Whitney Museum – Art Spiel

March 3, 2026March 3, 2026, by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

The $650 Show Art History Forgot, Thirteen Women, One Wet Floor, Zero Permission

At 33 Bleecker Street, history does not politely vacate.

In the 19th century, Herman Melville grew up at this address, long before the current building rose here in 1900. A century later, Joel Shapiro kept an early studio in the building before moving on to larger quarters. This winter, the ground-floor gallery Zürcher has been restaging a 1972 exhibition titled 13 Women Artists. Museum curators made the trip to NoHo. Emails arrived from outside the city asking for more time.

April 21, 2025April 20, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

DUMBO Open Studios 2025 with Peter Drake

A person holding a picture frame

Description automatically generated — Peter Drake in his Dumbo studio. Photo courtesy of Janice Faber

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. Peter Drake has been in DUMBO since January 2016. Peter Drake’s studio is at 55 Washington Street, #254.

July 22, 2024October 6, 2024, by Santiago Zabala

Josh Kline’s Greatest Emergency

Josh Kline, Unemployment, installation view, 2016

This is part of a series of articles for the upcoming exhibition, The Greatest Emergency at the Circulo de Bellas Artes of Madrid. The exhibition is based on Santiago Zabala’s book, Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency. In this exhibition, ten contemporary artists rescue us into our greatest emergencies, that is, those we do not confront as we should. Each article in the series will contextualize these artists’ practices and explore how they are linked to Zabala’s aesthetic theory and the exhibition’s themes. The second article in this series highlights the work of American artist Josh Kline.

January 2, 2023March 1, 2023, by Amy Talluto

Whisperings from the Wormhole with @talluts

Midlife Big Bangs

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Description automatically generated with low confidence — Faith Ringgold, Women Free Angela, 1971, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Drawing Committee, © Faith Ringgold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

As an artist, have you ever looked around and felt ancient, withered, and uncool? Well, this pep talk is for you, because we’re about to find out how later in life, big bangs can be the bravest and most creative big bangs of all.

December 7, 2022May 12, 2024, by Saul Ostrow

Another Fumble at the Whitney: no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria

Opinion

A group of people in a room with posters on the wall

Description automatically generated with medium confidence — Installation view. Photo courtesy of the writer.

The exhibition no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria, though it includes 50 works by 20 artists, seems overwhelmed given it has been installed in an enormous space. With the exception of two lounge-like areas in which billboard-sized video projections are installed, most of the works, modest in scale, seem to be scattered through the space, or enigmatically clustered together. Ironically, where the Wake of Maria is sparsely installed and attended, the Edward Hopper NY exhibition, given its scale and popularity, would definitely benefit from more space than the half floor it has been jammed into. Another oddity is the disparity in the number and scale of works each artist is represented by. I can only suspect the budget of this show was insufficient to achieve its stated ambition of “presenting artworks made over the last five years by an inter-generational group of artists from Puerto Rico and its diaspora.”

August 24, 2022August 24, 2022, by Saul Ostrow

Some last words on the Whitney Biennial as a cultural labyrinth

Opinion

I would hate to think I have become an old and conservative critic who believes our best days are behind us. I would rather believe that my structuralist perspective is capable of evaluating contemporary emerging practices and recognize the social, cultural and political value of these tendencies. What brought this on is having recently seen the 1962–64 exhibition at the Jewish Museum. This show examines how artists living and working in New York during this three-year period responded to rapidly changing social and cultural conditions, by questioning what was considered to be art’s normative forms and subjects. This post-AbEx generation was concerned with creating aesthetic configurations that would result in novel perceptual modes and political subjectivities.

August 15, 2022December 30, 2022, by Art Spiel

Harriet Salmon: Tracing Genologies at Heroes

Featured Project: with artist and co-founder of Heroes Gallery

Harriet Salmon with (from left) Benny Merris’ *An Other Another 196*, 2022 and an Emilio Pucci silk scarf from 1964. Courtesy: Emilio Pucci Heritage.

Hrriet Salmon is an artist, gallerist, as well as a podcast host and producer. Her engagement in art is deep and wide—in her own art she makes sculpture, drawing, photo, installation, and weaving; in Heroes, the gallery she co-founded with her partner, Jesse Penridge, they create vibrant visual dialogues between contemporary artists and historical art; in her Craftsmanship podcast she discusses technical skill in the contemporary artworld told through oral history of fabricators.

March 27, 2020March 23, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Artists on Coping: William Norton

During the coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

William Norton in his studio. Photograph by Rafael Fuchs

William Norton’s medium of choice is a mixture of drawing and carving, using a dremel and a router to carve lines by hand into large plexiglass sheets, letting light be what illuminates the artwork through casting shadows and reflections. Working from charcoal drawings and photographs all the work is autobiographical in nature, mostly an attempt to understand what it means to be a man, an issue that’s plagued him for decades stemming from the moment his 4 year old son was kidnapped and disappeared.