performance art – Art Spiel

August 11, 2026August 10, 2026, by Yasmeen Abdallah

The Art of Drag & NYC at Culture Lab LIC

A retrospective of drag was recently presented with great aplomb at Culture Lab LIC. Queens: The Art of Drag & NYC featured an array of artists deeply embedded in the glorious culture of drag. Honoring its rich history through performance, fashion, music, makeup, design, and more, the essence of this multifaceted experience was distilled through celebratory expressions of artistry, beauty, community, and resilience.

July 9, 2026July 14, 2026, by Tsipi Inberg Ben-Haim

The Baryshnikov Arts Center Celebrates 20 Years with Ex Machina

The Baryshnikov Arts Center celebrates its 20th anniversary with a dazzling work that perfectly reflects the institution’s spirit of innovation. Ex Machina, a collaboration between pianist Clara Yang and visual artist Xuan, is not simply a concert, an art exhibition, or a multimedia performance. It is a thrilling encounter between piano sound and painterly images that transforms the stage into a living canvas.

July 2, 2026June 28, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Dakota Gearhart: All Matter Is Alive

Dakota Gearhart grew up on a Florida coastline where algae blooms, sewage outflows, and bikini contests share the same shoreline, and her work has been carrying that mix of beauty, decay, and amusement into a much bigger frame ever since. Across animation, sculpture, performance, and sound, she builds video worlds where pixels sing, electricity becomes sentient, and the nonhuman shows up on equal footing with the rest of the cast. Her ongoing animated series Life Touching Life is hosted by Tiffany, a half-algae, half-woman figure who guides viewers through episodes shaped with collaborators — poets, scientists, activists, caretakers — whose lives already reflect the worldview the work is reaching toward. It’s funny, strange, and serious in roughly equal measure, which turns out to be the right register for the worlds it stages.

June 8, 2026June 16, 2026, by Sara Aparicio

After the Rains – How Nature Roots Us Home

When one thinks of nature, the first thing that comes to mind would be a park filled with leafy trees or perhaps a bouquet of vibrant flowers. With EFA Studio’s newest exhibition, After the Rains, artists challenge the idea of how nature can be represented.

June 2, 2026June 1, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Run by Artists, Built for Artists: OyG and the Cornell MFA

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.

May 20, 2026May 20, 2026, by Jessica Aguilar

Art Seen Philadelphia: Spring 2026

HIGHLIGHTS

During this season, art spaces across Philadelphia step up to demonstrate the voices of underrepresented communities as the city prepares to celebrate the semi-quincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. While institutions and sports fans are celebrating, artists take this moment to reflect on America’s 250 years, and how definitions of liberty, equality, and justice have evolved beyond what the Founding Fathers drafted.

May 19, 2026May 30, 2026, by Shana Dumont Garr

Sound Art for the Ecological Turn by EndGrain at SMFA Boston

What can sound art contribute to the ecological turn? When the Taiwanese sound artist Huichun Yang described her process as getting to know the entire life of the tree that became her instrument, she had my attention. The entire creative arc of her process is rooted in reverence toward materials. Yang selects the wood, sculpts it into an arbrosan—an instrument first introduced to the world in 1996—and plays it by directly sensing its surface with her hands, using gestures that evoke repair and tending.

April 20, 2026April 19, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Floating in Three Acts- Keren Anavy at SUNY

Floating names a state of suspension, between sinking and surviving, between grief and the body’s refusal to stop. In Keren Anavy’s landmark solo exhibition, Floating in Three Acts, this condition is both subject and structure. The exhibition is built the way floating feels: without firm ground, without clear direction, with the question of outcome left open.

April 7, 2026April 6, 2026, by Sara Farrell Okamura

Magical Thinking of Systems and Beliefs, at Tufts University Art Galleries

Installation view of Magical Thinking of Systems and Beliefs

Would you have believed the sun revolved around the Earth? Possibly, since that was the ironclad determination of the bureaucracies in the 16th century. Slavery legally existed in the United States for centuries before there was even the slightest abolitionist movement. Which brings to mind, why do we adhere to beliefs today simply because they are propagated by governments and institutions?

February 11, 2026February 10, 2026, by Michal Gavish

John Kelly: A FRIEND GAVE ME A BOOK at PPOW

I walked into the PPOW gallery the morning my friend Riki died. The 182-panel illustrated small drawings by New York artist John Kelly, which extend as an open graphic memoir around the gallery, captured me instantly, letting me in on a personal journey of mortality, pain, and beauty. There was something generous in the way Kelly handed his notebook and shared the manuscript of his injury. It resonated with my thoughts of investigating and dwelling on mourning and mortality.