textile art – Art Spiel

August 17, 2026August 20, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

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.

July 29, 2026July 28, 2026, by Adria Arch

America, Unfinished?! at WaterFire Arts Center

America, Unfinished?!, a national exhibit at WaterFire Arts Center in Providence, RI, features the work of 80 artists from 13 states and territories. I visited the 15,000-square-foot former rubber factory on a hot July day. The light-filled space is several stories high and could dwarf almost anything smaller than a jet, so it took me a while to find my bearings and focus on the work.

July 21, 2026July 21, 2026, by Mike Dressel

Fugue Gallery Finds a New Home with Forbidden Fruit

Located along the central artery of Little Italy, amid a glut of red sauce joints with checkered tablecloths, sits the new home of Fugue Gallery. Having recently relocated from Canal Street to Mulberry Street, the space, a 1,000-square-foot brick loft, eschews white box sterility for something more atypical.

June 2, 2026June 1, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Run by Artists, Built for Artists: OyG and the Cornell MFA

What does a gallery look like when the artists are in charge? Founded in 2013, Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG) is an artist-run collective with no fixed curatorial line and a non-hierarchical structure shared equally among its eight co-directors. Since 2023, it has become the annual New York home for Cornell University’s MFA thesis exhibition — a partnership built on a simple premise: artist-run spaces value experimentation, innovation, and risk-taking, giving graduate artists the freedom to present work without commercial constraints or curatorial imperatives.

May 26, 2026May 25, 2026, by odeta xheka

The Absence is in the Fingers

There are exhibitions shaped less by what is installed than by what fails to arrive. I did not plan for this to be one of them. Where Form Remembers was conceived as a two-person presentation: Julie Gladstone’s mixed-media works traveling from Toronto, Avani Patel’s drawings from Brooklyn. The premise was a dialogue between two practices in proximity, each distinct enough that the distance between them would produce something worth engaging over time. What it became was different.

May 14, 2026May 14, 2026, by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

At Some Point, Every Household Object Stops Being Innocent

No one ever thinks the plate is going to become a problem.

A plate survives three apartments and one bad Thanksgiving. A suitcase gets hauled across borders or shoved beneath beds; sometimes it is packed in hope, sometimes because someone has no choice. An iron presses school clothes and funeral clothes, then outlives its usefulness and sits in a closet somewhere, still holding the pressure of human hands.

That is the animating idea behind extraORDINARY things, the quietly arresting exhibition at the Flinn Gallery in Greenwich Library.

May 12, 2026May 9, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Carter Burden Gallery: Why Material Matters

Few New York galleries build their programs around the kind of organizing principle that anchors Carter Burden Gallery. Since 2008, the Chelsea space has focused on artists with long careers that haven’t followed conventional commercial arcs. Here, Associate Executive Director Marlena Vaccaro and Assistant Director Sarah Leon discuss the gallery’s mission, the values guiding their curatorial choices, the thinking behind the current exhibition, Material Matters, and what that focus has opened up.

April 13, 2026April 11, 2026, by Shuhan Zhang

Andrius Alvarez-Backus: I Want to Know, I Need to Know

In Andrius Alvarez-Backus’s solo exhibition, I Want to Know, I Need to Know, at Eli Klein Gallery, the work Are You Still Strong Enough? (2025) emerges as the visual center of the show’s underlying tension. A My Little Pony toy hangs vertically, the surface covered in bronze patina, while the incision along its abdomen is carefully stitched closed. What was once a lighthearted and slightly absurd object becomes, through this treatment, both fragile and solemn. Its form evokes a body after surgery, yet also resembles a preserved specimen. However, the meticulous stitching does not suggest that the wound has truly healed. Instead, the seam runs along the body, leaving the incision exposed and gradually becoming part of the sculpture’s structure. The suturing does not erase the rupture; it keeps the rupture visible. The wound is no longer simply a trace of intervention, but the structural element through which the work sustains its tension.

March 23, 2026March 23, 2026, by Ella Jackson

Masako Miki: Midnight March – A Galaxy of Joyful Transformation

As the founding Executive and Artistic Director of the MassArt Art Museum (MAAM), Lisa Tung has continually focused on bringing immersive exhibitions to the public and establishing an institution that champions art education, contemporary art practices, and the accessibility of art. Having seen and admired the work of Masako Miki, Tung brought Miki’s imaginative creations to MAAM, where they come alive in Midnight March, curated by Alison Gass and Meghan Smith.

Midnight March transforms the Paine Gallery into a galaxy, filled with Miki’s large-scale, felted interpretations of Japanese folklore spirits, yōkai. Through their materiality, scale, color, and design, the typically alienated spirits are presented through a contrasting portrayal from their traditionally frightening depiction, shown as playful, respected, and not so different from ourselves. Through an animistic approach, Midnight March reimagines myth, highlighting our similarities, spirituality, and the power of sculptural storytelling.

March 11, 2026March 17, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Spirit in the Flesh at Utopia

Spirit in the Flesh is on view at UTOPIA in Kingston, the gallery, bookstore, and studio space founded in 2025 by Lucia Cote. Curated by Saul Chernick, the exhibition brings together sculpture, painting, and works on paper by Courtney Puckett, Ben Pederson, and Chernick. The show treats art as a way of being, shaped by imagery rooted in intuition and dreams and carried into physical form through sustained attention to process. In a climate of constant noise and unrest, the works lean toward beauty, curiosity, and play. Curator and artist Saul Chernick tells us more about the exhibition and the venue.