What does a gallery look like when the artists are in charge? Founded in 2013, Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG) is an artist-run collective with no fixed curatorial line and a non-hierarchical structure shared equally among its eight co-directors. Since 2023, it has become the annual New York home for Cornell University’s MFA thesis exhibition — a partnership built on a simple premise: artist-run spaces value experimentation, innovation, and risk-taking, giving graduate artists the freedom to present work without commercial constraints or curatorial imperatives.
Continue reading “Run by Artists, Built for Artists: OyG and the Cornell MFA”Lauren Whearty: Slippage between Abstraction and Image

Lauren Whearty in her Philadelphia Studio, August 2021, photo courtesy of the artist
Lauren Whearty paints mostly still life from observation and preliminary sketches. Occasionally she takes photos of things which serve in her painting process as cues to spark a sense of memory rather than a source for likeness. She builds her compositions with a collage-like construction, adding and removing objects from both the paintings and the still life set ups. She loves the process of fitting things into the grid of the canvas, playing between representing objects and maintaining a close sense of the flat painted surface. “Color for me is expressive, connects to memory and play in the studio. In using repeated objects, the excitement in experimentation comes from how an object is painted, from their color to their expression and what I can get paint to do,” she says.
Continue reading “Lauren Whearty: Slippage between Abstraction and Image”Keisha Prioleau-Martin: I Have Been the Dancer

Keisha Prioleau-Martin in her Bushwick studio with her paintings. Photo credit: Luke Lunsford 2021
The figures in New York City based painter Keisha Prioleau-Martin, become an essence of motion and emotion – exuding a sense of radical joy and playfulness, expressed through gestural brushstrokes and vibrant colors.
Continue reading “Keisha Prioleau-Martin: I Have Been the Dancer”Will Hutnick – Artist as Facilitator

At the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency by Collar Works, Granville, NY, July 2019, Photo by Monica Hamilton
Will Hutnick is an artist, curator, co-director of Ortega Y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn from 2015 to 2020 and Director of Artistic Programming at the Wassaic Project upstate NY. In his paintings Will Hutnick is using rollers, and includes other mono-printing-like methods to create repetitive passages which form playful and unexpected relationships between shapes and colors. He shares with Art Spiel some of his work process, reflections on the ways his paintings have developed, and some of his other art related practices.
Continue reading “Will Hutnick – Artist as Facilitator”Artists on Coping: Rachel Klinghoffer
During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

Detail of installation at The Skirt at Ortega y Gasset Projects, March 2020
By repurposing materials, making and remaking them into paintings and sculptures, Klinghoffer prompts a reimagining of uses for these relic-like objects. Articles reflect the artist’s personal connection to femininity, craft-making, Judaism, romance, pushing the definition of painting. Through time, the items become specimens, icons. They are poked, prodded, stained, sprayed, stroked, rubbed, dipped, then pulled, torn, cracked open and broken apart making up and becoming the new work. Rachel Klinghoffer lives and works in South Orange NJ. Recently she has exhibited at Morgan Lehman Gallery and The Skirt at Ortega y Gasset, with a review in The Brooklyn Rail.
Continue reading “Artists on Coping: Rachel Klinghoffer”