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NYC Selected Gallery Guide, July 2026

Contributed by Sharon Butler/ July and August are the slowest months for NYC galleries. Many limit summer hours to weekdays, and close early on Friday, so check and see when they are open before you go. A few galleries have announced that they are relocating or closing. In DUMBO, AIR Gallery and Platform Project Space lost their Two Trees space subsidies. AIR is relocating to Greenwich Village while Platform is closing as director Elizabeth Hazan moves her studio to Long Island City. Lyles & King, one of the oldest and most prominent of the Henry Street galleries, is also closing. Marinaro, after briefly sharing LES space with Candice Madey, has signed a lease at 86 Walker Street in Tribeca. Most readers will have heard that Pace is downsizing. On the bright side, Ruby/Dakota is back in business this month with pop-up shows at Kravets Wehby in Chelsea and Art Cake in Brooklyn. In general, look for a mix of…

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Gallery news Gallery shows

Hannah Studnick: A practice of persistence

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.

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Gallery shows Upstate Art Weekend

Idyll and crisis at The Re Institute

Contributed by Lawre Stone / The Re Institute – a dairy barn built in the 1960s that Henry Klimowicz has repurposed as rustic art gallery – seems to arise sublimely out of nowhere, exuding the freedom and wonder of the open road. Presently installed on the ground floor is “Seven Women Chase Icebergs” – paintings, drawings, and works on paper by seven women convened by Brenda Zlamany for a residency at Pouch Cove in northern Newfoundland in spring 2025 to respond to the remote landscape. The thrill of yielding to an unknown environment permeates the exhibition.

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Gallery shows Opinion Quick Study

Art and the adolescent impulse

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / There’s a plausible argument that American culture is in a state of arrested development, ever bending back to a kind of national adolescence born of a persistent self-image of fledgling prodigy. Leslie Fiedler made the case as to literature at mid-century with Love and Death in the American Novel, insisting on the sober maturity of European letters in light of imperial decline and epochal devastation against the exceptionalist puerility of American fiction. Becca Rothfeld deftly rehabilitates and contextualizes this point of view in a recent New Yorker piece, landing it on a hortatory if plangent note: “Perhaps now that we are standing amid the ruins of the East Wing and the wreckage of the post-war liberal order – now that we, too, occupy and uncomfortable interregnum between two social formations – we will find it in ourselves to put away childish things and write something new.” Assuming this contention has some validity, is contemporary American art similarly retrogressive?

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Gallery shows NYC Gallery Guide

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. At Field of Play, look for a survey of paintings by Lee Sherry (1947–2012). She had close ties with the Language Poets and was part of an avant-garde painting circle in Soho but never gained wide recognition. If old reconfigured texts and quirky materials that subvert narratives…

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Art Fairs Gallery Guides Gallery shows NYC Gallery Guide

NYC Selected Gallery Guide, May 2026

Yes, we have art fairs in town this month, and I’m looking forward to swinging by ESTHER III, a kind of alternative embodiment of the concept at Estonian House on 243 E. 34th Street from May 13–16. Thomas Erben is bringing work by Mike Cloud and a few of my other favorite NYC galleries will be there, King’s Leap among them. Reserve free tickets now. Also on the must-see list this month is “The Moment and the Distance,” a big Helen Frankenthaler solo at Gagosian,…

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Gallery shows

Stuart Fineman and Alan Greenberg: Meaningfully minimal

Contributed by Michael Brennan / I took Amtrak down to Philadelphia and arrived there in 90 minutes, about the same amount of time it takes to go from Coney Island to MoMA by subway. I was celebrating my last few days of Spring Break, my terminal lust for abstraction, and the lifelong friendship with two artists, Stuart Fineman and Alan Greenberg, exhibiting together at Larry Becker Contemporary Art in a show titled “between earth and sky.”

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Artist's Notebook Gallery shows

Rodin and food

Contributed by Peter Dudek / I was on my way to ISAW – NYU’s Institute of Studies in the Ancient World – when an email from The New Yorker appeared on my iPhone. They had just published a story entitled “Love is a Mental Hospital.” A terribly precise and painful title for structurally confining relationships; often by one’s own choosing. Have we not all been there? And what about life as an artist? Is that not also an entanglement of rapture, love, hate, and malaise? Believing I understood the situation deeply, I wondered if reading the story was necessary. But could there not be a different take, a new perspective? Why not? I returned to the email and, of course, the title was not “Love is a Mental Hospital” but rather “Love in a Mental Hospital.” A story about…

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Gallery shows Solo Shows

Mira Schor: Uncensored

Contributed by Jonah James Romm / How does one acquire language? How do words shape identity and meaning? These questions might strike you upon entering Mira Schor’s exhibition “Figures of Speech” at Lyles & King. Bringing together a previously unseen body of the artist’s work from the 1980s and paintings from the last two years, the exhibition traces the compelling self-referential progression of Schor’s work over the last four decades. 

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Two Coats Resident Artist: Nichole van Beek, March 16–20

Contributed by Sharon Butler / This month, Two Coats of Paint is glad to welcome Nichole van Beek to the Residency Program, from March 16–20. For a show at the Morris N. Flecker Memorial Gallery in 2017, when she still lived and worked in NYC, Matthew Neil Gehring aptly introduced her paintings as “macrocosmic encounters with impossible and tantalizing illusions situated in a space that is once grounded in the familiar, the natural, yet is infinitely expansive.” She moved from NYC to the hollows of the Appalachian Mountains several years ago and found new content and media for her art practice, but she has retained the fine balance Gehring described between the big picture and smaller ones.

