Judy Pfaff, Barcelona, 1990, steel, plastic, glass, table and chairs, 168 x 168 x 168 inches
It began, as many enduring ideas do, over wine and conversation. Michael David, painter, curator, and gallerist of M. David & Co., was speaking at a dinner with Judy Pfaff about her close friend and early champion Al Held. The talk drifted to another dear friend, Elizabeth Murray, and then to her admiration for Frank Stella. From that exchange evolved the idea for Singing in Unison, Part 12: Painting in Space, curated by Michael David, and now on view at Art Cake in cooperation with The Brooklyn Rail.
Almond Zigmund, figure ground yellow, 2023, acrylic on paper, 36 x 53”, photo credit: Jenny Gorman
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.
Interior Worlds of Sculpture and Performance: Bonam Kim, Raul De Lara, and Nyugen Smith
Nyugen Smith and Marvin Fabien, After the Fracture 2019. Performance at Pérez Art Museum, Miami. Photography Pascal Bernier.
Creating work that both resists and grapples with their immigrant experiences, Bonam Kim, Raul De Lara, and Nyugen Smith offer distinctive approaches to sculpture. Their perspectives on their immigrant experiences show some overlap but also many differences. As part of The Immigrant Artist Biennial, Kim’s work in Enmeshed, Dreams of Water explores how new morphologies of identity emerge across time, place, and patterns of self-reflection, while Smith and De Lara’s work that will be on view in Excavated Selves, Becoming Magic Bodies begs the viewer to interrogate place through storytelling. Together with the artists, co-curator Anna Mikaela Ekstrand discusses the politics of art and how the artists approach personal histories and historical and political events before the exhibit.
