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Open Studios Resident Artist

Two Coats Resident Artist Gyan Shrosbree, May 5 – 10

Contributed by Sharon Butler / In May, Two Coats of Paint welcomes the return of Gyan Shrosbree from Fairfield, Iowa. Gyan, who had residencies in 2016 and 2017, makes clothing that she combines with twentieth-century modernist painting in an idiosyncratic and inventive practice that includes collaborative activities like sewing with her mother and staging exhibitions in the form of fashion shows. The closet, she declares, is her field of possibility. For Shrosbree, clothing is both practical and symbolic. It protects our bodies from the environment while projecting something about our inner life. It’s this duality that gives her bold paintings their emotional charge. 

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Solo Shows

E.M. Saniga: Country life vigorously observed

Contributed by Sutton Allen / With his show at Donald Ryan Gallery, E.M. Saniga join the esteemed company of artists who have eschewed fashion for the sake of personal vision. His real kin are Albert Pinkham Ryder and Courbet. He and Courbet are both interested in the raw beauty of country life yet also share an urbane sensibility. Saniga’s experience is made tactile through carefully modeled half tones and a calculated and surprising facture.

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Museum Exhibitions

Paul Klee, degenerate for the ages

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Branded a degenerate artist for his “insane childish scrawling” by the Nazis, Paul Klee, once anointed at the Bauhaus, left Germany for Switzerland in 1933. Scleroderma was already affecting his will and ability to paint, and his theretofore prodigious output waned. But as Germany’s onslaught in Europe effloresced into World War II, he regained purpose and productivity, yielding over 1,250 works in 1939, the year before his death. During this period, he downplayed his signature sublimation via color in favor of succinct line to expose the toxicity of fascism. Everything that concerned him as a citizen of the world seemed to catch light in his art. This valedictory turn is the subject of “Other Possible Worlds,” the Jewish Museum’s superbly curated show, uniquely centered on his final decade. 

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Solo Shows

Ken D. Resseger: Closer to creation

Contributed by Michael Brennan / In blues, there’s a tradition of over-practice, the idea being that the same song played thousands of times, and thus mastered, might yield something new about its nature, revealing a hidden room. My own artistic bias has long been to err on the side of underdevelopment. Ken Resseger, who was a student of mine over 25 years ago, back then overpainted. But, while his work could be labored, it often opened an entirely new world. As an older, seasoned painter, he has become something of a visionary in the very American vein of Martin Johnson Heade – a naturalist who painted exotic, realistic, yet unnatural landscapes.

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Solo Shows

Ruby Palmer: Flowers are forever

Contributed by Peter Schroth / Some subjects are immune to age or aesthetic trends. Like the sprout that powers through the crack in the sidewalk, plant life in general and flowers in particular are irrepressible inspirations for art and have breached the territories of artists primarily known for other, more rigorous forms, from Piet Mondrian to Amy Sillman. Ruby Palmer’s show “Garden Theory” at Morgan Lehman Gallery demonstrates yet again that flowers are forever.

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Solo Shows

Sam Jablon’s delicious confusion

Contributed by William Corwin / The paintings of Sam Jablon now on view at Morgan Presents produce delicious sentient confusion. The neural circuits devoted to looking at an image get crossed with those used to read text. We find the words, but, in Jablon’s hands, we don’t know what to do with them. Fuck, for example, a little 18-inch square painting in solid yellow with blue with black lettering, seems less about sex and more about the frustrated expletive. Or perhaps it’s a cold command, broken down into two letters on top, F and U, and two letters below, C and K. We also fix…

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Museum Exhibitions

Miró’s far-reaching tutelage

Contributed by David Carrier / “Miró and the United States,” now up at The Phillips Collection, offers a useful take on an important, much-discussed issue: the origins of Abstract Expressionism. Joan Miró (1893–1983) taught many Americans how to make a successful abstract painting. Between the First and Second World Wars, when American artists were finding themselves, Miró’s work was a welcome and beneficial influence. The Cubist paintings of Braque and Picasso and Matisse’s works from the early twentieth-century may have been greater. But, like Kandinsky, Miró provided…

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Gallery shows

Stuart Fineman and Alan Greenberg: Meaningfully minimal

Contributed by Michael Brennan / I took Amtrak down to Philadelphia and arrived there in 90 minutes, about the same amount of time it takes to go from Coney Island to MoMA by subway. I was celebrating my last few days of Spring Break, my terminal lust for abstraction, and the lifelong friendship with two artists, Stuart Fineman and Alan Greenberg, exhibiting together at Larry Becker Contemporary Art in a show titled “between earth and sky.”

