An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Wednesday, January 7, 2026
Contributed by Michael Brennan / I have long admired the work of the three artists Michelle Segre and Guy Corriero, whose work is now on display at “Fly like a Flea, Sink like a Stone” at Springs Projects, as well as Claire Seidl, whose show “Days Like These” is up at Helm Contemporary.
Contributed by Will Maddoxx / On Valentine’s Day, I walked into Living Skin, a “project space and persons hub” in Bushwick that had piqued my interest when I read its manifesto and perused promotional images for the group show “Hyper-meme.” I came to the show with some hesitation, as I have been to countless group shows that seemed unfocused and vague. Smatterings of “work about histories of images” or “art of a contemporary landscape” have gotten old and deflating. “Hyper-meme,” however, is sharp, original, and hyper-specific. It blew me away.
Contributed by Kari Adelaide Razdow / Lassoing whimsy and venturing into uncanny realms where crimson eyes peer from stones, “Fairyland 2: Deeper, Darker” at Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami, curated by Valerie Hegarty, presents a captivating visual language of non-human elementals and imaginings. Fairies, as an archetype, are perennially underestimated. Nimble and powerful in their capacity to provoke enchantment, they idiosyncratically neutralize assumptions through glamour, illusion, and surprise, and collapse boundaries of knowing and unknowing, and visibility and invisibility. In this group show, various paintings portray animals – one has bats emerging from petrified stage curtains in the forest – but figuration dominates. Bodies on the ground or bending towards the earth suggest unknown struggles, pixie-led crossings, enchanted tasks, and tales of wonder. Hybrid creatures, including Mala Iqbal’s painting Forest Tangle with Jaybird, align with Leonora Carrington’s surreal chimerical figures, including Figuras Miticas: Bailarin II and Girl, Horse, Tree, now on view in “Leonora Carrington: Dream Weaver” at the Rose Art Museum.
Contributed by Riad Miah / In conjunction with their two-person exhibition, The Shape of Things, at the John Molloy Gallery, I had the opportunity to engage in a conversation with artists Drew Shiflett and Carter Hodgkin about their materials and unusual creative processes. At first, their pairing seemed unexpected, as their visual languages appeared quite distinct. However, after seeing the exhibition firsthand, I came to appreciate the deep connections and underlying commonalities in their work.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / There are a fair few viable organizing concepts for group art exhibitions. One particularly challenging one is to present viewers with a tour d’horizon of emotions and attitudes that seem to prevail at a given historical moment. The key to optimal execution, of course, is to avoid both the obvious and the obscure. In “Each Own” at Springs Projects, curators and gallery co-founders Cate Holt and Tommy White strike the right balance, strategically deploying the work of six exceptional…
Contributed by Katy Crowe / Michael Handley and Greg Lindquist’s show at the Landing Gallery – identified by the emoji for fire – could not have been more poignantly timed. It coincides with California’s fire season and more particularly the destructive Mountain Fire just north of Los Angeles, beyond that with drought-induced fires on the east coast, including Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and with an incendiary presidential election.
Contributed by Adam Simon / There have been group shows that represented cultural milestones – the Armory Show of 1913, the “‘Bad’ Painting” show at the New Museum in 1978, the Times Square Show of 1980. In the shadow of a foreboding US presidential election, “Pierogi 30” has that kind of historical weight.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / It would be hard to miss the overarching theme of Lydia Baker’s show “Sonnet,” up at Massey Klein Gallery: metamorphosis. But rather than relying on overused signifiers, she gently guides us through life’s whitewater rapids, her work practically whispering “the only constant is change.”
Contributed by Elizabeth Johnson / Planned with hope and trepidation, “In the Dark,” now up at Studio 10, leans into post-election malaise and dread with work by Mike Ballou, Tom Butter, Larry Greenberg, David Henderson, and Kate Teale – Brooklyn-based artists whose studio explorations are unified through the color black, via shape, mood, and phenomenon. Designed as a positive project for unsettled times, the exhibit coheres as a short list of nascent strategies for coping with darkness writ large before it has been parsed, studied, and conclusively judged. The works share a resistant sense of seduction, anticipation, and opportunity. By virtue of piecemeal construction, the show sustains an alluring in-between emotion, just right for entering voids that are only partly plumbed or viewing objects that are but partly known.
Contributed by Anna Gregor / The anxiety of being unable to distinguish artifice from nature has haunted art since the Ancient Greeks. No one wants to be the prisoner who mistakes the shadow on the cave wall for Truth, or, more embarrassingly, the bird who tries to eat the grapes in Zeuxis’s trompe l’oeil still life. But today, as human-made technology permeates all aspects of life, the difference between what is artificial and what is real is not so clear. This ambiguity is most apparent in the city, where nature manifests itself as a force of decomposition and aggregation that acts on all objects indiscriminately, whether “natural” or human-made. Here, art and nature are indistinguishable. This relation of artifice and nature in the city is the driving force behind “Aggregate,” now up at Studio 9D.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / A while ago, with a half dozen adventurous galleries operating, a new art corridor seemed to be emerging on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. This made geographical sense. Brooklyn was reaching critical mass in terms of artist residents, and the street itself was long and central, with excellent public transportation access…
Contributed by William Eckhardt Kohler / “Make It or Break It,” now showing at C24 Gallery in Chelsea, features a group of artist known for their curatorial practices who use collage or found objects to disrupt, critique, and reflect reality. The implication here that collage in particular has become a prominent part of our visual vernacular suggests a pervasively fractured way of seeing the world and a compulsion to reorganize it. Each artist explores how fragments, juxtaposed images, and collected objects more broadly articulate new associations and understandings that encompass personal history, culture, and art history.
Contributed by Adam Simon / At some point, my IG algorithm sent me a clip of Brian Eno talking about how the term ‘genius’ should be replaced with ‘scenius’ because no artist works in a vacuum. Artists all come from some version of a scene, however small. Perhaps no one illustrates this better than Tina Girouard, who died in 2020 and whose work can currently be seen in NYC at two galleries, Magenta Plains and Anat Egbi, and at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA). During the 1970s, Girouard was instrumental in founding 112 Greene Street…
Contributed by Michael Brennan / On about 200 square feet of AstroTurf, artist-run Field of Play, which opened in 2022 in Gowanus, is a tiny gallery with big ambitions, staging adventurous exhibitions and offering health and wellness programs aimed at creative people and enterprises. “Bumper Crop,” curated by artist and gallery founder Matt Logsdon, includes work by artists carrie R, Estefania Velez Rodriguez, and Rachel Yanku. Timed to coincide with the autumnal equinox, she show’s theme is the garden – an intriguingly ironic premise, given that the gallery is located next to an EPA Superfund site, the Gowanus Canal.
Contributed by David Carrier / Bernice Bing (1936–1998), a gay Chinese American woman, grew up in San Francisco. She had a difficult childhood. Her mother died when she was five and lived in no fewer than 17 predominantly white orphanages. She attended local schools, got her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute, and actively participated in the local art scene. Her teachers included Richard Diebenkorn as well as celebrated local artists, and Bing exhibited widely in Northern California. Now, thanks to Berry Campbell Gallery, which has provided a magnificent catalogue with a fine essay by John Yau, her work is being brought to New York’s attention.
