Contemporary Art and Culture
Through their group show at Re Institute, Julia Kunin, Barbara Zucker, Meg Lipke, Catherine Hall, and Joanne Howard reflect on how a supportive community and friendship nourish the often solitary act of creating art. Their lives have intersected over many years, and their approach to art cross-pollinates on multiple levels.
Continue reading “A Tribute to Friendship at the Reinstitute”
Over-Compression, a group show featured in Ridgewood Open Studios, is the culmination of Eunice Chen Yuyue’s curator-in-residence program at Level Gallery, supported by Rockella Space. From February to April 2024, Eunice visited over 20 artists in their studios at One Eyed Studios and Brown Bear Studios. The exhibition highlights the work of Brooklyn and Queens artists, including Christine Abraham, Luis Aguilera, Britt Harrison, Ben Blaustein, Alexander Brewington, Sir, King David, Karryl Eugene, Yunierki Felix, Joe Gray, Kristen Heritage, Jason Karolak, Teddy Lane, Sheila Lanham, Sfera Louis, Spencer Patrick, Jean Rim, Alejandra Rojas, Chimera Singer, Md Tokon, and Amanda Valle. Over-Compression is displayed across five galleries at One Eyed Studios, running from May 3rd to May 19th, 2024.
Continue reading “Over-Compression in Ridgewood Open Studios, curated by Eunice Chen”
During her solo exhibition at the NARS Foundation, artist Marina Kassianidou spoke with Mary Annunziata, who previously curated Marina’s work, A Partial History, as part of the inaugural Immigrant Artist Biennial in 2020. In her exhibition at NARS, Marina presents new work inspired by her grandmother’s collection of 19th and 20th-century schoolbooks from Cyprus. On display are four photographs of selected pages from these books, four artist’s books that recreate the full original texts, and four large sculptural drawings. The show celebrates a call and response with ancestors’ material history, showcasing Marina’s time-intensive artistic process in which she works with surfaces found in her surroundings, such as walls, floors, fabrics, paper, and screens, and experiments with ways of marking that respond to the surface’s appearance, use, or history.
Continue reading “Marina Kassianidou: A Partial History”
In 2018, I interviewed David Samuel Stern about his process of creating woven photographic portraits. In these portraits, he interlaced photographs into intricate, tactile artworks, emphasizing the medium’s tangible qualities. Stern has been relentlessly exploring what it means to portray through photography and the medium’s place as a recorder of time and nature. Since our initial interview, he has produced captivating new work. Here, we survey his evolution over the last six years and his current work.
Continue reading “David Samuel Stern: Does a portrait need a subject?”
The Space Between, curated by Tracy McKenna at Platform Project Space, combines works in paint and fiber by Lauren Luloff, Tessa Greene O’Brien, Mark Olshansky, and Amy Kim Keeler. They all share a sense of desire to capture the elusive space in between—where the artist’s perception and hand meet your gaze.
Continue reading “The Space Between at Platform Project Space”
In her mixed-media work, Jeanne Ciravolo integrates collage, print, and stitching, materializing the stories of her female relatives—their stories of loss and hope. The female figures often reference representation of women in art history, such as medieval carvings or paintings from the Renaissance. The figure imagery is based on Ciravolo’s sketches, figure drawings, photos from newspapers and magazines, or photos she took.
Continue reading “Jeanne Ciravolo – the resistance in making do”
Peggy Cyphers’ exhibition at The Front Room Gallery in Hudson, titled Passages, integrates disparate painting traditions into abstract landscapes. The technique—fluid brush strokes combined with sand and paint pour—draws from Chinese landscape art, Native American traditions, and Postwar Abstraction. These paintings suggest the natural world’s fragility, mystery, and grandeur, recalling the upward gaze from the base of a canyon.
Continue reading “Peggy Cyphers: Passages at The Front Room “
Ernesto Renda and I first met on the internet, as more and more artists do. A follow turned into likes, which developed into mutual curiosity and respect for each other’s practice. Renda, who lives in New York, and I in Los Angeles, kept in touch for months, viewing miniature backlit versions of the other’s work while each suspecting there was more than met the eye. As fate would have it, Renda’s solo exhibition, The Moment of Truth, opened at Moskowitz Bayse in Los Angeles; subsequently, my solo exhibition, EGO RIP, opened at Management in New York City two weeks later. Viewing the work in person was enlightening and generated conversations around material play, intuition, and the verisimilitude of our subjects. These brief yet poignant chats inspired us to pose the questions below from the perspective of one visual practitioner to another.
Continue reading “Katie Hector & Ernesto Renda: on East & West Coast exhibitions”
BravinLee Projects has just launched an audacious, big, and bold exhibition of 60 contemporary artists working in textile or textile-related mediums. It’s a massive show in an unlikely pop-up space. A five-story historic brick warehouse building in the Seaport that is anything but the cool, clean white box gallery that we are used to. The walk-up gallery space has vintage wide planked flooring, old fireplaces, and deeply aged brick walls. Though it must have been a challenge to curate in the space and even more of a challenge to install, the result is a fascinating presentation of artists working in a wide range of materials and styles.
Continue reading “The Golden Thread – BravinLee Offsite at The Seaport”
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.
Continue reading “This Bitter Earth: Deborah Wasserman at Kuma Lisa”