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Museum Exhibitions

Grandma Moses’s simple world

Contributed by David Carrier / Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860–1961), who was born in Washington County, New York, and spent much of her adult life in Virginia before returning to upstate New York, has long been famous. The first American celebrity artist, she appeared on the covers of Life and Time and was portrayed as a celebrity in Norman Rockwell’s painting Christmas Homecoming (1948), which is included in the exhibition of her work currently on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Most people my age have seen reproductions of her artworks.

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Biennial

At the Whitney Biennial: Ali Eyal’s mirthless amusement park

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The 2026 Whitney Biennial is rightly dialed into the world’s abundant strife, most of the selected artists witnessing and declaring it through materials, context, or concept. Ali Eyal, with his knockout of an oil painting Look Where I Took You – arguably the jewel of the exhibition – takes an exceptionally straight-up approach via content. Composed from the memory of a Baghdad amusement park he and his sister visited before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, when he was nine, the piece spans the strategic arc of the twenty-first century with improbable lyricism while bravely carrying its immense geopolitical freight.

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Group Shows

Michael and Tim Maul: Art as antidote and refuge

Contributed by Adam Simon / If I had walked into Kerry Schuss Gallery knowing nothing about the two artists on display, I would have thought the pairing unusual, elegant, and extremely interesting. One group of works consists of Michael Maul’s 11 x 8.5-inch ballpoint pen and colored pencil drawings on ledger paper depicting row after row of almost identical figures, rendered in a diagrammatic shorthand. Interspersed among these, are four 20 x 24-inch photographs of books taken by Tim Maul. The photographs are one of a kind Cibachromes, produced by printing directly from 35-millimeter slides; the method was discontinued in 2013. Cibachromes are long-lasting photographs of exceptionally vivid colors. All four of the photographs were shot in the 1990s but not printed until 2000. Two depict books open to what appear to be the blank pages preceding the title page. A third book is similarly splayed but face-down. The fourth photograph is of a shelf of books that appear to be journals or compiled records with dates on the spines ranging from 1859 to 1863, shot on commission at a library in Ireland. 

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Museum Exhibitions

Valerie Hegarty: Enlivening Emily Cole

Contributed by Bill Arning / The Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill presents a conspicuous curatorial challenge. It no longer owns any of Cole’s major paintings and relies heavily on devoted visitors remembering his masterpieces sufficiently that encountering the rooms where they were conceived will hold interest. Given this, its single-artist focus, and fixed historical narrative, the museum also often invites contemporary artists to enliven the experience it offers. This approach can fail because if the living artist is reduced to little more than an interpretive prompt to appreciating a familiar figure. But Valerie Hegarty, with her devotion to an aesthetic of destruction infused with autobiographical trauma, is a truly provocative foil for the works of Emily Cole, Thomas Cole’s daughter. 

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Artist's Notebook Gallery shows

Rodin and food

Contributed by Peter Dudek / I was on my way to ISAW – NYU’s Institute of Studies in the Ancient World – when an email from The New Yorker appeared on my iPhone. They had just published a story entitled “Love is a Mental Hospital.” A terribly precise and painful title for structurally confining relationships; often by one’s own choosing. Have we not all been there? And what about life as an artist? Is that not also an entanglement of rapture, love, hate, and malaise? Believing I understood the situation deeply, I wondered if reading the story was necessary. But could there not be a different take, a new perspective? Why not? I returned to the email and, of course, the title was not “Love is a Mental Hospital” but rather “Love in a Mental Hospital.” A story about…

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Solo Shows

Opal Mae Ong: Worlds weighing in

Contributed by Lucas Moran / “Always Were” is the title of Opal Mae Ong’s solo show at Plato Gallery. It’s a compact declaration – two words that look both forward and back. The work does the same. Old ways, rituals, medicines, and inherited knowledge blur into future or parallel worlds: gradient skies without brushstrokes, glowing plants, and figures who bathe, offer, watch, and mourn. Grief is a constant presence here – not as melodrama but as a condition with the same dignity and value as joy or love. Ong treats all of it as coexistent. Nothing replaces anything.

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