Award-winning NYC blogazine with a focus on painting
Monday, June 15, 2026
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / As the summer winds down it is a great time to escape the heat by exploring art spaces in the Catskills region, Western Connecticut, and the Berkshires. There are some notable group exhibitions opening or continuing in August including TWENTY/20 at the Athens Cultural Center, The Summer Disaster Show 2 at Private Public in Hudson, Groundswell at Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown, and Back and Forth, Between Names at Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh….
Contributed by Riad Miah / After graduating from Pratt and spending a few years staging and curating pop-up shows and one-night events, Devon Gordon opened the ambitious new Zepster Gallery in Bushwick last May. The title of its second exhibition, now up, is “Oh, To Leave a Trace,” after a chapter of Mary Gabriel’s acclaimed book Ninth Street Women. The show features three female artists whose work continues in the contemplatively feminist vein that the book frames.
Contributed by David Carrier / Guillaume Lethière (1760–1832) was a very good French neoclassical painter. Respected and honored in the French art world, he served as director of the French Academy in Rome and was admired as a teacher. Consistent with this stature, the eponymous exhibition currently on view at The Clark Art Institute is robustly curated. In addition to abundantly contextualizing Lethière’s work, the exhibition materials document a life that embodied much of France’s complicated colonial history.
Contributed by Brett Levine / “A nonobjective idiom; unexpected surfaces; a synthesis of primary structures with surrealism.” That’s Lucy Lippard, in 1966, writing on the group sculpture show “Eccentric Abstraction” at the Fischbach Gallery in New York. Robert Pincus-Witten wouldn’t coin the term post-Minimalism until five years later, but that idea tracked with Lippard’s description and is arguably the strongest conceptual foundation for Sara Garden Armstrong’s “Environment: Structure/Sound III.” First exhibited in 1979, this 2024 incarnation at the Alabama Center for Architecture is a poignant reanimation and re-imagination of post-Minimalism as a practice. Accompanying the work are contextualizing process sketches, the original score, and new risograph prints.
In the heart of central New York, nestled among the rolling hills of New Berlin, stands a unique testament to artistic collaboration, friendship, and innovation: The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts. Established in 1997, the Foundation honors the legacy of Sam and Adele Golden, the visionary co-founders of Golden Artist Colors, a company dedicated to producing fine paint for fine art. We invite you to join us there in celebrating the profound impact that art and community have on our lives at the Foundation’s annual art benefit and auction on August 3rd from 4:30 to 8:00 PM. It promises to be our most exciting event yet.
Dedicated to Dr. Ruth (1928–2024)
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / I used my fattest Sharpie to excise the summer group show “Self-Pleasure” at Thomas Erben Gallery – a gallery I have long admired – from my list of what to see. Although the mere idea seems to have sprung straight from the The Onion, holding forth about an exhibition I’ve not seen, as I’m doing here, will strike some as inappropriate or even unethical. Several years ago, in fact, a prominent New York art magazine editor was duly criticized for reviewing a show he hadn’t seen. But I am not writing a review or describing the art in the show, which may or may not be good. I’m commenting on the show’s jejune premise.
Contributed by Mackenzie Kirkpatrick / In Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelardcharacterized the corner as “a symbol of solitude for the imagination.” Jan Dickey, curator of “The Corner Show”at D.D.D.D. Gallery, has keenly embraced this notion through dynamic, imaginative artists who apprehend the corner as a kind of refuge.
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / The Fifth edition of Upstate Art Weekend includes over 145 participants and spans ten counties from the Hudson Valley to the Catskill Mountains. There are too many art spaces and events to mention here, so this list primarily focuses on exhibitions and programs that take place exclusively during July 18-21. Check out the Upstate Art Weekend map for additional venues in the area including museums, galleries, and non-profit spaces.
Contributed by Elizabeth Whalley / Ying Li and Susan Jane Walp’s paintings on paper, on view in concurrent solo exhibitions at Pamela Salisbury Gallery, initially seemed to me to have little to do with each other given the differences in subject matter, its presentation, paint handling, and color. As I thought more about them, though, virtuous similarities emerged in my mind.
