Colorful, mixed-media exhibitions bring vibrancy to the winter season with splashes of exhilaration and discovery.
Continue reading “Art Spiel Picks: NYC Exhibitions in December 2025”Fran Shalom: Everyday Improvisations at Kathryn Markel
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.
Continue reading “Fran Shalom: Everyday Improvisations at Kathryn Markel”Why Black Art Is Rarely Just Abstract
Algernon Miller’s work bends space, time, and expectations, redefining what abstraction means when history isn’t optional
I met Algernon Miller the way I tend to meet people in the art world: by asking too many earnest questions at a panel. That day, at a Mel Edwards talk at Hauser & Wirth, I caught a smile from the soft-spoken man next to me. We chatted and clicked. Two native New Yorkers—he from Harlem, I from the Lower East Side—drawn together by chance, we followed each other with no particular reason, and what felt like nothing quietly became something.
Continue reading “Why Black Art Is Rarely Just Abstract”The Treasure Below Grand
Where Air Turns to Fog at Below Grand, curated by Ray Hwang, gathers Sammy Bennett, Anna Gregor, and Jesse Ng in a sometimes cheeky, but overall multivalent and sincere, investigation of visual perception and the machinery of capital-F/capital-A Fine Art presentation. With his characteristic casual abandon, Hwang exploits the gallery’s awkward architecture to its full potential, letting Bennett install an upside-down trompe-l’œil “group show” in the street-facing walk-in window display while reserving the closet-sized back room for a collection of Gregor and Ng’s paintings.
Continue reading “The Treasure Below Grand”Into the microVerse – Micrographia with Shae Nadine|| SubtleFlux
In Dialogue
Inspired by scientist and illustrator Robert Hooke’s seminal book, Micrographia, published in 1665, into the microVerse – Micrographia invites viewers into an immersive interdisciplinary installation where projected and printed microscopy act as a vehicle to witness the beauty of nature and our environment through magnified images of plant cells, microorganisms, and organic structures to transform our perspective of the familiar. Through this microscopic and material journey, the exhibition encourages a renewed perspective on our role as stewards of Earth’s delicate ecosystems and biodiversity, asking us to reimagine how we might preserve and protect these intricate natural systems for generations to come.
Continue reading “Into the microVerse – Micrographia with Shae Nadine|| SubtleFlux”West Chelsea Artists Open Studios 2025
The West Chelsea Artists Open Studios presents its 16th annual artists open studios tour on Saturday & Sunday, May 10th and 11th, from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. The event offers a look inside the art studios at the iconic building at 526 West 26th Street. Art Spiel conducted brief interviews with three artists who will participate in the event.
Continue reading “West Chelsea Artists Open Studios 2025”The Golden Thread, Part 2
Featured Exhibition
As a textile artist, I am drawn to works that uphold the tradition of fibers vis a vis labor, technique, material, craftsmanship and innovation. In this presentation put forth by Bravin Lee Programs, The Golden Thread 2 displays fiber-themed works taking various forms. Filling the old seaport building from floor to ceiling, room after room reveals different interpretations on what constitutes a “textile” work.
Continue reading “The Golden Thread, Part 2”On This Spot: Histories of Women Artists in NYC
On The Spot is a terrific new web series that seeks to document the histories of women artists in NYC from the 1950s to the 2000s. The ambitious mission is to document and present in three-minute videos the history of later 20th-century artists who have often been overlooked and underrepresented in the larger art world. They call themselves “a feminist art history nonprofit.” There are 40 videos so far produced, with plans for a great many more. The videos are a free public resource, accessible on the organization’s website.
Continue reading “On This Spot: Histories of Women Artists in NYC”Care / Condition / Control at 601Artspace
In Dialogue
The group exhibition Care / Condition / Control, which ends its run at 601Artspace on April 27th, takes its conceptual root, quite literally, in the form of hair. Experienced by different generations, cultures, genders, and identities, one’s relationship to the very follicles that grow from us and upon us is deeply personal and unique to each of us. As each artist mines their own stories from these relationships, Chapman expands upon the inspiration and undertaking of such a complicated and tangled subject. Yasmeen Abdallah interviews curator A.E. Chapman about the ideas behind this show.
Continue reading “Care / Condition / Control at 601Artspace”Insider Outsider
This past weekend New York saw the latest iteration of the Outsider Art Fair. Started in 1993, it has become a NYC institution and seems to be thriving after a few lean pandemic years. The Fair serves a field that has evolved a great deal over the past 30 years, and I really felt that this year more than in the past. As the number of now “blue chip” or “Old Master Self-Taught” artists dwindle, there’s been an influx of both younger artists and some who push against the definitions of self-taught in the first place. It’s a sticky subject and one that I have no answer to.
Continue reading “Insider Outsider”