Contemporary Art and Culture
Naomi Lev is a curator, cultural program director, and arts writer based in New York City. She works closely with living artists and calls her approach “Process Curating”—a method that follows a project from its earliest stages through final installation. It’s about long-term exchange and staying present as ideas shift.
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Willam Carroll’s newest painting series titled Trees has found a nice place to debut in 57w57arts. Each artist has their own room within the gallery space, the other artists include: Michael Voss, Steph Krawchuk, Seth Dembar, and Christopher Boyne. The rooms are also active office spaces where employees and clientele enjoy the work during appointments. Carroll’s series of seven new paintings on wood panels find themselves in the waiting room, stoically standing alongside a wonderful view of the New York Public library right outside of a nearby office window. Seeing the work within this space, especially it being a waiting room, allows viewers an opportunity for quiet contemplation, a foil to the hustle and bustle of what is right outside. You begin to feel as if you are journeying through the forest on a silent winter day.
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Bill Scott’s solo show Two Decades at Hollis Taggart Gallery’ celebrates this painter’s long career of collaboration with this renowned New York City gallery. Bill, a fairly reserved individual, often clad in neutral colors at gallery openings, produces profoundly beautiful works bursting with color. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Bill, a friend and mentor for more than 15 years, dating back to my days as an undergraduate at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
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Merging with the Garden Art Show by Rukh Art Hub. Mriya Gallery, Tribeca, NYC. Photo by Lesia Dutchak
The word Rukh stands for Movement in Ukrainian. Rukh Art Hub, the creative initiative promoting Ukrainian contemporary art in New York City, focuses on giving Ukrainian art momentum and a voice to Ukrainian creatives and curators. Polina Kuznetsova, Mariia Manuilenko, and Olga Severina are leading Rukh Art Hub, a project dedicated to cultivating and promoting Ukrainian art and culture in New York City and beyond.
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Polish artist Monika Drożyńska brings her resistance embroidery to a New York audience in a solo show at Open Source Gallery and her Urban Embroidery project. The connections she makes with words within many different languages are a dexterous game of text and symbols on fabric, an adept study of transformative change for a better world. Polish curator Bartek Remisko, speaking about the work, said, “Embroidery can be about threads that bring us together to create social change.” Remisko’s insight speaks to Drożyńska’s focus on embroidery techniques in contemporary art and textiles in public spaces to further the collective conversation and play with conventional expectations.
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Kosuke Kawahara’s solo show at RAINRAIN represents a multi-faceted approach to materials, exploring what are conventional ways of organizing knowledge? Or, perhaps, how cosmic, biological, and cultural systems intersect? Throughout the paintings, I recognize forms resembling distorted body parts and hinted symbols from astronomy, depicted with oil paint, acrylic, chalk, spray paint, fabric, and wood. When Kawahara’s surfaces manifest their materiality—a patch of exposed woodgrain or a peel of paint revealing found fabric—they suggest the existence of other dimensions and bring me to question the characteristics of processes like reproduction and decay.
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Jody Wood uses mediums of social practice, video, photography, and performance in her art practice. On a brisk January afternoon in Brooklyn, we discussed the joys of transformation and the metrics to determine success and trauma in healing. Wood’s recent work re-imagines routines in poverty support agencies, aiming to sculpt power dynamics and relationship networks and resist stigmas surrounding poverty. Her solo show Collecting Health at Open Source Gallery features Social Pharmacy (2021-ongoing), a project that redefines public health as a collaborative performance and asks what healing rituals can be found in simple acts of generosity between members of society and by utilizing the natural world around us. Collecting Health at Open Source Gallery runs from February 10 to March 22, 2024.
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In her Interiors painting series, American Iranian-born painter Zahra Nazari draws on prominent features in classical Persian and Islamic architecture—decorative botanical motifs, arch, and particularly, iwan, the large, vaulted hall semi-enclosed and usually walled on three sides, with one end entirely open. Many scholars believe its origin can be traced back to the Parthian era. While looking at Nazari’s luminous surfaces, it may be interesting to keep in mind the dual role of the Persian arch—it serves both decorative and functional purposes—this richly decorated key aesthetic element in Persian architecture functions not only as an ornament but also as a structural support that provides stability. It is also designed to moderate the amount of sunlight that enters space, especially in iwans or other open spaces. Nazari’s frequent use of Mylar as a surface stirs a play on the notion of external and internal light, and simultaneously, her saturated color palette invokes a hot and arid climate with bright, sunlit days and crisp nights. Repetitive and rhythmical, these motifs coalesce into energetic, translucent, and luminous surfaces, evoking an interior space in flux. Zahra Nazari elaborates on her ideas and process in this interview with Art Spiel.
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Journalist and author Julia Szabo is resolved to establish the world’s first museum to be built by women for women artists. MSeum is going to be a museum with a focus on overlooked artists (Know Unknowns), providing art storage space to creative women and their heirs and offering the most enriching museum experience for blind and low-vision visitors anywhere in the world, with a variety of tactile artworks and architectural features inviting touch, because loss of sight does not mean loss of vision.
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The Mirror Blue Night originated from an idea artist and curator Patrick Neal had for a show called Dark Noir, referencing the character of the city in the evening hours. When Neal was later invited to curate at the Undercroft Gallery, this idea expanded to include nocturnes and night in general. The gallery is located beneath The Church of Heavenly Rest on Museum Mile, and in this context, Neal began to look for spiritual echoes, considering how evening and twilight hours evoke the afterlife, the cosmos, anonymity, peace, and fear. “I had in mind depictions of darkness but also considered night as a condition that occupies half of our days and half of our lives, with all the symbolic, psychological, and temporal associations that come with it.”
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