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Gallery shows Hudson Valley & Vicinity Gallery Guide

Hudson Valley (+ Vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide, March 2026

Contributed by Karlyn Benson / Hudson Valley residents have been eagerly awaiting March and it’s promise of milder weather. With longer days come exciting new exhibitions throughout the region. On March 7, SPIRIT IN THE FLESH: Courtney Puckett, Ben Pederson, and Saul Chernick opens at Utopia in Kingston, The Dark Abyss of Time opens at Holland Tunnel Revisited in Newburgh, and solo shows by Daniel Giordano, Davana Robedee, and Kathy Ruttenberg open at CAS in Livingston Manor….

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Gallery shows Resident Artist

Two Coats Resident Artist: Stephanie McMahon, March 8-13, 2026

Contributed by Sharon Butler / This March I am delighted to welcome Stephanie McMahon to the Two Coats of Paint Residency Program. Stephanie lives and works in Alfred, New York, where she is a professor at SUNY Alfred and co-founder of the Alfred/Düsseldorf MFA in Painting and Residency Program. Up in Western New York, she is surrounded by an unruly and tangled 17+ acres of forests, fields, and ravines. While her rural environment has informed her paintings, it is the visual form of the twisting branches, leaf shapes, and shifting color that most fascinates her. Stephanie’s primary interest is the activity of painting itself.

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Jeffrey Bishop and Mason Dowling: Worldly phantoms

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The lithely flirtatious and somewhat Boschian primary elements in Jeffrey Bishop’s acrylic-and-collage Sidewinder series of screenprint-painting-collages – now on display at McKenzie Fine Art – are centered, unabashed things-about-town, decidedly abstract but, in their verticality and jazzy affect, firmly digital-biomorphic.

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Gallery shows Hudson Valley & Vicinity Gallery Guide

Hudson Valley (+ Vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide, February 2026

Contributed by Karlyn Benson / February’s highlights include the opening of Geary’s new location in Salisbury, Connecticut with a solo show of paintings by Alan Prazniak. On February 6, Souvenir, a group exhibition curated by Jeff Bailey opens at RUTHANN in Catskill. Numerous exhibitions are opening on February 7, including Terrestrial Extra at the Dorsky Museum, guest-curated by Alta Buden and Craig Monteith of Roundabouts Now. The same evening there are openings at Headstone (Above Board Ceramics), 68 Prince Street (Sharon Butler, Jason Travers, Kieran Kinsella, Murray Hochman, and Eileen Power), Distortion Society (Spaces Between Color) the Garrison Art Center (Stephanie Garmey and Michael Prettyman) and Buster Levi’s final show Open Ending….

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Gallery shows Group Shows

Lucas Blalock and Julia Rommel’s well-oiled machine

Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / Consider the hunk as a deliberate, usable form, as Julia Rommel does. Her paintings are hunks of color painted on linen – cut up, unstretched, and stapled into off-the-air color TV bars. They are as much about labor as color. Each painting feels as though it was sledgehammered into the wall just before you walked in the room, still ringing from the strike. Flanking Rommel through the show is Lucas Blalock, photographer. His photos operate similarly, offering an easy, even fun, seduction that segues into discovery as you find out how he’s tricked you. Images are cut and layered over one another, details are hidden. The viewer is rewarded for close, patient attention, as in an I Spy book. 

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Gallery shows

A nocturnal dance at Springs Projects

Contributed by Patrick Neal / As we orbit Winter Solstice, marking the shortest days, longest nights, and coldest temperatures of the year, along comes the perfectly timed exhibition, “Night Traveling in the Early Country of the Imagination” at Springs Projects in Dumbo. The show, which presents the work of multimedia artists Donna Dennis and Tommy Hartung, is dark, atmospheric, and hauntingly beautiful, evoking the season’s long shadows, monochrome palette, and stark beauty.

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Gallery shows NYC Gallery Guide

NYC Selected Gallery Guide, January 2026

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Because of you, Two Coats of Paint will continue to thrive in 2026. Your contributions will enable us to continue producing these painting-centric monthly gallery guides that help the painting community discover exhibitions in New York City, the Hudson Valley, and beyond. Cheers to another year of great art, great writing, and great community, despite the dark days ahead….

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Gallery shows Solo Shows

Alex Katz’s seas of orange

Contributed by Tena Saw / Ninety-eight-year-old Alex Katz’s current gem of an exhibition at Gladstone consists of eleven orange and white canvases, each ten and a half feet high, that wrap around the main gallery. All reference a road in Maine where Katz spends summers. Unlike most of his work, they lean heavily towards abstraction, treating the road like an opportunity to explore perspective or the light on the leaves. Particularly if you’re lucky enough be alone in the gallery – a single room of high white walls, industrial scaffold ceiling, and enormous skylights – it becomes a kind of meditation tank, containing a sea of optical orange. Natural light settles on the paintings like a mist. The effect is more akin to that of an installation than that of a traditional painting show. 

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Gallery Guides Gallery shows NYC Gallery Guide

NYC Selected Gallery Guide, December 2025

Hello, December! I’m grateful to everyone who has already supported Two Coats of Paint 2025 Year-end Fundraising Campaign. With roughly four weeks left, we still need additional contributions to fund 2026. If you haven’t yet donated, I encourage you to consider making your tax-deductible gift now. For two decades, I’ve managed to sustain Two Coats of Paint on a lean…

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