An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Monday, March 2, 2026
Contributed by Sharon Butler / From November 9 to 14, Two Coats of Paint will host Joseph Smolinski, a multidisciplinary artist and educator born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, and based in New Haven, Connecticut. Over the past 15 years, his research-based work has explored how communication networks, energy and oil industries, and industrial agriculture infrastructure fundamentally shape both our conception of “the natural environment” and its physical reality.
Contributed by Patrick Neal / The artist Libby Braden lives and works in an old East Village tenement apartment that recalls the austere bohemian enclaves of James Baldwin’s Another Country or Jonathan Larson’s Rent. Braden, who moved there in the early nineties, has embraced an essentially nocturnal existence. She logs onto the computer to begin her remote position as a financial administrator around midnight, finishing up with enough hours in the day to work on her drawing and painting before going to bed at around 4 PM. She is fully aware of parallels between the conventions of an ordinary office job and her own representational aesthetic. Both are grounded and populated, with ego, id, and superego mingling and overlapping in a circadian rhythm of awareness and unconsciousness.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / The 2025 brain drain predicted last November appears to be well underway. In the last few months, I’ve had artist friends pack up and leave the city for Taiwan, Scotland, Ireland, London, Portugal, Spain, and most recently Paris.
Welcome to the Two Coats of Paint October selected guide to painting-centric exhibitions in New York, Brooklyn, and Queens. We’ll be updating the listings around mid-month, so if you want your show considered for inclusion, please send info about the show to staff@twocoatsofpaint.com. NOTE: The year-end fundraising campaign starts in a few weeks, but readers who want to get a headstart can make a tax-deductible contribution here. Thank you!
Contributed by Adam Simon / Paul Gardère (1944–2011), whose work is now on view in “Second Nature” at Magenta Plains, is known for a unique version of combine paintings, incorporating assemblage, found objects, photography, dirt and glitter into works that critique the legacy of colonialism in Haiti and its diaspora. The problem with this narrative is that it undersells how formally innovative his work was in its time, the degree to which it stems from his own biography, and how it anticipated our current multi-screen reality.
DEADLINE to send a letter of interest for a 2026 residency is October 30, 2025. / Over the years, intimate, artist-run residency programs have helped move artists’ work forward in unexpected ways….
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Make today a day you, like me, refrain from doomscrolling in despair or listening to pundits vainly in search of packaged optimism. Cued by this guide, you might instead opt for art feeds on Instagram and ultimately the shows themselves because nothing is more hopeful than art in the fall in New York. We kick off the first week with the art fairs and then turn our attention to gallery exhibitions, hopping from neighborhood to neighborhood, absorbing new work by artists we’ve known for years and others we’ve never met. For a good time, this is the place to scroll.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / In “The Art Critics Who Don’t Want Good Art,” Anna Gregor describes a cultural hospice. The caretakers are a set of bad actors. They’re online critics who have replaced the labor of criticism with the catharsis of complaint, trading in “likes and clicks” for a smooth, sugary candy that requires only passivity and attention from its audience while it rots their teeth. This feedback loop, she argues, drowns true engagement and criticism in a “deluge of mediocre art.” It is a compelling diagnosis, but one delivered from the one place a critic cannot afford to be: behind a veil. Gregor deals exclusively in archetypes and generalizations while allowing the reader to “fill in the picture.” The playboi, the intellectualist, the yelper, and so on. She’s built a perfect haunted house and populated it with ghosts of her own making.
