An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Wednesday, April 8, 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 Adam Simon / The modus operandi behind much of Barbara Friedman’s work, including her current exhibition “All Rude and Lumpy Matter” at Frosch & Co., has a name, pareidolia, which refers to finding images within abstraction. Think of the age-old pastime of finding faces in clouds.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / Daisy Sheff’s exhibition “Begun in the Dazzling Sunshine” at Parker Gallery’s new space on Melrose in Los Angeles, intertwines reality with the fantastical. Her paintings employ leaping animals, fussy architectures, and bright flora to explain narratives that tease the peculiar logic of fairy tales. Their uneven surfaces, cleverly devised characters, and woolly layered scenes are busy and unwieldy. To interpret them is like piecing together the plot of a really great dream.
After several years during which galleries have focused relentlessly on narrative and figurative work, I feel a vibe shift in the air. Is it wishful thinking or is abstract painting roaring back? I recommend checking out RJ Messineo’s show at CANADA, James Miller at Nichelle Beauchene, Nicolas Bermeo at King’s Leap, and Franklin Evans, who has moved from site-specific wall installations onto canvas in his show at Miles McEnery. I’m looking forward to Moira Dryer’s solo show at Magenta Plains, too. Known for a witty strain of post-minimal abstraction in the 1990s, she was a hero to painters of my generation who were then living in the long shadow of video, photography, and installation work.
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / The Hudson Valley is finally thawing out after a cold, icy February. At the same time, a number of art spaces are opening again after a winter break. There are a lot of openings this month, starting March 1 with Michael Fortenberry at Headstone and a group show of monoprints at The Lockwood Gallery on March 2, both in Kingston. On March 8, Kino Saito in Verplanck…
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / For better or worse, directly or inferentially, movies reflect the zeitgeist. This year, they predominantly resonated dread or resignation, and even those focused on personal endeavor had a political tinge. With humanity’s and especially America’s scabrous underbelly fully exposed, both idealism and irony seem to be taking a break, leaving something in between that doesn’t quite amount to earnestness. It’s not the nineties or even the seventies, though the occasional and fleeting nostalgic nod to better days lightened things up. Here’s one (alphabetical) list of the year’s notable movies, with the usual acknowledgement of idiosyncrasy and incompleteness.
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 David Carrier / Few human developments have been more consequential, in terms of both art history and broader cultural expansion, than the movement of Africans within and out of their own continent. The mammoth exhibition “Project A Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica,” now at the Art Institute of Chicago in twelve high-ceilinged contemporary galleries, includes more than 350 drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, installations, watercolors and prints, but also books, magazines, posters, and record albums, made from the 1920s onward. It’s a lot, but never too much.
Contributed by John Goodrich / Hindsight, of course, is 20/20. Looking back at the early decades of modernism, we may sense something inevitable about the ascent of Picasso and Matisse. Weren’t both driven, gifted artists poised to take advantage of their cultural moment? And wasn’t the time ripe for Matisse’s upending of expectations of color, and Picasso’s overturning of pictorial structures? Of course, life is not so tidy and linear for the artists operating in the moment. As the luminous exhibition “Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde” at NYU’s Grey Art Museum demonstrates, none of the early modernists had a monopoly on talent or a singularly dominant vision of what painting had to be.
Contributed by David Whelan / If I asked you to make a sculpture about walking through the woods, what would you make? How would you go about expressing an awareness of your body in relation to the dense forest – stepping over downed logs, ducking under branches, feeling your feet against the ground and the sun warm on your skin? In A Walk with D. Ann at 15 Orient, Jilaine Jones suggests that we aren’t just walking through woods but having the experience of being human. There is an emphasis on gravity and things returning to the ground throughout the show. Landscape and motion, forms and space, combine to build emotional weight in the sculptures, asserting a presence while keeping their origins just out of grasp.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / It’s easy to associate the new paintings by Julie Beaufils, now on view at Matthew Brown Gallery in Tribeca, with a post-apocalyptic world. The sixteen paintings suggest fractured architectures and abandoned fields, sun baked and rising from a humming radioactive haze. Beaufils lives and works in Paris, and her precise lines and delineated spaces capture its curving promenades, narrowed boulevards, and sinking perspectives. Travels to Los Angeles and the American Southwest have also influenced this new work.
Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / In the early 2000s, among the pines and solace of an artist residency, Polly Apfelbaum shared with me a small, well-thumbed through book. Right off the bat I took the isolated black-and-white image on its cover to possess talismanic powers. Such was my introduction to the work of Myron Stout.
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 Sharon Butler / Walter Robinson played an important role in the New York art scene for over five decades, and on Sunday, February 9, he passed away at his New York home. A piece in Artnet reported that the cause was liver cancer. Walter loved artists and the art world, and he believed that anyone could have a piece of it. You want to be a writer? Go ahead and write. You want to have a gallery? Open one. You want to be a painter? Paint. He was a hub of that world and never seemed to lose interest in the wild schemes…
Contributed by Rebecca Chace / It’s 5:40 AM in New York and 12:40 PM in Palestine on August 10, 2024. I run back and forth inside my dark Brooklyn apartment, barefoot in a T-shirt and underpants. The workshop I’m leading for teachers in the West Bank begins in twenty minutes and my internet is down. Unplug the router; count to ten; plug it back in. I’m the one who’s supposed to have good internet. I have hot water, air conditioning, access to health care, and a well-stocked bodega on the corner. I lead workshops for the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College, which has partnered with Al Quds University for sixteen years. When Ibrahim, the soft-spoken director of the program for first-year students, reached out to schedule their annual faculty training sessions, we assumed he meant the workshops would take place on Zoom, not in-person.
Michael and Tim Maul: Art as antidote and refuge
Valerie Hegarty: Enlivening Emily Cole
Rodin and food
Opal Mae Ong: Worlds weighing in
Echo Yan and Cass Yao: An unsettled awareness
Outsider Art Fair 2026: Hunters and prey
Sharon’s Substack / April 1, 2026
NYC Selected Gallery Guide, April 2026
Hudson Valley (+ Vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide, April 2026
Barbara Takenaga’s pinballing fantasia
Turn Gallery: The 1990s in collective memory
Two Coats Resident Artist Dale Emmart, April 12–17, 2026