Contributed by Rosetta Marantz Cohen / “Anima,” the first New York show of Ranti Bam’s work, now on view at James Cohan, presents the British-Nigerian artist’s 15 mostly freestanding ceramic sculptures. They’re strategically deployed across two rooms, simulating a conversation among a lively group of women who are different in color and temperament but linked in some fundamental way. The longer you look at them, the more animated and female they seem.
Contributed by Jeffrey Grunthaner / Properly curated, summer group exhibitions can open novel avenues between disparate artists and particular creative practices. “Made in Cologne,” currently up at Peter Freeman, Inc., decidedly accomplishes this. The conceit of the show is simple: the 15 featured artists have all made ceramic works at the atelier of Niels Dietrich in Cologne, Germany. Founded in 1984, Dietrich’s studio specializes in ceramics and showcases how plastic this medium can be. The expressive character of the exhibition derives in part from the variety of styles and attitudes on display. But all embrace the unique nature of ceramics in one way or the other.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / During “Apophanies,” Gabbi Grill and Orli Swergold’s two-person show at Stephen Street Gallery, an artists’ collective and exhibition space in Ridgewood, Queens, funded by NYFA, I invited the artists to tell me about their work and art practices.
Contributed by Leslie Wayne / Deborah Buck’s energy is preternatural and her generosity of spirit seems to flow from the same deep well. We met at a wedding several years ago, and as I got to know, I learned that her path to becoming a full-time artist was not the usual one, largely because her creative drive was broad, democratic, and highly entrepreneurial. I sat down with Deborah during the run of her show, “Witches Bridge” at Jennifer Baahng Gallery.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / To add up, any contemporary movie about a motorcycle club needs to be deconstructive as well as elegiac. Jeff Nichols […]
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / July is the height of the summer art season, with cultural events and festivals of all kinds as well as […]
As I publish the guide, most of the journalists and pundits I follow are poring over the flagrantly partisan SCOTUS ruling on presidential immunity, which has for a minute displaced last Thursday’s devastating presidential debate above the fold. The good news is that Deborah Fisher, a smart artist-turned-astrologer…
Kerry Downey and Julián Kreimer conversation at the Sarah Lawrence College Heimbolt Center for Visual Art
Raphael’s innovations and influence
Angelo Vasta: Comfort in darkness 
Amorelle Jacox’s spiritual science
NYC Selected Gallery Guide, June 2026
Hudson Valley (+ Vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide, June 2026
Sharon’s Substack / June 1, 2026
David Humphrey: The hiker
Zombie Formalism vs. Paul Brown’s abundant abstraction
David Gilbert’s fugitive miracles
Jessica Frances Grégoire Lancaster: Loss and memory
Plagens: Ralph Meeker, or why I like James Brooks as much as de Kooning
NYC Selected Gallery Guide, June 2026
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In June, in the wake of an exhausting month of fairs, NYC galleries are again presenting a full slate of exhibitions. A...
How the term “zombie formalism” killed the next generation
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In 2014, a single phrase reshaped the trajectory of contemporary abstract painting. When the late Walter Robinson – pai...
April Gornik’s unsettled landscapes
Contributed by Rebecca Allan / In “Liminal States,” Miles McEnery Gallery presented recent paintings by April Gornik, juxtaposing five of her familiar...
American Abstract Artists in the 1930s
Contributed by Jacob Cartwright / In 1957, Clement Greenberg penned the essay “The Late Thirties in New York,” reflecting on years that were formative...
Hudson Valley (+ Vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide, June 2026
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / This month I am looking forward to the opening of Putting it Together: Transforming Collage at 68 Prince Street Gallery...
Emma Webster: Peculiar but pleasant
Contributed by Will Maddoxx / Last summer, the New York Times reported that someone impersonated Lady Gaga to buy a painting of Emma Webster’s. The p...