Contemporary Art and Culture
Floating names a state of suspension, between sinking and surviving, between grief and the body’s refusal to stop. In Keren Anavy’s landmark solo exhibition, Floating in Three Acts, this condition is both subject and structure. The exhibition is built the way floating feels: without firm ground, without clear direction, with the question of outcome left open.
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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.
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Nanette Carter: A Question of Balance at the Montclair Art Museum is an extensive survey of 46 works from throughout the artist’s career curated by Mary Birmingham. Carter is known for her boundless abstractions and innovative works on mylar. This long-awaited show reflects Carter’s long history with the museum, the community, and the town itself. As one enters the show, the first piece is a video titled The Weight from the pandemic days, where Carter films herself balancing various pieces of her two-dimensional painting as more pieces get “stacked” onto the main mass. Setting the mood for the show, it not only introduces Nanette Carter in flesh but also important themes she has been working on throughout her career.
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Terra Keck and Jan Dickey caught up with artist Weihui Lu a couple of weeks after she completed a residency at Wave Hill in the Bronx. At the time, Weihui was reflecting on that experience while also preparing for her current solo show, when there is no longer a danger of frost, at Tempest Gallery in Ridgewood, Queens. An installation artist with roots in Chinese landscape painting, Weihui continues to explore impermanence, a delicate and sparing use of material, and humankind’s relationship to the natural environment. Her installation at Tempest draws its source material from an aging greenhouse she spent time contemplating during her residency at Wave Hill—understood as a physical embodiment of human systems of care, including their inevitable collapse and repair.
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Naomi Lev is a curator, cultural program director, and arts writer based in New York City. She works closely with living artists and calls her approach “Process Curating”—a method that follows a project from its earliest stages through final installation. It’s about long-term exchange and staying present as ideas shift.
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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.
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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. Main Window, situated in the historic Clocktower Building at 1 Main Street, has been a presentation space dedicated to public art in DUMBO since 1980. Their enduring mission is to spotlight the diverse voices of under-represented Brooklyn and New York City artists. Main Window is curated by artist and Dumbo resident Jeff Wallace. @mainwindowdumbo
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A cavernous cubbyhole with a variety of enigmatic gunmetal stalagmites emerges from the relative monotony of the urban backdrop of St. John’s Place in Crown Heights. Janet Goldner’s collection of sculptures, called Zigzags, populate FiveMyles’ exterior space, and while the viewer can enter this space through the gallery, the initial impression of jagged edges, pent-up energy, and the cold solidity of the welded metal objects makes one relieved there is a metal gate between us, the viewer, and them, the sculptures.
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Outcropping, Erica Stoller’s recent solo show at A.I.R. Gallery, which ran through November 10th, utilized cardboard cuttings, formerly boxes, and packaging, as its exclusive material. When walking through the gallery, one noticed the show has three sections– a corner piece that covers two walls, floor to ceiling, a grid of individual cardboard compositions hung on the wall and a third “sandwiches” station that allowed viewers to pick up layered cardboard batches. Proceeds from the sale of the “sandwiches” go to Feeding America. An interesting survey of installation art—a site-specific installation, painting-like works on a wall, and an interactive piece. Stoller often works with space in curious ways. In Item # 25-033, her 2022 solo show at A.I.R. Gallery, she created a single wall-to-wall installation using Manilla rope and elastic bands. The rope cut through the gallery space, creating framed planes between ceiling pipes, wall hooks, and the floor.
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Lou Reed’s song All Tomorrow’s Parties, featured on the Velvet Underground & Nico’s debut studio album, was allegedly inspired by the musician’s observation of Andy Warhol’s ‘Factory,’ an epicenter where camp, craze, and creativity flowed in abundance. With a tangible sense of energetic exploration, M. David & Co.’s mega-scale group show at Art Cake echoes this creative exchange by articulating the dynamic intergenerational connections between emerging and established artists across media.
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