Is nostalgia really a safe space for us to process the uncertainty of the rapidly changing present? This Candy Has Teeth, curated by Shuhan Zhang, features five Chinese artists, Shengjie Jiang, Weican Wang, Jiaqi Mao, Yukun (Chloe) Ba, and Cindy (Zhaoyue) Chen, who move through childhood, memory, and nostalgia in different ways. Together, their works reflect our current desire for nostalgia, a desire that perhaps reveals just how uncertain the present feels. Yet the more we try to grasp onto the soft, safe, familiar places of the past, the more complicated those memories become. If you really delve back into them, they are also full of discomfort: moments of being forced to accept what happened, and the stiffness of a choke at the throat. As the curatorial text suggests, it is a “sensory misalignment”—an apple is sweet, yet hard to swallow.
Continue reading “This Candy Has Teeth: Can Nostalgia Really Comfort Us?”SPRING/BREAK highlights: Hide and Seek
This year’s theme for SPRING/BREAK Art Show was Hide and Seek. The fair was within this new and exciting office space that felt like a labyrinth at first, but then it evolved into a wonderful journey- meeting new artists and old friends. Full of amazing works and installations, the booths caught my attention through either a detail, a connection, or a wonderful conversation. The themes varied, from Peter Gynd’s focus on the joys of the everyday to Juan-Manuel Pinzon and Matthew Logsdon’s connections through material, action, and discovery. David Howe and Jesus Benavente’s team brings urgency and humor, showing how decisions from up high affect our everyday lives. My experience of the fair concluded with the works of Noa Charuvi and Shmuel Charuvi, exploring connections to a sense of place and ways of viewing the world, often influenced by the works of family, while Braden Bandel’s paintings and drawings bring us into another world entirely- allowing us a place to rest and contemplate.
Continue reading “SPRING/BREAK highlights: Hide and Seek”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.
Continue reading “Latency: Reinventing Photography – MFA Parsons Show”Betty Parsons: An Expanded World at The Hessel Museum of Art
The Hessel Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College has mounted a lavish retrospective on the work of artist and art dealer Betty Parsons. The first such exhibit in 25 years, it covers her career from beginning to end.
Continue reading “Betty Parsons: An Expanded World at The Hessel Museum of Art”Rebecca Rutstein: Universal Nature at the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art
In Universal Nature, at Ursinus College’s Berman Museum, you can easily feel the breadth of Rebecca Rutstein’s long artistic practice. Rutstein has spent over two decades creating paintings, sculptures, videos, and textiles, buoyed by a passion to connect with and understand complex global systems that are core to our existence on this planet. Universal Nature presents a mid-career survey spanning her oeuvre, with an intellectual focus on continuous change, transformation, and interdependence.
Continue reading “Rebecca Rutstein: Universal Nature at the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art”Serpentine Sibyls at Snug Harbor
A chance meeting in October 2024 set Serpentine Sibyls in motion. Wandering into the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Daniel Rothbart met its director and senior curator Melissa West, and a shared bond with the late critic and curator John Perreault — who ran the center in the 1980s — opened a collaboration that grew from the main pond to the two reflecting pools beside the Glass House. Rothbart’s floating forms in aluminum and glass, buoyed by salvaged Japanese fishing floats, drift and turn with wind, light, and water, so no two hours look alike. Named by West for the ancient prophetesses and for the serpentinite stone in Staten Island’s own hills, the work holds history and forecast at once, using the climate crisis as its undertow. Sited at a former sailors’ home along a tidal waterway, it runs through September 28 at Snug Harbor. The artist and curator discuss the project’s origins, its shifting forms, and the myth and history beneath the title.
Continue reading “Serpentine Sibyls at Snug Harbor”Cutaway at Brandeis University
For Cutaway, curator Olivia Baldwin worked the way she does in her own studio — building from the ground up, beginning with the artists rather than a theme. She had followed Eleanor Anderson, J Stoner Blackwell, Lucy Kim, Kirstin Lamb, and Hai-Wen Lin for years, looking for where their materials might overlap and where they might productively rub against one another. Meeting with them, a shared concern surfaced: how each artist asserts and then loosens the limits of an object, a body, a pattern. Their means are strikingly varied — discarded plastic bags, cross stitch, dyed silk and chain, cast flounder and teeth, a kite pitched toward the upper windows — bound by saturated color and touch. The body recurs throughout, rarely pictured, more often left as a trace in the material. Baldwin discusses the show’s bottom-up beginnings, what its materials share, and the withholding behind its title.
Continue reading “Cutaway at Brandeis University”Treizman + Zurilla: Monumentalizing the Trace
Situation
The duo Treizman + Zurilla has created a paradoxical situation at The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery in Pembroke Pines, Florida. There are no paintings hanging on the walls or sculptures on pedestals; only the remnants of an undefined and colossal event. It is perhaps the belated fulfillment of a premonition that adopts the exhibition space as a medium for art, transforming the White Cube into a site-specific installation.
Continue reading “Treizman + Zurilla: Monumentalizing the Trace”Do I Know You From Somewhere? at Transmitter: Alison Kudlow, Susan Meyer, Hanna Washburn, and Se Young Yim
Entering the bright gallery space, shared with Tiger Strikes Asteroid on the other side of the wall, you are welcomed by brightness and playfulness. Like walking into a kindergarten classroom, a playroom, or a yoga studio, the sculptural inhabitants are cordial yet also preoccupied with themselves. It is no coincidence that the curator and three of the artists are mothers who spend time with children.
Continue reading “Do I Know You From Somewhere? at Transmitter: Alison Kudlow, Susan Meyer, Hanna Washburn, and Se Young Yim “Cantilevers at Roundabouts Now
Katy Fischer and Marie Lorenz go back to the mid-90s and the printmaking department at RISD, where the sheer amount there was to learn on a technical level sealed both of their paths as artists. Cantilevers, their two-person exhibition at Roundabouts Now in Kingston, includes no printmaking at all — yet a printmaker’s habit of setting up a repeatable process and then letting it devolve runs through both bodies of work. Lorenz, who has operated a tide taxi in New York Harbor since 2005 in boats she designs and builds, shows kinetic, pendulum-based sculptures weighted with porcelain casts of objects found on the beach. Fischer’s script-like porcelain shapes and new mosaics draw on techniques with roots reaching back 1,500 years. In the conversation that follows, the two artists discuss their shared history, the systems behind their work, and the tension of balancing porcelain on a single point.
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