photography – Art Spiel

November 26, 2025November 22, 2025, by Chunbum Park

Yi Hsuan Lai: The Ontology of the Body at SoMad

Yi Hsuan Lai, *Rubber, Rubber*. Installation view in SoMad, 2025. Imagery courtesy of SoMad and the artist

Yi Hsuan Lai exhibits her works in a solo show at SoMad, a femme- and queer-led art space that serves as a platform for emerging artists to experiment, collaborate, and challenge conventions. SoMad comprises a combined gallery and artist residency program, a production house, and an event space. The name “SoMad” reflects both the physical location — south of Madison Square Park — and the collective’s frustration with the current landscape of resources and support structures available for emerging artists, particularly artists from marginalized communities.

September 8, 2025September 7, 2025, by Persephone Allen

Backscatter: Light Studies and Everyday Alchemy at OVERLAP

Sparkling surfaces abound in Backscatter, OVERLAP’s quietly radiant summer show of works by Funlola Coker, Katherine Mitchell DiRico, Jesse Kaminsky, Joetta Maue, Leah Piepgras, and Esther Solondz, curated by Alicia Renadette. On a clear summer midmorning, sunshine falls across shimmering layers of glass, crystal, gold leaf, copper, bronze, salt, acrylic, and clear liquid. Materials catch and refract light. The overall effect is of a hushed brilliance that draws you in, inviting a closer look.

September 2, 2025September 2, 2025, by Art Spiel

Reclamation: Holland Tunnel Revisited in Newburgh

previewing

*Holland Tunnel Newburgh opens its sculpture garden. Julie Lindell, Everything, 2025, 144x144x144 in. Mixed media, found objects. Photo courtesy of Julie Lindell*

When artist Alexandra Limpert invited Janet Rutkowski to co-curate Reclamation in honor of her longtime friend and Holland Tunnel founder Paulien Lethen, Rutkowski accepted without hesitation. Although she had just finished curating and exhibiting in several projects, she embraced the challenge with what she describes as her “devil-may-care” approach. The exhibition’s title emerged quickly, reflecting her interest in the idea of recovery and renewal.

August 6, 2025August 6, 2025, by Yasmeen Abdallah

Art Spiel Picks: NYC Exhibitions in August 2025

The Gatherers images courtesy of Yasmeen Abdallah

This month’s lineup takes us through Brooklyn, Queens, and Jersey City, where intimate thoughts, melded with the political repercussions we grapple with individually and collectively, are presented to the public in moving forms that are explorations in artistic practice as a means of activation against the norms we must confront to maintain our humanity. Through rejections of subjugation and exploitation, be it patriarchal economies or the fallout of colonialism, these selected exhibitions put artists at the forefront who contend with these issues and make space for constructive discourse.

July 30, 2025July 31, 2025, by Art Spiel

80th Anniversary of the USA-JAPAN Atomic Bombings: Sowing seeds for the future

A collage of pictures of people and monuments AI-generated content may be incorrect. — Photo: Yasuyo Tanaka – Nuclear Disaster

The Children’s Art Carnival presents Seed Bomb, an exhibition marking the 80th anniversary of the devastating atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Coinciding with this solemn milestone, the exhibition and its accompanying workshops take place in a deeply resonant location—Harlem, just blocks from Manhattanville, where research for the Manhattan Project was once conducted.

May 27, 2025May 28, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

Wherever I Lay My Head at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning

In Dialogue

Group picture(Members in picture from left to right): Euijin V. Ra (artist), Julia D. Shaw (artist), Courteny Symone Staton (artist), Laura OsCam (artist), Sherwin Banfield (Program Manager), TEDF (artist), Marleen Moise (artist).

Wherever I Lay My Head, now on view at The Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning , began with an invitation to Indira A. Abiskaroon to curate the culminating ARTWorks exhibition. The offer came from Program Manager Sherwin Banfield and was formalized in conversation with Director of Program Operations Wendy Arimah Berot. Abiskaroon’s first priority was to spend time with the ARTWorks Fellows—to learn how their practices had developed over the course of the program and to hear what ideas had been resonating in their weekly sessions.

April 23, 2025April 27, 2025, by Yasmeen Abdallah

Care / Condition / Control at 601Artspace

In Dialogue

Works by John Coplans (left) Jarret Key (center) and Melissa Stern (right). Photo courtesy of Etienne Frossard/601Artspace

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.

April 22, 2025April 22, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

Night Shades

Featured Exhibition

*Nancy Baker, Pretty Circles, 2020, Oil on Canvas, 48 x 48 inches*

Night Shades, a new exhibition presented by daphne:art Gallery and Advisory in collaboration with ODETTA, brings together three artists—Nancy Baker, Claire Seidl, and Geoffrey Parker—whose paintings and photographs explore the uneasy edge between perception and memory, hinting at alternative realities, and brushing against dystopia.

April 20, 2025April 14, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

DUMBO Open Studios 2025 with Ellie Krakow

Ellie Krakow with several pieces from her series *Comfort Corners*, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, photo by Kay Hickman, courtesy of the artist.

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. Ellie Krakow has been in DUMBO since 2024. Her studio is at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, 20 Jay Street, #720.

April 19, 2025April 19, 2025, by Andrew Fish

Art Spiel Picks: Boston Exhibitions April 2025

Highlights

*If They Told You, Would You Listen?* at Thayer Academy, Braintree, MA

Spring has sprung and many beautiful exhibitions are in full bloom across the city of Boston. Several exhibitions celebrating fiber art are on view along with multiple shows that highlight the season of rebirth. One of my favorite things about Spring in New England is seeing the trees awake from their dormancy and plants sprouting from the earth. The area thaws out and inspires a creative push toward summer. This means a lot of play, or spiel, for artists who experiment with unconventional materials and new media. This is wonderfully evident in the work on view this month as artists and galleries display playful and profound creations for a new season. Here’s some Art Spiel for you.