portraiture – Page 2

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.

March 5, 2025March 19, 2025, by Melissa Stern

Insider Outsider

A painting of a person in a suit and tie

AI-generated content may be incorrect. — Adhemar Ahmad- portray 1969. Oilt, thin wooden board, unprimed canvas, staples. 32.5 x 24.25 2002

This past weekend New York saw the latest iteration of the Outsider Art Fair. Started in 1993, it has become a NYC institution and seems to be thriving after a few lean pandemic years. The Fair serves a field that has evolved a great deal over the past 30 years, and I really felt that this year more than in the past. As the number of now “blue chip” or “Old Master Self-Taught” artists dwindle, there’s been an influx of both younger artists and some who push against the definitions of self-taught in the first place. It’s a sticky subject and one that I have no answer to.

March 4, 2025March 19, 2025, by Yasmeen Abdallah

Art Spiel Picks: All Around NYC Exhibitions in March 2025

HIGHLIGHTS

Nick Cave at Jack Shainman photo courtesy of Yasmeen Abdallah

Spatial dynamics and human hybridity are central to this month’s roundup of highlights in New York. From monumental sculpture to works intimately interspersed within the home, all things great and small commune and offer reflection upon their relationships to the environments in which they currently reside. The hierarchy between the natural and the manmade is in conversation within this selection of shows through shifting currents of tenuous and harmonious moments.

February 6, 2025February 5, 2025, by William Corwin

Keisha Prioleau-Martin: Recenter at Olympia

Recenter is a delightful return to Impressionism in many ways. Prioleau-Martin chooses for her subject matter decidedly impressionistic themes—moments at home, moments of introspection, and unrehearsed tenderness, all the casual yet poignant subject matter that marked painting’s initial move from the historic and fantastical to the everyday and human in the 1870s. She also employs the paint with a focus to capture the spur of the moment and the unexpected. Her small-scale ceramics, composed on the templates of stock sculptural types—odalisques, Rodin-like romantic poses, and busts, are, by virtue of their Lilliputian size and wit, Impressionist re-interpretations of dry classic forms. They start out as one thing and shift mid-stream into another: this is particularly evident in Prioleau-Martin’s bust Self-portrait (2024) which masquerades as a planter with fabric and wire vegetal tendrils emanating from her cranium along with her braids.

January 13, 2025January 11, 2025, by Claire Haik

Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in January 2025

HIGHLIGHTS

Naoko Serino’s *Generating 9*, in *Japandi Revisited: shared aesthetics and influences* at Wayne Art Center, photograph courtesy of Wayne Art Center

Out on the Main Line, the world of craft takes center stage at Wayne Art Center in two distinct but complementary shows. CraftForms 2024, 29th International Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Fine Craft and Japandi Revisited: shared aesthetics and influences, together invite viewers to contemplate the power of form, material, and cultural aesthetics. In Old City, at the Museum for Art in Wood, Mark Sfirri explores the many definitions of family through his exquisite woodworking in La Famiglia. Cerulean Arts Gallery and Studio in Center City pairs the dreamy drawings and paintings of two Philadelphia artists, Gary Grissom and Louise Vinueza, in A Day in The Life. Together, these four exhibitions offer a diverse range of artistic viewpoints from the global scope of contemporary craft to the exploration of family and nostalgia.

December 16, 2024December 15, 2024, by Nicole Michaud

Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in December 2024

HIGHLIGHTS

“Shared Vision: Portraits from The CCH Pounder-Koné Collection at The African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP). Photo courtesy of The African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP)

December is a gift of a month for exhibitions in Philadelphia. Those currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, African American Museum of Philadelphia, and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery are not to be missed. From macro scale celebrations to quiet personal yearnings in intimate moments, the works in these exhibitions explore the fullness and complexity of artists within and alongside Black contemporary life.

December 11, 2024December 10, 2024, by Andrew Fish

Art Spiel Picks: Boston Exhibitions in December 2024

Highlights

*Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore* at Museum of Fine Arts, Bosto

It’s the end of 2024 and a new year is upon us. As we go into the holiday season to celebrate, reflect, and make resolutions for a new year, let’s also remember to take time to see all the amazing art on view. In Boston, there are several knockout shows to catch while you’re out and about. Whether you’re gathering with friends or going to your favorite gallery’s holiday party, you’ll be spending time with family – chosen and inherited – to feel centered, grounded, and a sense of belonging. Family can be wondrously complicated and beautifully complex in its array of characters.

November 11, 2024November 12, 2024, by Andrew Fish

Art Spiel Picks: Boston Exhibitions in November 2024

Highlights

Hugh Hayden: Home Work at Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA.

In the aftermath of the Presidential election, I feel inspired to visit galleries and museums more than ever. Not only am I feeling a conviction to support these now-endangered organizations, but I am finding respite in their halls and holdings. Regardless of your political leanings, this is a tender time for artists and art institutions, as well as for the curators and Directors who organize exhibitions. Obviously, what’s on view this month was curated before Election Day, but now that we’re in a new world, all of it seems singed by the results and potently relevant for the time. Hugh Hayden’s exploration of public education reminds us that the Department of Education may be gutted, and J Rowen O’Dwyer’s portraits of Trans people show us a vulnerable population that’s now even more susceptible to the threats of an angry and fearful nation. It’s a sobering time, but one that calls for art and artists to persevere.

October 28, 2024November 19, 2024, by Yasmeen Abdallah

Art Spiel Picks: New York City Exhibitions in October, 2024

HIGHLIGHTS

The *Object Library*, photo courtesy of Yasmeen Abdallah

Mementos abound all around us in our day-to-day activities. Often, they hold dear memories: some we wish to keep, and some we wish to release so that we can move on to new experiences. Be it a trinket that houses memories of better days, a gift from someone we cherish, or a serendipitous discovery that found its way into our orbit, we become fused in inexplicable ways. What happens then, when we are asked or forced to part with such gifts? It can be freeing to release ourselves from materialism, but it can also be devastating, depending on the circumstances.

September 19, 2024September 18, 2024, by Claire Haik

Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in September 2024

HIGHLIGHTS

Rebecca Rutstein at Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Photograph courtesy of the artist

As the Philadelphia gallery season ramps up, we explore unseen worlds in three very distinct shows. If you are a science or color enthusiast, be sure to see Rebecca Rutstein’s large abstract paintings at Bridgette Mayer Gallery. She uses bold designs and bright colors to tap into the sublime, examining hidden ecosystems fundamental to life on Earth. Delving into the veiled depths of the subconscious, Elena Drozdova’s Riding Fear at PII Galley presents dream-like paintings with powerful symbolic imagery. Across town at InLiquid Gallery, Brotherly Lens: A Portrait of Philadelphia places three exceptional photographers in conversation, inspiring introspection and creating a striking narrative of Philadelphia’s unknown history and communities.