migration – Art Spiel

July 7, 2025July 11, 2025, by Yasmeen Abdallah

Art Spiel Picks: NYC Exhibitions in July 2025

HIGHLIGHTS

Installation view, Michael Pribich at Transmitter

Pathways of migration, transit, turbulence, and foundational knowledge lead us across the city through three boroughs that speak to time and reflection. Through the slightest gestures cleverly calculated by the selected artists, we can trace symbolic movements as indicative of something greater and inherently profound. This lineup is a reminder to delve into one’s humanity and to mine for empathy and change. These themes are as relevant today as they were long ago, and it’s important to acknowledge the work of artists who are using their talents to envision an equitable world for all. Let us carry forth this mindset so that the present we build is a true path forward towards a more mindful future.

May 27, 2025May 28, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

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.

May 12, 2025April 29, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

Duae Lingua at the Romanian Cultural Institute

In Dialogue

Curator Daniela Holban with artists Adina Andrus, Alex Wolkowicz, Katya Grokhovsky, Lilian Shtereva, Elena Kalkova, and Luisa Tuntuc – Deputy Director of the Romanian Cultural Institute, at the *Duae Lingua* exhibition, Brâncuși Gallery, 2025. Image Courtesy of the Romanian Cultural Institute. © Johnny Vacar

The group show Duae Lingua at The Brâncuși Gallery in the Romanian Cultural Institute began as a personal reflection on curator Daniela Holaban’s migration journey from Romania to the United States and gradually evolved into a broader curatorial inquiry into dual identity and cultural translation through the lens of Eastern European women artists. “Initially, I was interested in the dissonance between linguistic and cultural fluency—how even after mastering a language, true belonging can remain elusive,” says Holban. In this interview with Art Spiel, Daniela Holban elaborates on how that concept became the foundation for the exhibition, using language as both metaphor and framework to explore themes of identity, memory, and assimilation.

October 16, 2024October 16, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

Bascha Mon’s Life and Journey of Dreaming at Tappeto Volante

In Dialogue

A Celebratory Retrospective of an Artist’s Life and Journey of Dreaming, Perseverance, Activism, & Unconscious Expression.”

The retrospective of Bascha Mon’s paintings at Tappeto Volante offers a focused look at an artist whose career has been shaped by both creative achievements and personal struggles. Mon first gained recognition in the 1970s and 80s, with numerous exhibitions and critical acclaim. However, her trajectory was interrupted by health challenges that led to a long period of seclusion. During this time, she continued to work from her basement studio in New Jersey, expanding her creative vocabulary across various mediums while remaining largely out of the public eye. In recent years, Mon turned to digital platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Paola Gallio, the exhibition curator and gallery co-founder, describes this phase as “dissolving the physical isolation that had once defined her situation.” These platforms allowed Mon to reconnect with the art community and sustain an active, visible presence. Gallio emphasizes that “Mon’s modest basement studio became a metaphor for boundless creative space,” where the constraints of physical isolation were replaced by the limitless possibilities of virtual engagement. For deeper insights into the retrospective, Gallio’s interview with Art Spiel offers further reflections on Mon’s artistic journey and the significance of this exhibition.

September 11, 2024October 6, 2024, by Yasmeen Abdallah

Art Spiel Picks: Governors Island in September 2024

HIGHLIGHTS

A room with a large chess board

Description automatically generated — Dario Mohr’s Don’t Forget to Check. Image by Yasmeen Abdallah

Themes of searching and connection to ancestors through practice, ritual, and persistence are intertwined through work that depicts aspects of migration, objecthood, and the complexities of humanity itself. The winds moving across the island dictate the mood as we bow and sway through graceful installations in deeply resonant forms at LMCC Art Center and Artcrawl Harlem.

July 1, 2024July 1, 2024, by Riad Miah

Conversation with Sandra Eula Lee

In Dialogue

*Seeds in a wild garden*, 2009, Rubble collected from construction sites in Seoul, South Korea, house paints in colors of local gardens

Sandra Lee is an artist who produces sculpture and 2-D works, which addresses her interest in labor, materials, and traditions that have been passed in through time and culture and defining those elements through a contemporary lens. Lee had a recent exhibition titled “The Walking Mountain” at Drexel University. I had the pleasure of speaking to Lee about her work, her influences, and what it means to be an American-Korean artist and daughter of immigrant parents. The Walking Mountain exhibition consists of works that signify some of these themes through their materiality and their making. Here is the discussion that transpired.

