storytelling – Art Spiel

July 2, 2026June 28, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Dakota Gearhart: All Matter Is Alive

Dakota Gearhart grew up on a Florida coastline where algae blooms, sewage outflows, and bikini contests share the same shoreline, and her work has been carrying that mix of beauty, decay, and amusement into a much bigger frame ever since. Across animation, sculpture, performance, and sound, she builds video worlds where pixels sing, electricity becomes sentient, and the nonhuman shows up on equal footing with the rest of the cast. Her ongoing animated series Life Touching Life is hosted by Tiffany, a half-algae, half-woman figure who guides viewers through episodes shaped with collaborators — poets, scientists, activists, caretakers — whose lives already reflect the worldview the work is reaching toward. It’s funny, strange, and serious in roughly equal measure, which turns out to be the right register for the worlds it stages.

January 6, 2025January 7, 2025, by Melissa Stern

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson: Character Studies, Curator: Character Studies at Fort Gansvoort

A framed piece of art Description automatically generated — Dad’s Journey. 2003. Pen, ink, colored pencil, fabric, thread, buttons, on paper. 15 x 11

“She was weird,” said the Columbus Museum of Art curator affectionately of artist Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson at the press preview celebrating the late artist’s work. She went on to explain that Robinson made her own art supplies, lived an unconventional and rich life, making art in many mediums and acted as an informal archivist and raconteur of her community. “Weird,” in this context is a high compliment. Fort Gansevoort, an eccentric gallery in New York’s Meatpacking District announced its representation of Robinson’s estate (1940-2015) in collaboration with the Columbus Museum, to which Robinson bequeathed her work and archives. It’s a perfect match between artist and gallery.

December 10, 2024December 10, 2024, by Anna Shukeylo

Object Relations: Michael Gac Levin at My Pet Ram

A painting of a living room

Description automatically generated — We Had an Agreement, 28”x24”, Acrylic on canvas

As one enters My Pet Ram’s humble gallery space full of moderately-sized Gustonesque paintings, the viewer is transported into the surreal personal nooks and crannies of Michael Gac Levin’s reality. His paintings are heavily influenced by his family life. Familiar landscapes are juxtaposed with foreign characters and shapes. The artist tells a fantastical story in this new body of work through a day in the life of two characters embodied by an apple and a tree-like figure.

October 4, 2023October 6, 2023, by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

The Immigrant Artist Biennial – In Dialogue

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.

December 12, 2022December 18, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Myth Catchers: Manju Shandler, Rithika Merchant and Jacqueline Shatz

Manju Shandler, Wonder Whale 1, 2018, mixed media, 23×19 inch

Luckily, or to many art-mavens’ chagrin, our 21^st century art world—in line with the global techno-culture and socio-political processes—seems to have abandoned crusades of “right” or “wrong” related to artistic form (though sometimes that does not apply to content). We are experiencing a dizzying array of aesthetic expressions, where often fast-pace visual trends replace ideologies of form. Unlike some passing trends, visual narratives based on mythological iconography have been central in all art forms since archaic ages, except for the early-mid half of the 20^th century when narrative impetus was largely downplayed in most of what was called the “Avant Garde” art of the time.

November 17, 2022December 30, 2022, by Art Spiel

Linda Kuo & Dancers Unlimited

Grantee of Brooklyn Arts Fund

Project Profile: Edible Tales

Dancers Unlimited members at Waikalua fishpond in Hawai’i. Photo credit: Jordan Medeiros

Brooklyn Arts Council announced in March 2022 an allocation of over $1.3 million to 238 Brooklyn-based artists and cultural organizations. This year marks the highest number of grantees and awardees as well as the largest amount of funding BAC has ever distributed. Art Spiel in collaboration with Brooklyn Arts Council features some artists who received a Brooklyn Arts Fund, Local Arts Support, and/or Creative Equations Fund grant in 2022.

March 25, 2022November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

To Have and to Hold at the Clemente

A picture containing indoor, floor, wall, room

Description automatically generated — *To Have and To Hold* exhibition with works by from left to right: Jean Carla Rodea; Maria De Los Angeles; Micaela Martello; Julia Justo, Maria De Los Angeles; and Jeff Kasper

Featured Project: with curators Anna Shukeylo and Yasmeen Abdallah

The group show To Have and to Hold at the Abrazo Interno Gallery at the Clemente brings together work by Maria de Los Angeles, Julia Justo, Jeff Kasper, Michela Martello, Patricia Miranda and Jean Carla Rodea, who explore in their work notions of beauty and soulful trajectories through the potency of heirloom-like objects. Co-curators Yasmeen Abdallah and Anna Shukeylo share their thoughts on their collaborative curatorial experience.

August 9, 2021October 4, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Keisha Prioleau-Martin: I Have Been the Dancer

*Keisha Prioleau-Martin in her Bushwick studio with her paintings. Photo credit: Luke Lunsford 2021*

The figures in New York City based painter Keisha Prioleau-Martin, become an essence of motion and emotion – exuding a sense of radical joy and playfulness, expressed through gestural brushstrokes and vibrant colors.

January 19, 2021January 19, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Christopher Ulivo: The Present is Nonsense

Christopher Ulivo, the LA based painter, takes us in his vivid paintings to imaginary places, from time travel to ancestral family spirits to rewritten myths and histories. His worlds are filled with idiosyncratic, wildly imaginative narratives, where you can sense the painter’s presence as a prolific storyteller.

January 14, 2021January 14, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Yvette Molina: Big Bang Votive at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey

In Dialogue with Yvette Molina

Yvette Molina in residence at the VACNJ before shutdown. Photo credit: Ettienne Frossard.

Big Bang Votive, Yvette Molina’s collaborative storytelling art installation has evolved over fifteen weeks, utilizing the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Gallery at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey through January 18^th, 2021. Yvette Molina creates an immersive audio-visual experience — accompanied by a 30-minute surround sound composition played on a loop, her installation includes three hundred paintings of starry skies, some with votive symbols of delight or love taken from stories gathered from the public, a work-table with the artist’s materials, and an on-going “story catcher” project involving public participation.