Contributed by Lucas Moran / In early March, when another gallery seemed to disappear every few days, I opened Instagram to find Hannah Studnick’s dashboard confessional announcing that Ruby/Dakota was closing its doors. The speech wasn’t prewritten or staged – just a heartfelt message delivered from a dreary highway drive, the kind we take to mull things over, digest where our lives are headed, and reassess. Hannah turned the camera on herself, as she often does, and let the world in on who she was and what she was going through. Vulnerability isn’t unusual on Instagram, but it is in a gallerist. I can’t think of another dealer who has so consistently folded her own life into the public story of running a gallery. During announcement, Hannah let us directly into her emotional world, tracing the gallery to the loss of her fraternal twin sister Emma.
When they were young, Ruby/Dakota was a running joke in the family, especially during moments of discomfort. Rather than addressing difficult feelings, their mother would say, “I should’ve given you different names. Then we wouldn’t be dealing with this. You Ruby, you Dakota.” Years later, Hannah gave those names to the gallery, which thus became a response to inherited silence. She spoke about why she chose the space before thanking the artists and everyone who helped make it what it was. She referred to the gallery as “she.” I can’t quite explain why I found the video cathartic. Maybe because, in a world where everyone is posturing and curating an image, here was someone genuinely sharing. Or maybe because, when gallery closures feel almost routine, this one lingered. Hannah noted that while a building is just a building, the gallery had been a vessel for processing grief and gathering a community. That, she insisted, would remain.
Ruby/Dakota is now back with two exhibitions. The first, “How to Escape a Whirlpool,” Studnick co-organized with Emily Saltman, who’s at Kravets Wehby. The title feels almost too apt. Life these days can feel like being held underwater. Most conversations I have fail to distract me from the sense that the world is on fire. If we’re collectively spiraling, what do we do on the way down? Do you know how to escape a whirlpool? The answer is unsettling. You don’t fight the current. You let it pull you under until it loses force, then swim sideways towards open water. The exhibition seems to suggest a similar strategy. If we are headed for collapse, maybe resistance doesn’t always look like opposition. Perhaps it looks like obsession.
Claudia Bitrán’s two portraits of Britney Spears continue an artistic fixation that recently found expression in her exhibition devoted to Titanic. Both paintings concentrate almost entirely on Britney’s eyes. Rather than simply depicting an icon, Bitrán appears to search for the force that drives her. Are she and Britney somehow pursuing the same thing? Are Claudia and Hannah? Both seem compelled to become more fully themselves through repetition, devotion, and work. One paints. One builds exhibitions.
oil on canvas, 17 x 14 inches
oil on canvas, 17 x 14 inches
Is obsession the only salve for turbulent times? I can’t say for sure. But I do envy people capable of tuning out the noise and following an internal compass so completely that it demands transformation. Aaron Michael Skolnick’s paintings do exactly that, gradually morphing the artist into Liza Minnelli across three canvases. Like an ’80s horror-film dissolve, identity becomes fluid rather than fixed.
Aaron Michael Scott (Left to Right):
Liza Performing in Cabaret, 2026, oil on linen, 7 x 5 inches
Me and Liza 2 (Transforming into Liza Minnelli from a Live Performance of Cabaret), 2026, oil on Linen, 7 x 5 inches
Me and Liza 1 (Transforming into Liza Minnelli from a Live Performance of Cabaret), 2026, oil on Linen, 12 x 9 inches
While Aaron stages transformation through painting, Hannah has been engaged in one of her own. Most galleries are built around permanence: an address, a lease, a storefront. Ruby/Dakota has become more portable, and has continued to exist even after its real estate has been surrendered. Arguably, Hannah’s commitment to art borders on obsession. What logical reason would anyone have to stay in this business? There is little financial reward, and the labor often feels endless. Yet watching her speak, I couldn’t shake the feeling that running a gallery isn’t simply what she does. It’s what she is. Anything else would feel like a betrayal of instinct.
On July 10, Ruby/Dakota will take up temporary residence at Art Cake with a three-person exhibition co-organized with Tamara Pasternack, titled “It’s More the Way It Is Now Than It’s Ever Been,” featuring Austin Li Chang, David Fix, Jr., and Erica Newton. The title comes from a bumper sticker spotted after a studio visit, itself a version of a Dwight D. Eisenhower quotation mangled through another source. I love the strange game of Telephone. A disposable bumper sticker arrives carrying the weight of something timeless. With so much around us collapsing, Ruby/Dakota offers an intriguing model for what endurance might look like: a practice of persistence, and the ability to adapt, migrate, and collaborate.
“How to Escape a Whirlpool,” Kravets Wehby Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, Ground Floor, New York, NY. Through July 17, 2026.
“IT’S MORE THE WAY IT IS NOW THAN IT’S EVER BEEN,” Art Cake, Studio 10, 241 40th Street, Brooklyn, NY. July 10–July 29, 2026
About the author: Lucas Moran is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn. Moran’s paintings have been included in many shows in the United States and Canada, and he has had several solo shows in New York City.
