photography – Art Spiel

November 4, 2026November 3, 2026, by Arete Xu

Under the Common Sea | 海的下面还有海

It is difficult for anyone to tell a story about being Chinese. On the surface, we have consummatory trends like “At A Very Chinese Time of My Life”; otherwise, we often see over-sensationalized narratives about geopolitical maneuverings. Yet, in the undertow, Chinese people work and make in conditions full of positional and situational complexity, and they belong to nuanced communities. Under the Common Sea is a group exhibition where artists and cultural workers came together to showcase the range and diversity of experiences, relationalities, and perspectives on identity among Chinese and Sinophone diasporic peoples in NY and across the United States.

October 20, 2026October 17, 2026, by Matt McBride

No Ideas but in Things: Jim Condron and Dean Kessman at MONO PRACTICE

Jim Condron, It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light

Looking at Condron and Kessman’s MONO PRACTICE exhibition, I’m struck by the aura their pieces exude. Both make work using found materials, and both represent/re-present those materials in ways that push them close, but not past, the point of recognizability. The “things” of this exhibition have been abstracted and estranged but not transcended. They exist in a liminal moment, when the subject recedes, and the idea begins to shape itself. However, the objects persist in being objects.

September 24, 2026September 22, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Orly Cogan and Robert Mann: Behind the Lens & Through the Needle

Orly Cogan, installation view, photo by Daniel Menzo

Orly Cogan stitches, crochets, and paints directly onto photographs. Under her needle, figures loosen from their frames, and in some pieces the thread spills past the edge onto the floor. Her work on photographs owes much to twenty years alongside the photography dealer Robert Mann. The two met at an art fair, reconnected at a collector’s party, and had their first date in her studio talking about her work; across years of openings, fairs, and long studio hours since, each has shaped how the other looks. Cogan, trained as a painter, came to read a photograph as an object with its own history and materiality, while Mann, whose gallery was built on photography, became an advocate for embroidery and its feminist history. That shared education first reached his gallery walls in 2014.

Behind the Lens and Through the Needle gathers the work that grew from that exchange and opens Mann’s newly built West Chelsea space in his thirty-fifth year with a public gallery. In Cogan’s hands, the two mediums hold different kinds of time: the camera’s caught instant and the needle’s slow, cumulative one. The photograph gives her the frozen scene; the embroidery reopens it, adding labor, touch, and imagination until the captured moment seems to keep unfolding.

September 10, 2026September 9, 2026, by Cynthia Chen

This is Me Looking: In Dialogue with Wen-You Cai on Collaborating with Her Six-Year-Old Self

In 1996, a six-year-old child was given a camera and sent out to capture the world through her eyes. She aimed the lens at her father’s back against the Twin Towers, at her own blurred hand, at a sculpture in a museum, at Buddhist drawings on the wall. She had recently arrived in the United States, and the world in front of her was made of curiosity, novelty, and strangeness.

September 9, 2026September 8, 2026, by Sara Aparicio

Latency: Reinventing Photography – MFA Parsons Show

Since its invention in the early 1800s, photography has evolved from merely capturing moments. Over time, photography became intertwined with other traditional art mediums and slowly became a more accepted medium in the fine arts space. Now, with Parsons’ 2026 Photography MFA thesis show, Latency continues to expand what photography can be, literally.

September 2, 2026August 29, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

The Pandora’s BoxX Project: Grace Roselli

Grace Roselli’s Pandora’s BoxX Project began as something personal: a way to reconnect with a world of artists she’d drifted from while raising two daughters, much of it as a single mother. She started by photographing the few women artists she still knew; each led her to another, and the project grew by conversation and recommendation rather than plan. Nearly 360 portraits later — of artists alongside curators, writers, historians, educators, and museum directors — it had become a record of a community whose influence has rarely been seen whole. Roselli photographs each sitter in their own home or studio, in available light. She then lets them choose the final image, because the portrait isn’t finished until both of them recognize the person in it. Roselli discusses the project’s origins, her way of working, and what nearly 360 encounters revealed.

August 18, 2026August 17, 2026, by Chunbum Park

Bing Lu: The Queries that Remain After the Image

Bing Lu’s solo exhibition, “what remains after the image,” at Gallery 60 NYC is an endeavor of multifaceted inquiries concerning the nature of photography and image production, abstraction, and the artist’s own personal life. Featuring 13 photographic works that utilize digital collaging and color manipulation techniques, the exhibition is an exercise in experimental spirit for Lu to continually push the boundaries and investigate the abstract and experimental language of photography.

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 28, 2026July 28, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Greater New York and the identity and pulse of the city at MoMA PS1

Walking through MoMA PS1 for the first time in several years, I realized how much it has changed and how much I still remembered from my first visit, before officially becoming a New Yorker. The meandering, bustling energy of the building remained, each turn and new corridor offering discoveries. It was special to witness how eclectic and unique each artist’s vision and process was and how many identities and stories are gathered under one roof. Organized for the first time by MoMA PS1’s full curatorial team, the exhibition emphasizes the forces that shape daily life in the city today. This includes strategies of resistance and adaptation in the face of increased surveillance, shifting identities, economic uncertainties, how we view ourselves and others, and the ever-changing technologies around us. This exhibition notes both optimism and anxiety throughout all of the artists’ attention to the layered, eclectic lived textures of New York City and the people intertwined within it.

July 20, 2026August 20, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Timothy Makepeace: From Thirty Feet to One Million Miles

Timothy Makepeace has spent nine years making art about one of the most complex machines humanity has ever built. Since his first visit to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in 2016, the artist has developed an expansive body of work in response to the James Webb Space Telescope — its gold-plated beryllium mirrors, its acoustic test chambers, the light it gathers from increasingly distant points in time. The culmination of that inquiry is Ghost in the Machine, on view at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC, through August 9, 2026. We spoke with Makepeace about working with NASA engineers, the formal decisions behind his square-format drawings, and what kept drawing him back to a telescope now orbiting the Sun a million miles from Earth.