An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, March 5, 2026
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Not many good contemporary painters fully embrace sports. The subject is burdened by daunting precedent (George Bellows) and mild cliché (Leroy Neiman). But this century, as social media have enabled athletes to reveal and fans to probe the people behind and beyond the moves, sports have acquired greater social and political resonance, sending a stronger demand signal to artists.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Due to a massive hack attack at Two Coats of Paint, we had to rebuild our most recent files, including the April gallery guide. Call it a work in progress. We will continue to edit and update as necessary. INVITATION: Save the date for DUMBO Open Studios, April 22-24, when I will be showing some recent work created for a collaborative project with CounterPointe9, with choreographer Julia Gleich and Norte Maar in my studio at 55 Washington Street. I also organized a show at Platform Project Space called “MOD” featuring one of my paintings alongside singular works by Peter Dudek, Steve Hicks, Sheila Pepe, and Adam Simon. Located at 20 Jay Street #319, Platform is run by artist Elizabeth Hazan. The opening is scheduled for Friday April 22, 6-8 — the same night as the opening party for the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, which is in the same building. Please join us!
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Deborah Dancy’s big abstractions have migrated from the murky darkness inspired by research into the lives of her Black ancestors, who were enslaved in the South, to a visual language informed by the rural landscape that surrounds her home and studio in Storrs. I visited her on a bitter winter day in March before Kathryn Markel Fine Art in Chelsea and Marcia Wood in Atlanta had picked up work for her upcoming solo exhibitions.
Contributed by Julia Kunin / On March 1, 2022, I reconnected with my friend the Hungarian artist Anita Kroo after reading that she and her family […]
Contributed by Vittorio Colaizzi / The first plate of Barnett Newman?s Notes, a series of etchings from 1968 that are on view at Craig Starr alongside Brice Marden’s “Suicide Notes,” contains an outlandish concentration of marks in the lower left of the central column. With this plate, as with his painting Achilles (1952), it seems as if he was pushing the limit of his own format, to see how much incident he could include without, in Donald Judd?s terminology, ?weakening? the composition.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / At the beginning of the pandemic, when Jamie Madison’s Bay Area studio was less accessible, she settled into her home studio in a rural area of Northern California and got a puppy. Behind her house lay the wild, oak-studded riparian woodland of Putah Creek, and in the front conventional orchards and farms stretched for miles.
Contributed by Julia Kunin / Like many Americans, I have been watching onliine and reading about the war in Ukraine with shock and sadness. Finding Ukrainian Canadian artist Taras Polataiko speaking out on social media made it more real. Taras, whom I met in 2008 at Art Omi, is back in Ukraine to help his family and raise funds for Kyiv’s civilian defense soldiers. I reached out last week to see how he is doing. �A lot of people don�t realize that we actually have been at war for the last 8 years,” Taras told me. “The word ‘war’ was not used because the Russians presented their hybrid war as ‘a civil internal conflict.'” He told me they are slowly getting used to the situation. I’ll have an update in a few days.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Jane Swavely has lived and worked in a loft overlooking the Bowery since the 1980s when she was an SVA […]
Contributed by Russell Floersch / My dear friend, the artist Daniel Levine, died suddenly on January 20th of a heart-attack as he was taking Mona Levine, his 90-year-old mother, to a doctor’s appointment.
Contributed by Margaret McCann / Like a strobe light gifted with consciousness, Danica Lundy lets whatever she sees point a way through a painting. The six works in �Three Hole Punch� at Magenta Plains are informed by memories of soccer practice, parties, school, and more � themes that function mainly as armatures for corporeal drama and mesmerizing painting detail.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / This month many of the February shows will be on view for another week or two, so if you missed any, such as, for instance, Rochelle Feinstein (Candice Madey and Brigette Donahue, LES) or David Diao (Postmasters, Tribeca), you have a little more time. Recently opened shows include Zachary Keeting at Underdonk in Bushwick, Harriet Korman at Thomas Erben in Chelsea, and Kathy Butterly at James Cohan in Tribeca. We’ll update mid-month when the next wave of openings takes place.
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / The poet and artist Anne Ryan (1889�1954) accomplished the rare feat of making precious art � art that�s small, perfectly executed, and pretty � that is not the least bit treacly or sentimental. Drawn to both abstraction and surrealism, Ryan was a quiet player in the avant-garde visual art circles of the 1940s, attracting less attention than women artists like Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, and Grace Hartigan. Today she�s best known for her small collages, which she began after having a eureka moment at a Kurt Schwitters collage exhibition at the Rose Fried Gallery in New York in 1948.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / When an arthouse revisionist western directed by an Australian woman and starring an Englishman dominates the Oscar nominations, it’s safe to say that the pandemic has not severely compromised the quality or vision of cinema, even if it has skewed the structure of the business towards streaming platforms and away from brick-and-mortar theaters.With the usual caveats about inevitable bias and subjectivity, here, in alphabetical order, is a defensible Top Ten for 2021.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In 2012, artist, writer, and curator Brian Edmonds founded Curating Contemporary, an online exhibition space that, since its inception, has hosted over fifty exhibitions. Then, in 2019, Edmonds took his project to print, and began publishing Eraser, a biannual book featuring the work of contemporary artists and writers. This year he has organized an exhibition called “Eraser” at Ground Floor Contemporary, in Birmingham, Alabama, that brings together some of the artists who have been featured in his publications. I’m pleased to be included in the fourth Eraser book and also to have two paintings in the show, alongside work by a great group of artists: Matt Kleberg, Jered Sprecher, Jason Stopa, Sean Sullivan, Vadis Turner, Cecilia Vissers, Don Voisine, and Thornton Willis.
Contributed by Armin Kunz / �Can we ever look at Titian�s paintings the same way again?� asked Holland Cotter when he reviewed the reunion of […]
