An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Monday, March 30, 2026
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Understanding the work of the mostly overlooked artist Benjamin Wigfall (1930–2017) requires looking at far more than the art. Over the course of his lifetime he made numerous paintings, assemblages, collages, and prints, a number of which are on display in the large, thoughtfully curated survey exhibition “Ben Wigfall & Communications Village” at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / I went to visit Fran Shalom’s studio in Jersey City on the occasion of her first solo museum show, “Duck/Rabbit” at the Hunterdon in Clinton, New Jersey. Continuing a conversation we’d started at “Groping For the Elephant,” Shalom’s 2021 solo show at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in Chelsea., we discussed surface, shape, ambiguity, and the confidence painters develop over time. “Duck/Rabbit” was curated by Mary Birmingham and opens on October 2.
Contributed by Kari Adelaide / Dana Sherwood’s exhibition “Animal Appetites and Other Encounters in Wildness,” on view at the Florence Griswold Museum, embraces domesticity and wildness, method and chaos, human and animal, the ordinary and the magic. Captured in night-vision infrared, Sherwood’s work turns on her appreciation of nature and fantasy alike and her generosity towards the fauna we live with.
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / The revised exhibition, at the Museum of fine Arts in Boston, with 73 paintings and 23 drawings, is a team effort mounted by the museum’s two curators, two guest curators, various museum staff and educators, the critic Homi Bhabha, and a trauma counselor who crafted a statement about “emotional preparedness” for the show. It begins: “The content of this exhibition is challenging. The Museum offers these words in a spirit of care and invitation.” Midway through the exhibition, visitors who find the material too disturbing can leave through a special exit before they encounter particularly vivid Klan imagery.
Contributed by Barry Nemett / With squiggly marks and brilliant colors bringing the bucolic outdoors indoors, the exhibit Joan Mitchell is a sensual delight. What a treat to feel, smell, and hear the French countryside’s springtime breezes and see its glorious summer’s colors in Baltimore.
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / While an artist friend and I were having dinner together after seeing the Whitney Biennial, she suddenly said” “Art is a cult.” For a second, I thought she was joking – I mean, art is truth and goodness, cults are lies and wickedness. Then I realized how much sense it made.
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 […]
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Singling out individual works for praise in an exhibition of the size and range of MoMAs Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction is almost beside the point. Her first US retrospective in 40 years, it includes 300 of her approximately 1,200 extant works: pencil drawings, gouache
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Its quite a feat for a figurative painter to achieve both intimacy and remove simultaneously, but Jennifer Packer accomplishes just that in The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing, the vibrant survey of her work at the Whitney.
Contributed by Anne Swartz / Since its origins in the 1970s, practitioners and advocators of the Pattern and Decoration movement have countered claims that decorative art lacked seriousness. In America at the time, critical arguments focused on the exhaustion of painting, positioning it as an outmoded visual form. Several artists resisted this affront. Instead, they embraced images for their pleasure, opposing the notion of immediacy often considered synonymous with other mediums such as photography.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Sue Havens history her searching and sometimes painful life experiences and her adventurousness in the studio are distinctly encoded, like a unique double helix of molecular structure, in the complex work she has produced this past year.
If theres one word that sums up Paul Czanne (1839-1906), the subject of this massive MoMA exhibition, its struggle.
Contributed by Anne MacLeod / I first encountered the installation Antoines Organ by Rashid Johnson in 2019 by accident, as it sat serenely inside the […]
By Laurie Fendrich / Critics have been lavish in their praise of the Brown, queer-themed figurative paintings by the Pakistani-born Brooklyn artist Salman Toor, currently […]
Contributed by Kari Adelaide Razdow / Now on view as part of the deCordova Museum’s “Visionary New England” exhibition, Josephine Halvorson‘s lyrical yet meticulous oil […]
Barbara Takenaga’s pinballing fantasia
Turn Gallery: The 1990s in collective memory
Two Coats Resident Artist Dale Emmart, April 12–17, 2026
Springs Projects: Concerted vibes
Lois Dodd: A balm against cynicism
Rick Briggs and Natasha Sweeten: On painting and writing
Amelie Mancini: Longing and wonder
St. Francis at the Frick
Tracy Burtz and Claire McConaughy: Vulnerability and resilience at The Painting Center
Kathy Butterly’s small-scale magnitude
Ezra Johnson and Matt Bollinger: Disrupting convention
Six artists meshing at Field Projects
