Fran Shalom: Everyday Improvisations at Kathryn Markel

Installation view

Fran Shalom’s paintings reduce form to its essentials while preserving the marks of revision and doubt. The surface becomes a record of both decision and hesitation, clarity and its undoing. Her compositions are direct yet ambivalent. Airy lines float within vivid color fields, their edges both firm and uncertain, altogether suggesting a state of being through color, motion, and gesture rather than representation. They obstinately remain abstract, teasing recognition without granting it.  

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Learning with Trees-Artists for Climate and Environmental Solutions

In Dialogue
 Installation view. Photo courtesy of Martina Tanga

Curator Martina Tanga had been reflecting on the ideas behind Learning With Trees – Artists for Climate and Environmental Solutions long before the exhibition took shape. In 2022, she read Ben Rawlence’s The Treeline, a book tracing how the Boreal forest is shifting under the impact of climate change. That reading sparked the idea that trees could serve as a highly accessible and disarmingly effective way to approach conversations about climate change.

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Art Spiel Picks: Boston Exhibitions in November 2025

HIGHLIGHTS
Beverly Semmes, Red Bird on Blue, 2017, 16” x 20”, oil and magazine page collage on glass

I’m deeply grateful for Boston’s university galleries—they consistently fill the gaps left by the local commercial gallery scene, which has been diluted, in my opinion, by the pressure to cover rent. These institutions reliably bring high-quality, thoughtful art and ideas to the city. A short but not exhaustive list would include the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, the Aidekman Arts Center at Tufts, MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, and the Harvard Art Museums.

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Recording is Seeing at Tappeto Volante: Marta Lee 11:11

Installation photograph of 11:11, at Tappeto Volante

A few weeks ago, Marta Lee visited my studio. A few days after that visit, she texted me:

“Hey, what is the deal with that long wood piece of molding that was kind of to the left of where u were sitting? It’s gorgeous”

Marta was referring to an 8-foot-long piece of molding I’ve used as a mahlstick (also spelled ‘maulstick’) since 2018. I probably found it in the trash in my first studio building on Grand Street in Bushwick, and I’ve never thought of it beyond its use as an object to balance my arm on while painting. But Marta was right – it is sort of gorgeous. It’s got a spiraling geometric pattern carved into it, and paint streaks where I swipe it while lifting brushes. This realization led to another – just how unique Marta’s way of seeing the world really is. 

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Art Spiel Picks: Philadelphia Exhibitions in October 2025

HIGHLIGHTS
Clay as Care Installation view. Photo by The Clay Studio

Just as a solitary action can cause a ripple effect, the sharing of unique ideas can inspire and transform existing systems to include and support different communities. The exhibitions this month demonstrate genuine curiosity and meaningful activation, leading to a trend of revisionist histories in art, institutional displays, or familial archives. Curators Jennifer Zwilling and Nicole Pollard reinvent how gallery exhibitions should be interacted with and ask the question of how clay can assist in caring for mental health at The Clay Studio. Artists Mahsa Attaran, Monica Hamilton, Hanieh Kashani, and Anna Schwartz create a language to describe the power of memory as they mine through personal photographs and materials at Automat Collective. Calero Rodríguez establishes her own History of Art, incorporating Latino, Afro, and Carribean imagery in masterly assembled collages at Taller Puertoriqueño.

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Delusions of Grandeur -Grayson Perry at the Wallace Collection

Totally Unique Thing. AI generated image, glazed ceramic. Installed on bespoke wallpaper, designed by Perry and produced by Liberty of London

The Wallace Collection, a storied historic mansion in London that houses an extraordinary, far-ranging collection of art and objects, invited the artist Grayson Perry to embed and create an exhibition that responds to their collections. Collected during the18th and 19th Centuries, the museum is dripping in Rococo, houses breathtaking Old Master paintings, amour, ceramics, medieval relics and sculpture. It would be, for a lesser artist, a daunting assignment.

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Reinventing the Grid: A Conversation with James Gold

Portrait of the artist

The paintings in James Gold’s solo show, Infinite Scroll, act as intermediaries between past, present and future. These glimmering grids at Morgan Lehman gallery toggle between his deep reverence for history and his active aesthetic imagination. Talking with the painter about his wider practices in collaged artist books and archeological renderings revealed new means of perception and applications of art-making.

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Aleksandra Scepanovic: Site Seen

In Dialogue
Closing Reception, Guests mingle among paintings, neon, and a vintage car, the grungy garage space alive with conversation, community and shared food. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Miller

Aleksandra Scepanovic’s story begins in then-Yugoslavia, where the stark presence of brutalist architecture shaped her early sense of form and space. As a journalist during the 1990s she reported on the Balkan conflicts, bearing witness to the fractured landscapes of cities such as Sarajevo.

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Jeffrey Morabito: The Caged Bird Sings

In Dialogue
Lan Shi, Curator, photo courtesy of Helen Chen

In 2019, an art acquisition trip brought curator Lan Shi from Beijing to New York. When the pandemic extended her stay, she shifted her focus and began working as a full-time freelance curator and art agent. Since then, she has organized more than a dozen exhibitions of varying scale, including her current project with artist Jeffrey Morabito.

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Extreme Whether Show at Icebox4

Featured Exhibition
Installation view

With only a few days left before it closes on October 4, Extreme Whether Show at Icebox4 offers a gathering of 21 artists responding to the turbulence of the present. Curated by Tom Fitzgibbon, the exhibition unfolds less as a single argument than as a shifting field of voices, unsettled, layered, and in dialogue.

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