Contemporary Art and Culture
Why do we need art in this moment? What art sustains both practitioners and audience in difficult times? These urgent questions pulse at the heart of curator and artist Olivia Baldwin’s extraordinary exhibition at the Kniznick Gallery, part of Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Center—and the answers she’s assembled are luminous.
Continue reading “A Gathering: Gardens, Portals, Protests”
On April 26th and 27th, from 1 to 6 pm, artists in DUMBO will open their doors to the public as part of DUMBO Open Studios, offering a rare look inside the art studios along the Brooklyn waterfront. Since the 1970s, DUMBO has been shaped by its vibrant art community. This interview series highlights a handful of participating artists in 2025. Each response offers a glimpse of what’s waiting behind the studio door. Main Window, situated in the historic Clocktower Building at 1 Main Street, has been a presentation space dedicated to public art in DUMBO since 1980. Their enduring mission is to spotlight the diverse voices of under-represented Brooklyn and New York City artists. Main Window is curated by artist and Dumbo resident Jeff Wallace. @mainwindowdumbo
Continue reading “DUMBO Open Studios 2025 with Main Window”Hot Air
Ten years ago, Judy Hoffman became enthralled with clay and hand-building. The current exhibition Evolvers and Wildtypes at the Long Island City Sculpture Space is her first solo show of these ceramic sculptures. Hoffman’s ceramics’ imagery and forms tap into a previous installation work made from sculpted paper pulp, natural materials, and man-made debris. Paper clay techniques permit the bonding of wet clay to fired forms, enabling the construction of diverse configurations. These components are conjoined to initiate a dialogue between organic and mechanical elements, yielding imagery that defies expectation. The artwork evolves through a rhythm of construction and deconstruction, encapsulating cycles of creation, deterioration, and renewal. Viewers are meant to encounter an elemental rawness, surprise, and a touch of humor.
Continue reading “Judy Hoffman: Evolvers and Wildtypes at Sculpture Space”In conversation with Hannah Barrett and Saul Chernick
The Grotto: Shrine group exhibition at Soloway Gallery, curated by Hannah Barrett and Saul Chernick, featuring works by Orli Swergold, Laurel Sparks, Ben Pederson, and Saul Chernick, merges the physical with the mystical. It showcases sculptures and installations that draw on the use of scale and a diverse range of materials—obsolete electronics, dried grains, paper pulp, and glitter. These elements serve to connect viewers to celestial, underworld, ritualistic, and imaginative realms, referencing the reflective and immersive qualities of shrines and grottos.
Continue reading “Grotto: Shrine @ Soloway”
Peel (America), a new series by Hedwig Brouckaert, which was supported by a Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation Grant, embodies a significant evolution of her practice that integrates life-defining experiences. The title suggests removing a protective coating which is integral to the artist’s physical process and emotional journey of making the work. Peel (America) is on view at Project: ARTspace, 99 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, from December 19, 2023 to February 20, 2024.
Continue reading “Hedwig Brouckaert / Peel / Examining the Layers”
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, from 2020 through 2021, eight women artists from the Midwest and the East Coast of the United States came together via Zoom to read and discuss All We Can Save: Truth, Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Ph.D. and Katharine K. Wilkinson, Ph.D. The book contains essays and poetry by a cadre of diverse women policy wonks, scientists, writers, journalists, lawyers, activists, and others who address the most critical existential issue of our time with the intention of offering different ways to effect change and mend the significant damage that we have caused to the Earth. The artists’ responses to the essays form the exhibition Climate Conversations: All We Can Save. The exhibition runs through June 30th, 2022.
Continue reading “Climate Conversations at Easton’s PA Nurture Nature Center”
On India’s 75th year anniversary, the horrors of the Partition cannot be forgotten. Yet despite the atrocities committed against women, their experiences are often excluded from discussions of Partition’s impact. In What the Body Remembers and Queering Mother India, artist Pritika Chowdhry pushes back against this historical erasure. Revisiting two of Chowdhry’s installations for women’s history month, one is struck by the sensitivity and delicacy of her work alongside the urgency of her message.
Continue reading “Revisiting Pritika Chowdhry’s Feminist and Decolonial Installations Speaking to India’s Partition for Women’s History Month”
In her solo exhibition at the Lemmerman Gallery in NJCU curated by Doris Cacoilo, Amanda Thackray presents her handmade paper installations, prints and sculpture which altogether comment on plastic pollution and the fragility of marine environment. The artist creates an allegorical environment which both reflects and distorts an aquatic world.
Continue reading “Amanda Thackray: Surface Tension at NJCU”During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.
Nancy Cohen’s work examines resiliency in relation to the environment and the human body. Recent exhibitions include Force: Observations from the Interior, a solo show at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in NYC, and group exhibitions at Accola Griefen and BioBat Art Space in Brooklyn, Dorsky Gallery in Long Island City, Heller Gallery in Manhattan and The Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ. Her current work has been featured in the blogs Artists and Climate Change, Art Spiel, Less than Half and Delicious Line, in the anthology the Body in Language edited by Edwin Torres and in ArtTable’s Artist Perspective Podcast.
Continue reading “Artists on Coping: Nancy Cohen”