Contributed by Rosetta Marantz Cohen / Who doesn’t love a hat? Whether you wear them yourself or simply admire them on others, it is hard to deny that a beautiful, handmade hat is a marvelous object. As with all aesthetic creations, where hats sit on the continuum between high art and craft, sculpture and practical headwear, depends on the intention of the hatmaker and the predisposition of the viewer. Certainly there’s an argument to be made for giving certain hats their due as museum-worthy objects. Museums have long displayed all manner of objects intended for wear, from designer shoes to lavish evening gowns. The special display of hats currently on view at The Gallery at the Met Store makes the case that hats constitute a unique blend of high art and commodity. Situated unabashedly inside the museum store, the show is perfectly candid about what it is: a thoroughly delightful inventory of beautiful and artful yet wearable things, with prices attached.
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Kick off: The Two Coats 2024 Year-end Fundraising Campaign
It starts again! The annual campaign—a reminder that survival in the arts isn’t just about making work, but sustaining the framework that allows it to exist and thrive. We know art is essential, and it needs financial support. Today, we launch the 2024 Two Coats of Paint Year-End Fundraising Campaign, because the simple truth is that without funding, the platform falters, the conversation dims….
Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida: The ZERO interview
Contributed by Adam Simon / This year’s Upstate Art Weekend (July 19 – 21) included a most unusual venue. The Zero Art Fair exhibited the work of over seventy artists in a barn in Elizaville, New York, owned by Manon Slome. All the work was available to take home and none of it was for sale once the fair began. Surprisingly, or not, many of the artists that were included normally sell their work for prices that would have been out of the question for most browsers at UAW. Yet here those browsers were taking art home for free. The Zero Art Fair was scheduled to last for three days but by the end of the second day almost nothing was left. The following is a Two Coats of Paint interview with Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida, the two people primarily responsible for the Zero Art Fair.
UPDATED: NYC Selected Gallery Guide, October 2024
Welcome to the early edition of our October painting-centric gallery guide. Later in the month we will be updating the list with more exhibitions that open in the second half of the month. Galleries that would like their shows considered for inclusion should send a note to…
Whitney Claflin: Forever young
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Whitney Claflin’s work, now on view in her solo exhibition “Pinky’s Where” at Derosia, is winningly deceptive, like the title’s double-entendre. Consider the paintings Emma in Tarzana and Mr. Triste. At first blush, they seem nonchalantly wise-ass and a little frustrating, the first an offhand quip about internet celebrity and influencer supreme Emma Chamberlain, and the second…
Sama in the Forest: Indian women’s powerful storytelling
Contributed by Kathryn Myers / As an artist and longtime collector and curator of India’s unique and dazzling Mithila art form, I was deeply moved by an inspired new film, Sama in the Forest, which enlivens and re-contextualizes an ancient folktale while offering a privileged glimpse into the process of creation in Mithila art. Distinguished by its exquisite network of complex lines rendered in ink with shapes of brilliant color, Mithila is…
Tina Girouard: In the realm of the possible
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…
Dannielle Hodson’s infectious imagination
Contributed by Margaret McCann / “Chasing Rabbits,” the name of Danielle Hodson’s show at Kravets Wehby Gallery, refers to the cautionary Chinese proverb, “if you chase two rabbits, both will escape.” Hodson accepts that risk, bypassing clear purpose to embrace multiplicity. Impelled by curiosity – as Alice was, and Grace Slick advised – Hodson’s visual gestalts, though far livelier than Cezanne’s, similarly invite the viewer to re-experience their becoming…
A garden grows – on AstroTurf – in Gowanus
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.
Meet UConn’s MFA Studio Art, Class of 2027
Meet the University of Connecticut’s MFA Studio Art Class of 2027. Working in a broad range of art making, the five-student class features…
Alan Prazniak: Balancing the artisanal and the epicurean
Contributed by Tom McGlynn / Alan Prazniak’s paintings fall into productive intervals between landscape and still-life and between abstraction and representation. His most recent show at Geary comprises sixteen medium and small paintings (all from 2024) that are rigorously composed and wide-ranging in palette, bringing to mind the lyrical abstractions of Philip Guston and the quasi-landscape compositions of Nicolas de Staël. Prazniak has acknowledged as inspirations Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley’s groundbreaking works, which embodied similarly massed shapes in bold, contrasting colors. The modernist tension…
Christoph Matthes: Vulnerability of memory
Contributed by Theodora Bocanegra Lang / In his current solo show “Tactical Hugs, Practical Shrugs” at Gratin, Christoph Matthes – born in 1990 in Germany, now based in New York – intuitively explores imaginative childhood reminiscence through doubling, motif, and collage across a dozen cheeky paintings.
Bernice Bing’s unsung talents
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.
Katy Crowe’s light-and-shadow poetics
Contributed by Mary Jones / Katy Crowe returns to as-is.la with “Lunar Shift,” a superb second show of eleven lively and resonant abstract paintings. All are oil on linen works completed within the last year, six of them 52 x 42 inches and five 24 x 18 inches. A strikingly linear installation puts two opposing walls of the gallery into play, with the paintings equally spaced. The formality of the presentation underscores the dichotomy between window and object inherent in all paintings but Crowe’s especially, and brings out buoyant rhythms from painting to painting.
Hudson Valley (+vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide: October 2024
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / October is the most beautiful time to visit the Hudson Valley, Catskills, and Western Connecticut, and there are dozens of new exhibitions to see this month….


































