Month: May 2025

Artist's Notebook

Jack Whitten: A force for upending

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / Walk with me, backwards through time. See Jack Whitten painstakingly remove over two thousand tiles of hardened acrylic paint from his canvas. Watch as he assembles them into a large, flat plane, carefully unslices them from tiny squares, and then unsplatters and unpours the black and white paint. We’ve reached that final moment, in 1990, when the idea for The Messenger (for Art Blakey) is alive only in the artist’s mind. It is a fireball that has hurtled through years of searching, experimenting, suffering, loving, being lost, being overlooked, being angry — and now is ready to take hold….

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Catalogue Essays

Daina Higgins: At Home with Discord

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Daina Higgins began her vocation as an artist in the 1990s as a quintessential outsider: she was not only a graffiti artist in her native Columbus but also one of the few young women then so engaged there. Her noirish attraction to the oblique angles and ominous shadows of a presumptively benighted urban landscape in the Rust Belt has never flagged. At the same time, her paintings and drawings have acquired the existential gravitas that comes, if an artist has the requisite talent and mind, with the travails of life, the burden of lineage, and the compulsion to reflect on them.

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Solo Shows

Rick Briggs’s compositional irreverence

Contributed by Jason Andrew / It’s refreshing and a little humbling to walk into a gallery and be blitzed by art that’s cleverly derived from years of play, probing, and practice. Rick Briggs’s solo show at Satchel Projects shows us how open-ended and liberating painting can be.

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Solo Shows

Curtis Mitchell’s powerfully oblivious dogs

Contributed by Adam Simon / I tend to rail against art openings. Few attendees of a crowded art opening ever get to really see the show; the glimpses they’re afforded are more like scrolling Instagram than anything approaching contemplation. I felt differently at the opening of Curtis Mitchell’s pop-up show “19 Black Dogs” at the untraditional talent agency called No Agency on Bowery. The work does lend itself to contemplation, but at the opening of this show, Mitchell’s sculptures – stuffed dogs he purchases on the internet and then abuses in various ways – were contextualized by a young, hip crowd, connected I assume to No Agency rather than to Mitchell. Some appeared to be fashion models. 

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Gallery shows

A tight three at Field of Play

Contributed by Michael Brennan / “A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson in another context. As much as I respect institutional Minimalism, economy in painting excites me more, and what could be more economical than a three-person, three-painting exhibition presented in a 135-square-foot space with one empty wall? Artist Mark Sengbusch has scrupulously curated “3 Painters” at Field of Play in Gowanus in accord with his own personal Periodic Table, in which each artist represents a specific Element. Charlotte Hallberg is field, Clare Grill is air, and Victoria Roth is depth.

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Gallery Guides NYC Gallery Guide

NYC Selected Gallery Guide: May, 2025

Contributed by Sharon Butler / May is Art Fair Week in New York, but don’t forget to visit the galleries. A few have closed since our last guide—Dinner, Spanierman, and Pocket Utopia are all taking a break. Nathalie Karg is on hiatus. On a brighter note (literally), be sure to see “LFG” at The Hole, a group exhibition featuring blinking LED lights, painting, sculpture, and installation informed by video game aesthetics. McBride/Dillman, the newest…

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Gallery Guides Hudson Valley & Vicinity Gallery Guide

Hudson Valley (+vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide: May 2025

Contributed by Karlyn Benson / The first weekend of May is packed with shows opening and closing around the region. On Friday, May 2, “The River That Flows Both Ways: Ever Baldwin, Erika DeVries, Clarity Haynes, Portia Munson” opens at RUTHANN in Catskill. On Saturday May 3, Hudson-based Italian artist Lucio Pozzi opens at Philip Douglas Fine Art in Hudson, and “Ellon Gibbs: The Color Blue is Warm” opens at Gallery 495 in Catskill. Nearby in Hillsdale, LABspace opens two solo shows, Susan Meyer and Carlton Davis. In Kingston, “More Than Any Mirror” with Benjamin Herndon and Adie Russell opens at Headstone, and in Cold Spring, an exhibition of landscape paintings by Lisa Diebboll opens at Buster Levi. In the Catskills, Wade Kramm, Howard Schwartzberg, and Susan Silas are opening at Catskill Art Space, and a group show “Feeding Our Demons” opens at 1053 Gallery. Also on May 3, “Nature Reimagined” blooms with Rachel Burgess, KK Kozik, F Lipari and Warner Friedman opens at Bernay Fine Art in Great Barrington, MA. In Kent, CT, Carol Corey Fine Art will host an exhibition of works by legendary New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast for the gallery’s final show. Sunday, May 4 is the last chance to see three excellent exhibitions at CPW in Kingston: Mary Ellen Mark’s “Ward 81, My Sister, My Self;” Colleen Kenyon and Kathleen Kenyon, and Keisha Scarville in “Recess.” Sunday is also the last day for Amy Talluto’s solo show at the Garrison Art center. A new gallery, Ligenza Moore Gallery, is opening in Cold Spring on May 24 with a group show featuring work by Katherine Bradford, Don Voisine, Judy Pfaff, Chris Martin, Meg Hitchcock, and others.

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