An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, January 23, 2026
Contributed by Sharon Butler / This month, the Two Coats of Paint Residency Program welcomes Bryce Speed, a painter and professor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In his intriguing abstractions from 2023–24, Bryce embedded architectural structures but refrained from fully imparting the specificity required to identify a particular situation or place. Instead, he played with the position of shapes within the picture plane to create subtle relationships and illusions of space….
Contributed by Fay Sanders and Bob Szantyr / Spring fair season is here, and our annual tradition is to try to see as much art as possible in one day. This year, Spring/Break Art Show, located at 75 Varick Street, was less sprawling, recalliing the spirit and energy of the event’s earliest years. The location made it a quick trip from the Future Fair in Chelsea via the 1 train.
Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / Walk with me, backwards through time. See Jack Whitten painstakingly remove over two thousand tiles of hardened acrylic paint from his canvas. Watch as he assembles them into a large, flat plane, carefully unslices them from tiny squares, and then unsplatters and unpours the black and white paint. We’ve reached that final moment, in 1990, when the idea for The Messenger (for Art Blakey) is alive only in the artist’s mind. It is a fireball that has hurtled through years of searching, experimenting, suffering, loving, being lost, being overlooked, being angry — and now is ready to take hold….
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Daina Higgins began her vocation as an artist in the 1990s as a quintessential outsider: she was not only a graffiti artist in her native Columbus but also one of the few young women then so engaged there. Her noirish attraction to the oblique angles and ominous shadows of a presumptively benighted urban landscape in the Rust Belt has never flagged. At the same time, her paintings and drawings have acquired the existential gravitas that comes, if an artist has the requisite talent and mind, with the travails of life, the burden of lineage, and the compulsion to reflect on them.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / It’s refreshing and a little humbling to walk into a gallery and be blitzed by art that’s cleverly derived from years of play, probing, and practice. Rick Briggs’s solo show at Satchel Projects shows us how open-ended and liberating painting can be.
Contributed by Adam Simon / I tend to rail against art openings. Few attendees of a crowded art opening ever get to really see the show; the glimpses they’re afforded are more like scrolling Instagram than anything approaching contemplation. I felt differently at the opening of Curtis Mitchell’s pop-up show “19 Black Dogs” at the untraditional talent agency called No Agency on Bowery. The work does lend itself to contemplation, but at the opening of this show, Mitchell’s sculptures – stuffed dogs he purchases on the internet and then abuses in various ways – were contextualized by a young, hip crowd, connected I assume to No Agency rather than to Mitchell. Some appeared to be fashion models.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / “A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson in another context. As much as I respect institutional Minimalism, economy in painting excites me more, and what could be more economical than a three-person, three-painting exhibition presented in a 135-square-foot space with one empty wall? Artist Mark Sengbusch has scrupulously curated “3 Painters” at Field of Play in Gowanus in accord with his own personal Periodic Table, in which each artist represents a specific Element. Charlotte Hallberg is field, Clare Grill is air, and Victoria Roth is depth.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / May is Art Fair Week in New York, but don’t forget to visit the galleries. A few have closed since our last guide—Dinner, Spanierman, and Pocket Utopia are all taking a break. Nathalie Karg is on hiatus. On a brighter note (literally), be sure to see “LFG” at The Hole, a group exhibition featuring blinking LED lights, painting, sculpture, and installation informed by video game aesthetics. McBride/Dillman, the newest…
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / The first weekend of May is packed with shows opening and closing around the region. On Friday, May 2, “The River That Flows Both Ways: Ever Baldwin, Erika DeVries, Clarity Haynes, Portia Munson” opens at RUTHANN in Catskill. On Saturday May 3, Hudson-based Italian artist Lucio Pozzi opens at Philip Douglas Fine Art in Hudson, and “Ellon Gibbs: The Color Blue is Warm” opens at Gallery 495 in Catskill. Nearby in Hillsdale, LABspace opens two solo shows, Susan Meyer and Carlton Davis. In Kingston, “More Than Any Mirror” with Benjamin Herndon and Adie Russell opens at Headstone, and in Cold Spring, an exhibition of landscape paintings by Lisa Diebboll opens at Buster Levi. In the Catskills, Wade Kramm, Howard Schwartzberg, and Susan Silas are opening at Catskill Art Space, and a group show “Feeding Our Demons” opens at 1053 Gallery. Also on May 3, “Nature Reimagined” blooms with Rachel Burgess, KK Kozik, F Lipari and Warner Friedman opens at Bernay Fine Art in Great Barrington, MA. In Kent, CT, Carol Corey Fine Art will host an exhibition of works by legendary New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast for the gallery’s final show. Sunday, May 4 is the last chance to see three excellent exhibitions at CPW in Kingston: Mary Ellen Mark’s “Ward 81, My Sister, My Self;” Colleen Kenyon and Kathleen Kenyon, and Keisha Scarville in “Recess.” Sunday is also the last day for Amy Talluto’s solo show at the Garrison Art center. A new gallery, Ligenza Moore Gallery, is opening in Cold Spring on May 24 with a group show featuring work by Katherine Bradford, Don Voisine, Judy Pfaff, Chris Martin, Meg Hitchcock, and others.
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Some 250 years after the birth of the English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), the Yale Center for British Art has re-opened its renovated Brutalist building with a perfectly scaled, carefully curated exhibition of 77 Turner prints, watercolors, and oil paintings from its collection of his works, the largest outside Britain.
Contributed by Lucas Moran / On Instagram, where most artists list their websites, exhibitions, and accomplishments beneath their handles, Dan Schein keeps it simple: “artist/painter,” followed by “Person Who Stutters.” It’s fitting for a painter whose work, some now on display at JJ Murphy Gallery, feels as though it may sometimes have a tough time coming out of him. But Schein, a painter’s painter, knows how to elicit beauty from struggle….
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “The Messenger,” Jack Whitten’s momentous and flawlessly curated exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, is a signal event not just in American art history but, arguably, in American history simpliciter. To be sure, it showcases an art polymath who broke and cultivated important ground across a broad swath of artistic endeavor. But its timing as a socio-political statement seems perhaps singularly important.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Pierre Obando presents ten paintings, made between 2021 and 2025, in “Some Kind…,” his first exhibition at the Bushwick salon Starr Suites. While his imagery is for the most part recognizably organic, it is not easily decipherable.
Contributed by Kate Sherman / “Ghost Coast,” Ray Hwang’s solo show at Tempest Gallery in Ridgewood, conjures an alchemical whirlpool of memory, meaning, and the self. In the line of sight from the gallery’s entrance hangs where there’s smoke-, a large and densely layered painting that evokes stained glass reliquaries or maybe a personal treasure map of candle-lit memories….
Contributed by Almog Cohen-Kashi / A rose has never had a fixed meaning. This simple flower swings between adoration and destruction, purity and rot, natural beauty and artificial symbolism. Seamlessly interlacing art history and literature, “A Rose Is” at the FLAG Art Foundation brings together 39 artists of varying generations and backgrounds for a poetic exploration of how society views an idealized plant to project shifting attitudes towards love, romance, commercialism, commemoration, and decay in an elegantly curated exhibition….
