and science, focusing on the topic of water and on creating models for communities in the United States and China to know and become stewards of their own water sources. The brief descriptions below, highlighting four of Damon’s many exhibitions, ecological and sustainable design projects, publications, and organizations are only a brief glimpse into her prolific and important body of work.

May 23, 2022December 30, 2022, by Art Spiel

Fragile Rainbow: Traversing Habitats by ecoartspace

Featured Project: with curator Sue Spaid

A picture containing floor, indoor, ceiling, people

Description automatically generated — Tessa Grundon, *Invasive Species*, 2018-2021/2022, Asiatic Bittersweet root systems and border fencing, dimensions variable.

The group show Fragile Rainbow: Traversing Habitats at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in Brooklyn includes paintings, sculptures, videos, and installations addressing environmental issues by more than fifty artists from the New York City region who are members of ecoartspace. The title is based on Claire McConaughy’s oil painting, Fragile Rainbow, referencing both hope and loss. The show runs from May 7^th through June 4^th, 2022. Curator Sue Spaid elaborates on this large-scale group show.

March 28, 2022November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Sharon Yavo-Ayalon: Laminated Earth at ZAZ

Featured Artist

A picture containing indoor, ceiling, platform

Description automatically generated — installation views; 7ft Mud Curtains, photo courtesy of Yunha Choi

Laminatede Earth, Sharon Yavo-Ayalon’s large-scale multimedia installation at ZAZ10TS intersects architectural representations of housing with land art practices—raw soil and synthetic matter coalesce. Sharon Yavo-Ayalon, an artist and architect, draws from both disciplines to transform the confined lobby of 10 Times Square into a shimmering dreamy landscape. The exhibition extends to the ZAZ corner billboard on 41^st and 7^th with video art, taken from a performance of the artist who builds, destructs, and rebuilds her own plastic home. The show is curated by Professor Lala Ben-Alon and runs in the gallery through April 28^th, 2022.

July 16, 2021November 2, 2022, by Alex Feim

Jorge Otero-Pailos: Distributed Monuments at Sapar Contemporary

A picture containing gallery, room, scene, indoor

Description automatically generated — *Installation view of Jorge Otero-Pailos: Distributed Monuments. Courtesy of Sapar Contemporary*

One could say that the primary medium of Jorge Otero-Pailos’s work is liquid latex, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that his medium is time – or rather, the passage of time made visible. In Distributed Monuments at Sapar Contemporary, Otero-Pailos presents a series of latex casts mounted on canvas from the old U.S. Mint in San Francisco, California and from the pool at Lyndhurst Mansion in Tarrytown, New York. Two monumental sites on opposite coasts come together – one representing the literal creation of wealth, and the other an accumulation of it by an elite family. These latex casts have extracted dust from the sites, which are both in states of preserved ruin, but can be visited by the public.

November 5, 2020October 28, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

All the Way to Hell

In Dialogue with Eliza Evans

Last year, after artist Eliza Evans learned she had inherited the equivalent of three acres of mineral rights in Oklahoma, she started receiving offers from agents for fossil fuel companies to buy or lease these rights. After researching the law, Eliza Evans learned that she could not refuse and that the property could be fracked without her consent if the neighboring property owners agreed. Eliza Evans says that since like most artist she does not like being told what to do, she took a deep dive on mineral rights and property law to see if she could create some options. This resulted in the conceptual art activism of All the Way to Hell.

All the Way to Hell is giving away fractions of this property to as many people as possible. Nearly 300 people are participating so far, and signups will remain open until mid-December. This aggressive fragmentation of the property drives up the driller’s acquisition costs and will impede their interest. All the Way to Hell is a platform for a new form of protest, the foundation for a 100-year sit-in. Although each fractional mineral property is minuscule from a practical and legal perspective, the space it occupies is vast. All the Way to Hell may be the largest land art project ever.

July 9, 2020August 31, 2020, by Nina Mdivani

Confronting History through Herstory

ecofeminism(s) at Thomas Erben Gallery

Installation view of ecofeminism(s) curated by Monika Fabijanska, left to right: Eliza Evans, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Hanae Utamura, Betsy Damon, Aviva Rahmani, and Jessica Segall. Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, June/July 2020 (photos: Andreas Vesterlund).

The exhibition ecofeminism(s), on view at Thomas Erben Gallery from June 19th to July 24th, will reopen Tuesday, September 8th through Saturday, September 26th, 2020. Curator Monika Fabijanska brings together works of sixteen artists in graceful, yet dense and thoughtful way as a museum show would. Albeit in the gallery consistently staging pivotal and sophisticated exhibitions,including among many others shows of Senga Nengudi, Dona Nelson, Painting Forward and Looped and Layered – Contemporary Art from Tehran.

March 31, 2020March 30, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Artists on Coping: Mary Mattingly

During the coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

*Swale*, *Concrete Plant Park* 2018, Photo: Subhram Reddy

Mary Mattingly works with photography and sculpture. She is currently artist in residence at the Brooklyn Public Library. In 2016, she founded Swale, an edible landscape on a barge to circumvent New York City’s public land laws, and in 2018 dismantled a military vehicle and deconstructed its mineral supply chain with BRIC Arts. Her work has been exhibited at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Storm King, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Palais de Tokyo. It has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times, Le Monde, New Yorker, NPR, Art21, and included in books such as MIT Press Documents of Contemporary Art, and Henry Sayre’s A World of Art.

March 12, 2018June 4, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Meet the artists at Wave Hill’s Open Studios

Tamara Kostianovsky, trunk 4. photo courtesy of the artist

Wave Hill* is a twenty eight acre public garden and cultural center overlooking the spectacular Hudson River and Palisades. Wave Hill aims to celebrate the artistry and legacy of its gardens, to preserve its magnificent views, and to explore human connections to the natural world through programs in horticulture, education and the arts. For the ninth consecutive year, Wave Hill opens Glyndor Gallery as workspace for selected New York-area artists, giving them the unique opportunity to explore the winter landscape and develop innovative work based on direct observation from nature. Continue reading “Meet the artists at Wave Hill’s Open Studios”