Contemporary Art and Culture
Aleksandra Scepanovic’s story begins in then-Yugoslavia, where the stark presence of brutalist architecture shaped her early sense of form and space. As a journalist during the 1990s she reported on the Balkan conflicts, bearing witness to the fractured landscapes of cities such as Sarajevo.
Continue reading “Aleksandra Scepanovic: Site Seen”
Almond Zigmund’s work occupies the charged space between structure and disruption. Moving fluidly across sculpture, painting, and installation, her practice explores the intersection of geometry, architecture, and lived experience—often in subtle yet powerful ways. I have the pleasure of discussing her work at the end of her recent exhibition at East Hampton’s Guild Hall. In this interview exchange, Zigmund speaks about the formative influences that shaped her, from growing up in a creative household to navigating the distinct geographies of Brooklyn, Las Vegas, and the East End of Long Island. The conversation delves into the improvisational roots of her approach, her ongoing engagement with spatial systems, and how tension—between control and spontaneity, place and perception, the built and the organic—continues to animate her work. With references to theorists, artists, Zigmund offers a thoughtful and richly textured account of how art can be both experiential and critical, formal and deeply human.
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. Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong has been in DUMBO since 2015. Her studio is at 20 Jay Street #M10B (mezzanine level).
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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.
Continue reading “Art Spiel Picks: Boston Exhibitions in November 2024”
at Griffiss International Sculpture Park , Rome, NY
Linda Cunningham – Divisions
… hunger and fear can vanquish all human resistance, and all
freedom … Freedom consists in knowing freedom is in danger.
But to know … is to have time to avoid & prevent the moment of
inhumanity … the infinitesimal difference between the human
being and the non-human being …
————–Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity
Continue reading “Divisions: To Be Human Is To Act Humanely”
Bat Ami Rivlin, who has lived in New York City for over a decade, finds her artistic practice profoundly shaped by the city’s relentless cycle of object turnover. The daily expulsion of waste from restaurants, buildings, and homes onto the streets, followed by the inevitable clear-out, is a stark reflection of urban existence. This phenomenon sparks contemplation on how these transient objects organize our spatial interactions, both during their use and after their disposal.
Continue reading “Bat Ami Rivlin: Functional Narratives”
The current group exhibition at The Boiler | ELM Foundation, Transgressing Lands, curated by A.E. Chapman, features work by Jeannine Bardo, Nancy Cohen, Cristina de Gennaro, Deborah Jack, Natalie Moore, Itty S. Neuhaus, Nazanin Noroozi, Lina Puerta, Corinne Teed, Elizabeth Velazquez, and Letha Wilson, who interpret the horizon’s role as a foundational element for understanding our place in the world. The artists confront pressing issues—preserving landscapes under threat, the ramifications of climate change, the realities of displacement and conflict, the significance of mindfulness, challenging colonial legacies, and the ever-present cycles of destruction and rejuvenation. Chapman’s direction for the exhibition invites viewers to engage with how landscapes can anchor us in the present moment and our collective history.
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As part of The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023, artists Carlos Franco (b. Puerto Rico) and Keren Anavy (b. Israel) both showed their work in the group exhibition Enmeshed: Dreams of Water at NARS Foundation. Franco’s work often deploys appropriated images and linguistic symbols. He seems to be exploring the contextual complexities behind how signification takes shape and how signification continues to evolve as a context-dependent subject. Anavy’s site-specific work has been connected to the multifaceted paradigm of “ecological order,” according to the book Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts. Her fabricated environments consider the “liminal geographic spaces between political art and escapism.”
Continue reading “The Immigrant Artist Biennial – In Dialogue”In Dialogue with Linnéa Gad, Magdalena Dukiewicz, and Anna Ting Möller
Instead of transcribing a previously established set of ideologies through scholastic mediums, Linnéa Gad, Magdalena Dukiewicz, and Anna Ting Möller engage with materials that “breathe”—materials whose lives and afterlives warrant separate biographies.
Presented within the context of The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023: Contact Zone, Swedish artist Gad creates sculptures with limestone, oysters, lapis lazuli, and other materials profoundly connected to the Earth’s carbon cycle. On Governors Island, her sculptures, Shoals I-II, evoke humanity’s resonance with and reliance upon nature. Polish-born artist Dukiewicz juxtaposes industrial components with provocative, organic materials such as hair and blood. In the group show, Enmeshed, Dreams of Water, at NARS Foundation, Dukiewicz’s Object #6 (2023) contains decay, regeneration, and fluidity elements into beautifully translucent and sculptural artwork. Chinese-born Swedish artist Möller, whose work will be presented in Parasites and Vessels at Accent Sisters, unpacks the convoluted social history of kinship via kombucha cultures. The oysters, hair, and kombucha are not subjected to manipulating the artists’ hands; instead, the materials are collaborators in these projects, bringing their subjectivities, histories, and sociological implications into the creative process.
Together with TIAB’s co-curator, Anna Mikaela Ekstrand, the artists speak about their work about technology, materiality, and ecosystems.
Continue reading “The Immigrant Artist Biennial – In Dialogue”
Donna Zarbin-Byrne, Like Water from a Rock. Here Once Was Ocean, still image from augmented reality animation. Photo courtesy, Donna Zarbin-Byrne
In her installation-based exhibition, Like Water from a Rock, at Arts Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX, Donna Zarbin-Byrne responds to the landscapes of the Chihuahuan desert of West Texas and the West Maui mountains, connecting material sites with an internal process. Western art traditions often portray the landscape as an idealized place to conquer and expand. Zarbin-Byrne frames the landscape as a place to experience the sensate.
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