In Unreliable Narrators, Rochelle Voyles’s collages hold both a capacious nihilism and a hope to build stories from the void. From this fulcrum, I think of Joan Didion’s classic essay The White Album, and its opening truism: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Voyles’s compositions of found photographs extend to viewers, a branch, a bone, a tool in making sense of the randomness that seems to rule our lives. Cutouts layered into loops capture chaos, but the care in each cut, the curation, and the collision of hyperspecific images betray a belief in an idiosyncratic order. These works are at once figurative mazes of manifold meaning, and objects calculated to short-circuit our thinking and experience pure sensation.
Continue reading “Unreliable Narrators: Rochelle Voyles”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.
Continue reading “Masako Miki: Midnight March – A Galaxy of Joyful Transformation”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.
Continue reading “The $650 Show Art History Forgot, Thirteen Women, One Wet Floor, Zero Permission”On This Spot: Histories of Women Artists in NYC

On The Spot is a terrific new web series that seeks to document the histories of women artists in NYC from the 1950s to the 2000s. The ambitious mission is to document and present in three-minute videos the history of later 20th-century artists who have often been overlooked and underrepresented in the larger art world. They call themselves “a feminist art history nonprofit.” There are 40 videos so far produced, with plans for a great many more. The videos are a free public resource, accessible on the organization’s website.
Continue reading “On This Spot: Histories of Women Artists in NYC”OXH Gallery Setting the Stage for Women Artists in the Heart of Tampa
In dialogue

Odeta Xheka, an artist, curator, and mother, has been an avid advocate for women in the fine arts. Her latest endeavor is an ambitious and exciting one, as she opened OXH Gallery in the heart of Tampa’s Ybor City Historic District just a few months ago. I’m sitting down with Odeta to discuss her new gallery, her mission, exciting collaborations, and the current two-person show Time Shards, which will be on view through March 20th, 2025.
Continue reading “OXH Gallery Setting the Stage for Women Artists in the Heart of Tampa”Looking Back, Topping Off: 2024 Books
book review

I had the pleasure of reading quite a few remarkable books this year. I had the additional pleasure of reviewing a number of them for Art Spiel.
I reviewed Rapper’s Deluxe: How Hip Hop Made the World, Dr. Todd Boyd’s sweeping and lushly illustrated account of hip hop history, published by Phaidon, back around its release date in February. You can read my full review here: “Even Greater Days: Rapper’s Deluxe: How Hip Hop Made the World”.
Continue reading “Looking Back, Topping Off: 2024 Books”Julia Szabo: Vision and visibility
In Dialogue

Journalist and author Julia Szabo is resolved to establish the world’s first museum to be built by women for women artists. MSeum is going to be a museum with a focus on overlooked artists (Know Unknowns), providing art storage space to creative women and their heirs and offering the most enriching museum experience for blind and low-vision visitors anywhere in the world, with a variety of tactile artworks and architectural features inviting touch, because loss of sight does not mean loss of vision.
Continue reading “Julia Szabo: Vision and visibility”Paige Beeber – on Phantom Thread
In conversation
By Amanda Millet-Sorsa

Prior to her exhibition, Phantom Thread at Freight+Volume, Paige Beeber spoke with Amanda Millet-Sorsa at the artist’s studio in Brooklyn. Nestled into a Cube Smart storage space building in Gowanus on the edge of Red Hook, the studio is part of TI Studios. Beeber’s long family roots in Brooklyn date back to the early 1900s, as she continues to live and work in this borough. Her new work evolved from experiences she had at residencies in 2022 (DNA Residency in Provincetown, SARP in Sicily, and recently completed her fellowship at The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation). Her work exists between narration, figuration, and abstraction and largely uses the repurposing of her own past paintings that transform into new patterns, motifs, and imagery in new paintings. Ritual and community play an essential role in the stitching of new narratives.
Continue reading “Paige Beeber – on Phantom Thread”Feminist Connect
Curator Sally Brown in conversation with artists Marie Bergstedt, Amy Chaiklin and Laurence de Valmy
In conversation with the artists

Marie Bergstedt, Amy Chaiklin and Laurence de Valmy were featured artists in Feminist Connect, on view at Charles Adam Studio Project in Lubbock, Texas, in March, 2022 and as part of a larger online exhibition by the same name, running through February 2023. The artists Bergstedt (fabric), Chaiklin (drawing/painting) and deValmy (painting) discuss their processes, concepts and relations with the co-curator, Sally Brown, expanding on the discussion the exhibition provokes around the feminist lineage of art.
Continue reading “Feminist Connect”In Accordion Time, Unfolding : A Pandemic Archive at Ursa Gallery
In Dialogue with Alexandra Rutsch Brock

Patricia Fabricant, Jo Yarrington, Katherine Jackson, Ellen Hackl Fagan, Alexandra Rutsch Brock, Patricia Miranda (missing Josette Urso) – watching President-elect Joe Biden’s victory speech Nov. 7, 2020 – after our gallery reception. Photo courtesy Dustin Malstrom
The group exhibition In Accordion Time, Unfolding : A Pandemic Archive marks the opening of Ursa Gallery, an experimental gallery showcasing contemporary art and design located at the historic Arcade Mall in Bridgeport, Connecticut. This art venue was founded by Cris Dam and conceived in collaboration with Dustin Malstrom. Cris was also cofounder of Dam Stultrager in 1998 – one of the earliest galleries in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Co-curated by Alexandra Rutsch Brock and Patricia Miranda, the exhibition features mail art in the form of accordion-fold books and digital dialogues by the London Calling Collective over the challenging past year. It runs through February 12th, 2021.
Continue reading “In Accordion Time, Unfolding : A Pandemic Archive at Ursa Gallery”