nature and art – Art Spiel

November 2, 2026October 31, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Fall Exhibitions at The Hammond Museum

At the Hammond Museum and Japanese Stroll Garden in North Salem, New York, art doesn’t stay inside the galleries. Since 1964, the museum has staged exhibitions that move from its gallery walls to its patio, tea hut, and garden paths, with about fifteen shows a year and the number growing. Contemporary and historical, drawn from many styles and cultural traditions, the exhibitions often aim to build cross-cultural understanding, while those set outdoors open a dialogue between art, nature, and personal reflection. This fall, five shows fill the grounds: Tomoko Amaki Abe’s Heaven Come Down in the Main Gallery, Meg Hitchcock’s Fang in the Hays and Goelet Galleries, Soli Pierce’s Poetry of Place in the Tea Hut, Matthew Weber’s Ground Shift on the Patio, and Kurt Steger’s In the Garden along the Japanese Stroll Garden. In this conversation, the museum team talks about how the Exhibition Committee selects its shows and how each one carries the museum’s mission forward.

August 19, 2026August 17, 2026, by Ming Chen

Transcendence at FOU Gallery

Group exhibition: Transcendence installation view, 2026. Photography by Jiaqi, courtesy of Fou Gallery

Transcendence, a group exhibition of sculptures and paintings, is curated by Helena Jin and on view at FOU Gallery from July 11 – September 5, 2026. The artists Tianshu Zhang (张天舒), Gloria Fan Duan (樊段晓春), and Tao Xian (陶显) explore the show’s theme of transcendence in vastly different formal ways. Despite Helena Jin’s scholarly background in researching Buddhist art history, the type of transcendence posed by the show is distinctly secular; while some of the artists reference East Asian tradition and symbolism, the “beyond” or spiritual is achieved through individual artistic approaches to color and form.

June 30, 2026June 30, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

The Whole Water of a River at TSA Brooklyn with Byron Toledo

The Whole Water of a River, installation view

A dead opossum lying in a fetal position along a contaminated riverbank in Quito became, for Byron Toledo, both an encounter and a sculpture. That moment, tender and violent at once, is at the heart of The Whole Water of a River at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Brooklyn, an exhibition that follows the Machángara River from its mountain source through the city. Ceramic animals, distilled plant aromas, and sound recordings gathered along the watershed map the river as a living system that connects hills, ravines, plants, people, and the city itself. The project carries unusual stakes: in 2024, an Ecuadorian court ruled that the rights of the Machángara had been violated, a ruling for which Toledo’s own video work served as evidence. We spoke with the artist about walking the river, collaborating across disciplines, and what it means to make art inside an ecosystem fighting to survive.