June 11, 2024June 9, 2024, by Eliana Blechman

Jiwon Rhie: Suddenly, Images Explain Everything at La Mama Galleria

Jiwon Rhie often explores moments of deep personal depression, social misanthropy, and cultural alienation in her work. You would never know it, though, from first viewing. Walking into La Mama Galleria in the East Village, NY, visitors are greeted by the playful whirring sound of over a dozen mechanical toy dogs, each covered in exploding layers of colorful, fake flowers. The dogs walk across a blue moving pad, bumping into walls, each other, or the artificial boundaries Rhie erected. In the center of the moving pad, two quarter candy vending dispensers shake with the motion of encased and enflowered toys, which act, of course, unperturbed by their enclosures. Viewers are invited to borrow quarters from the gallery to dispense pods filled with custom keychains and temporary tattoos from the candy machines. Though only a corner of a room within a larger exhibition, Rhie’s Flower Dogs make it impossible to enter the gallery without stopping to smile, take a photo or video, and procure ones own custom keychain art.

April 24, 2024April 24, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

This Bitter Earth: Deborah Wasserman at Kuma Lisa

Photo Story

Deborah Wasserman, Rubble, 2021, ink and acrylic on paper, 28″ x35.5″

Rubble, mutated crop fields, floods, scorched earth, and occasional female figures floating or submerged unfold throughout the sixteen landscape paintings in Deborah Wasserman’s current solo show, The Bitter Earth at Kuma Lisa. Though the paintings differ in scale and media—from small acrylic and oil on panels to larger acrylic, oil, and stained clothes on canvas to medium-sized works on paper—they all share the sense of a world where multiple perspectives from different vantage points co-exist. Wasserman’s energetic strokes and searching lines create a rhythmic movement upward, downward, and sideways—reminiscent of the fluidity in Chinese and Japanese calligraphic scroll paintings and the clear, directional lines of a hand-drawn map. These linear dynamos intertwine with a palette of earthy tones, greens, yellows, oranges, blues, reds, and pure blacks, creating multiple vignettes within a layered landscape.

January 8, 2024December 24, 2023, by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

The Immigrant Artist Biennial – In Dialogue

Portraiture, Archives, and Representation: Golnar Adili, Erika DeFreitas, and Jonathan Ojekunle

On the left: Jonathan Ojekunle. *Shining Light*, 2022. Oil, acrylic on canvas. 60 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist and The Immigrant Artist Biennial. Courtesy NARS Foundation. Photographed by Young Yu Don.

Oftentimes, in thinking about the representation of the human form in art, people can get very attached to the ‘abstraction’ versus ‘figuration’ binary. These respective styles frequently get coded as opposites, and certain kinds of politics are ascribed to each. For example, ‘figuration’ is coded as a kind of politics of representation, whereas ‘abstraction’ is a politics of refusal or resistance to legibility. However, the work of Golnar Adili, Erika DeFreitas, and Jonathan Ojekunle, all on view in The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023: Contact Zone, functions beyond this binary in fresh ways. We interviewed the artists about portraiture and its relationship with archives and representation.

November 27, 2023November 27, 2023, by Art Spiel

Linda Sok: Biomythorgraphies

In Dialogue

My grandmother with a bird, 2021, silk, cotton, salt, ink, wood, 80 x 70 inches, image courtesy the artist.

Linda Sok uses in her fiber-based sculptures elaborate dyeing techniques practiced throughout Asia and imagery of her family she receives through social media to convey narratives of migration and cross-cultural pollination. Linda Sok is a second-generation descendant of survivors of the Khmer Rouge Regime, a genocidal period in Cambodia’s history that forced her family to flee Cambodia. By accessing fragments of Cambodia’s traumatic past, she attempts to recontextualize lost traditions and culture to allow living descendants to process the history through a contemporary lens.