Contributed by Anna Gregor / If yesteryear the call for negative art criticism rang clear and true, today complaints about the state of art blur into an inarticulate whine. Be they artist or critic, Marxist or capitalist, academic or anti-intellectual: everyone is dissatisfied. Or so it seems. Despite their complaints, however, one starts to suspect that few of the YouTubers, Substackers, or Instagrammers who presume the title of critic want the circumstances they complain about to change, so lacking are they in convincing diagnoses of present problems and convinced visions of alternatives, not to mention actual critical engagement with artworks.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / This month, many galleries are taking a well-deserved break after a shitshow of a year. A few, though, are curating through the heat and hanging new shows. At Karma, Jane Dickson holds forth with a series of amusement park nocturnes. 5-50 presents in “Becoming Otherwise” – paintings by Jocelyn Fine, Will Hutnick, Geist Topping, and Peter Schenck that crackle with energy in LIC. Deanna Evans Projects’ “ExtraOrdinary” features unsettled scenes of American home life by Lisha Bai, JJ Manford, and Ann Toebbe. At Margot Samel, Glasgow gallery Kendall Koppe presents Laura Aldridge, while Essex Flowers mounts “Overhang 2,” a ro art services pop-up riffing on the idea of summer group-show abundance and community. At The Hole, on Bowery, don’t miss “Herbivore,” which includes work by Bushwick stalwart Ben Godward.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / A special note to New Yorkers who, like me, are loath to leave the city over holiday weekends or at any point during the summer, really: always check to see if galleries are open on Saturday. Chances are they aren’t. Many gallerists, kind of like Bartleby, simply prefer to close up shop for the entire long weekend. Other galleries, possibly your favorites, are shuttered until late summer or early fall, back to work only after the dust has settled from the September art fairs and blockbuster openings. For the hardcore stay-cation crowd of course, a slew of wonderful group shows are on view – sometimes freewheeling affairs in which emerging artists hang alongside more established ones we know and perhaps love. Where possible, I’ve listed the artists in each show so that you can hunt down the names already on your radar or target a few less familiar up-and-comers. Some of my best memories involve wandering around a nearly empty gallery with the editor on a sweltering summer afternoon and then ending up in a dark hideaway, drinking pints and arguing about the shows we saw. Save the shore for the off-season. As my mother, a woman who lived in a seaside town for most of her life, used to say, why go to the the beach in the summer? It’s a mob scene!
Contributed by Adam Simon / Two galleries with a focus on abstract painting, a short walk from each other in downtown Manhattan, currently have exhibitions that share a vocabulary of basic geometric forms, directional brushwork, and an emphasis on color relationships. Both shows present the rectangle as a primary condition of most painting and the dynamic interplay of forms within the rectangle as a drama unfolding. Yet these two shows couldn’t be more different. Seeing one after the other, as I did, was a study of how affect itself, manifested through color choices and paint application, becomes a subject for abstract painting, analogous to but different from a subject for representational painting.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Katie Butler (no relation to me as far as we know) creates vivid still life paintings that dive into the fraught realms of American politics and economics, riffing ironically on the “kitchen-table” and “bread-and-butter” issues affecting average people that political figures are supposed to address. While she establishes a journalistic sense of authenticity by sourcing her imagery from White House archives and the Ohio Statehouse, the discrepancy between reality and painted presentation raises burning questions about the veracity and integrity of the sources.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / June, academics’ favorite month, is here. I’m looking forward to checking out Smack Mellon’s“Remains to be seen,” a group show that brings together nine emerging artists whose practices find meaning in waste. Artist Austin Eddy has curated a star-studded exhibition called “A Movable Feast” at Halsey Mckay’s Greenpoint outpost. Abbey Lloyd has a solo at Ptolemy, a newish gallery in Queens. I’m looking forward to seeing some aggressive abstraction, with Iva Gueorguieva’s solo at Derek Eller and…
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / At first blush, Hope Gangloff’s remarkable new paintings, on view at Susan Inglett Gallery and largely set in a notional rustic retreat, could be mistaken for blown-up greeting cards for vacationing hipsters, perhaps with a sly nod to David Hockney. Pristinely applying acrylic paint, she crafts them like illustrations, and they are unabashedly luminous. But the ecstatic vibe that characteristically radiates from that quality, though present, is winkingly deceptive. While Gangloff paints friends and actively cherishes the intimate golden moment, existential concerns burn through her work.
