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The Summer Show at Carrie Haddad Gallery

A person climbing a tree

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Annika Tucksmith, Something, Somewhere, 2022, oil on panel, 40 x 30 inches (image courtesy of Carrie Haddad Gallery)

Carrie Haddad Gallery’s summer offering, The Summer Show, is a playful wink and a poke to bastion of every gallery’s yearly program: the month of August. Much like the title of the show, this selection of work is self-referential and effervescent. Modernities collide in depictions of leisure, wanderlust is shown as both fantastical and intimate, and universally bold palettes are a sucker punch to the senses. Though they span an array of media, each of the artists incorporate detail with nuance and ease, their pith and wit happily imbibable. The Summer Show features Robert Goldstrom, Hue Thi Hoffmaster, Louise Laplante, Andrea Moreau, Kahn & Selesnick, and Annika Tucksmith and includes painting, collage, and photography.

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Who Gets On The Front Cover?

Study for “Mother/Son”, 1984, Ink on Artforum magazine cover. (March 1977), 10.5″ x 10.5″, photo courtesy of the artist

Enter Thompson Giroux Gallery in Chatham NY and come face to face with what we as artists, curators, critics, gallerists and historians consciously and subconsciously know; we are missing greats. Arthur González’s exhibition, Ego Diaries confronts the art world and those who control the keys to the kingdom and anoint who is recognized and who is not.

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Some last words on the Whitney Biennial as a cultural labyrinth

Opinion
Photo from the Whitney 2022 Biennial

I would hate to think I have become an old and conservative critic who believes our best days are behind us. I would rather believe that my structuralist perspective is capable of evaluating contemporary emerging practices and recognize the social, cultural and political value of these tendencies. What brought this on is having recently seen the 1962–64 exhibition at the Jewish Museum. This show examines how artists living and working in New York during this three-year period responded to rapidly changing social and cultural conditions, by questioning what was considered to be art’s normative forms and subjects. This post-AbEx generation was concerned with creating aesthetic configurations that would result in novel perceptual modes and political subjectivities.

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Deanna Sirlin: Borders of Light and Water at Palazzo Bembo

Featured Artist

Deanna Sirlin, Borders of Light and Water, 2022, C-print transparency on glass, 199.5 x 493 inches, Palazzo Bembo, Venice, Italy

In Borders of Light and Water at Palazzo Bembo in Venice, American artist Deanna Sirlin utilizes the architecture and translucency of the large-scale windows overlooking the Grand Canal, to create a luminous and ever-changing patches of bold color. The beauty of this installation allures you in and prompts you to gaze out at the flickering water of the iconic canal below, raising awareness to what is at stake with rising water and changing climate. This installation is part of the Venice 2022 Art Biennial organized by the non-profit organization European Cultural Center, running from April 23, 2022 through November 27th, 2022.

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Animal Well Being at the Swimming Hole Foundation Residency

In conversation with the artists

The barn studio with artists (left to right) Rick Klauber, Sky Pape, Nancy Davidson, Lyn Godley, Rebecca Welz, and David Provan, 7/23/2022. Photo courtesy of John White.

The Swimming Hole Foundation offers residencies to groups of artists, designers and educators who are exploring environmental and social justice through collaborative work. In Animal Well Being artists Nancy Davidson, Lyn Godley, Rick Klauber, Sky Pape, David Provan, and Rebecca Welz referenced the theme of birds in their collaborative project. The project was open to the public Saturday, July 23rd, 2022.

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Jesse Pallotta – QT Art Camp

Grantee of Brooklyn Arts Fund

Project Profile: QT Art Camp Brings Free Art Workshops to Queer and Trans Youth

Photographer: Carmen DeCristo

Brooklyn Arts Council announced in March 2022 an allocation of over $1.3 million to 238 Brooklyn-based artists and cultural organizations. This year marks the highest number of grantees and awardees as well as the largest amount of funding BAC has ever distributed. Art Spiel in collaboration with Brooklyn Arts Council features some artists who received a Brooklyn Arts Fund, Local Arts Support, and/or Creative Equations Fund grant in 2022.

QT Art Camp just announced its summer series of art workshops for queer and trans youth taking place in New York. These workshops are free and welcome to youth ages 13-19. During the workshops, youth will work with NYC-based trans artists. Workshops including vogueing, film photography, painting and drawing. Youth are encouraged to learn new skills, discuss art with their peers and mentors, and will leave with a finished art piece. QT Art Camp is starting local but hopes to reach youth nationally, especially in smaller cities that don’t currently have many resources for queer and trans youth.

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Jodi Hays – The Find at Night Gallery in LA

In Conversation with Jodi Hays and Night Gallery

Installation image courtesy of Night Gallery and Marten Elder

A new show at Night Gallery in L.A. explores feminine conventions in painting. Large cardboard assemblages counter the traditional stretched canvas by repurposing a commonplace consumerist material. The Find is Jodi Hays’s first solo show in L.A. and a poetic contemplation on space, landscape, and material. Working in layered and dyed cardboard, Hays creates subtle landscapes reminiscent of long drives down winding roads. These works are odes to the quotidian, evoking both nostalgia and references to femininity, while straddling the line between painting and assemblage. Contributor Jac Lahav sat down with artist Jodi Hays and Night Gallery to talk about the show.

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Showings in Four Dimensions

Showings in Four Dimensions (installation view L-R), Darius Yektai, Waiting For Death Or Slavery: After Delacroix, 2022, Elise Ansel, Celestial Lounge Chair, 2021, Darius Yektai, Untitled Falling Flowers, 2021 & Kyle Hittmeier Natural Le Coultre, 2022. Photo: AB NY Gallery

As soon as the formula codified that a contemporary artist could reach a new level of institutional engagement once they proclaimed their inspiration from generations of art historical masterpieces, the flood gates opened to practitioners solely deploying references to the canon to project their careers farther and faster. With encyclopedic museums refreshing their image by aligning themselves with the success of the contemporary art world’s darlings, by connecting their creative process to roots foregrounded in the rich mire of historical artworks, new publications and programming surfaced. Notably The Artist Project at The Metropolitan Museum of Art was launched in 2015, and most recently even the gilded age indulgence of The Frick Collection created their exhibition series Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters at their temporary home on Madison Avenue.

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Natalie Westbrook: Faces at Zynka

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Natalie Westbrook’s exhibition at ZYNKA Gallery in Pittsburgh features new paintings on canvas and drawings on paper. Westbrook depicts faces as thick lines immersed in saturated hot pinks, greens or monochrome gradations—altogether fluctuating between the monstrous and the angelic, the scary and the pathetic. Sometimes they are solitary and sometimes they indicate twins or perhaps a fragmented self. In her catalogue essay on Natalie Westbrook’s work, Larissa Pham observes that Faces “come for you, leering, grinning, mouths a garish lipsticked rictus of joy, embedded flat against the canvas, their features seeming to emerge from the psychological fabric of the painting itself.”

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