An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Sunday, December 28, 2025
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / October is the most beautiful month to visit the Hudson Valley and surrounding regions. Don’t miss seeing the brilliant foliage and enjoying cooler days and clear blue skies. Special events this month include the O+ music and art festival in Kingston on October 10-12 and the WAAM Members Open Studio Tour October 11-12. In Hudson, Farrell Brickhouse is giving an artist’s talk at Philip Douglas on October 11….
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson/ Among the syndromes that make the current American moment so vexing is a liberal contingent duly alarmed but bereft and flummoxed in the face of unprecedentedly heedless and unrestrained illiberal forces. Concerned citizens – including elected officials – don’t know what to do, and they are clamoring for a sensibly energized way forward. Movies can reflect the zeitgeist quite resonantly and animate civic discourse. Lately, though, they have tended to divert to smaller-bore social issues and wistfulness for Americana or the counterculture without confronting what could happen to the country overall, Alex Garland’s Civil War excepted. Last week, however, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another landed. It is a fully sussed cri de coeur of liberal conscience, resistance, and resilience inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, and the first great political movie of the Trump era.
Contributed by Amanda Church / Marina Adams has long been exploring the range of allusions that can be conjured by various color combinations and the scale and placement of simple shapes, which press up and vibrate against each other in subtle, sexy ways. Curvy configurations, interspersed with diamonds and triangles, hint at myriad aspects of nature and the female form. In Adams’ current show “Cosmic Repair” at Timothy Taylor, variations on this trajectory continue in nine paintings, all new and acrylic on linen except Singing to the Highest Deity from 2020 hanging by itself in the back room. Influences range from Matisse to, according to the press release, “Uzbek textiles, Indigenous American Southwest pottery, and the Great Pyramids.”
Contributed by Adam Simon / Paul Gardère (1944–2011), whose work is now on view in “Second Nature” at Magenta Plains, is known for a unique version of combine paintings, incorporating assemblage, found objects, photography, dirt and glitter into works that critique the legacy of colonialism in Haiti and its diaspora. The problem with this narrative is that it undersells how formally innovative his work was in its time, the degree to which it stems from his own biography, and how it anticipated our current multi-screen reality.
DEADLINE to send a letter of interest for a 2026 residency is October 30, 2025. / Over the years, intimate, artist-run residency programs have helped move artists’ work forward in unexpected ways….
Contributed by David Carrier / Spencer Finch is fascinated by Japan, which he first visited some 50 years ago, when he was a teenager. “One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige),” his current exhibition at James Cohan Gallery, includes four installations grounded in that experience. Fourteen Stones, inspired by a Japanese Zen garden and made with ordinary concrete bricks, encompasses simulacra of fifteenth-century garden stones. Even these banal objects, Finch suggests, warrant contemplation. For Moonlight (Reflected in a Pond), he has installed stained glass to evoke Japanese moon-viewing. Four LED sculptures present images that recast traditional Japanese haikus through lit color schemes. And Finch’s 42 watercolors reference Utagawa Hiroshige’s renowned One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, made in 1856–58, through present-day New York.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / On October 12, Two Coats of Paint welcomes Alice Pixley Young. She hails from Cincinnati, Ohio, where the Rust Belt and ancient fossil beds meet nuclear contamination sites. She creates installations that tease out ideas about the complex archaeology of the industrial landscape, uncovering stories of displacement, exploitation, and environmental degradation that have come to characterize twenty-first-century America.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / I saw my favorite piece of Cady Noland ephemera before I ever saw one of her sculptures. On Instagram, a gallery posted a photo of a tee-shirt. It’s well loved and sun-faded, advertising the opening of Noland’s solo show at American Fine Arts on Wooster Street. The date of the opening is September 11, 2001. Opening the same day, across Canal Street on Broadway, was a show by Gelatin (Gelitin since 2005) at Leo Koenig’s gallery. The year before, the group had gone up to the 91st floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center and hung out a window. Josh Harris, founding Silicon Alley millionaire/internet pioneer/legendary liar, took photos from a helicopter. The Gelatin show was sparsely attended. I don’t know if anyone made it to Cady’s.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / Susan Rothenberg’s exhibition “The Weather,” now up at Hauser & Wirth, is a rare chance to experience the breadth and intensity of one of most vital influences in American painting. The exhibition gathers fourteen works from across her career – horses, fragmented bodies, and spectral forms – some rarely or never before exhibited. Rothenberg told the LA Times in 1983 that she liked to think of the subjects in her paintings as being “swept along in unconfined space by forces of weather” – rendered in thermal swirls and blizzardy brush marks – and the exhibition is structured around this idea.
Contributed by Mary Jones / Exuberance is a word frequently used in describing the work of JoAnne Carson, and, in “Cosmic Chatter,” her first solo show at DC Moore, it’s in hyperdrive. Twelve large, colorful paintings share the main gallery space with one eight-by-six-foot monochromatic sculpture of an intricately crafted white flowering tree. Placed near the entrance, the sculpture serves as a three-dimensional model and introduction to the paintings. The fragile delicacy of this surprising and marvelous object resembles an encounter with a conjured specimen preserved in ice, a fact among fiction.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / If On Kawara’s monumentally quotidian work was about the objective significance of the simple passage of time, Robert Yoder’s may be, in turn, about the subjective importance of each passing moment however uneventful. “I Was the Other Conversation,” his solo exhibition of untitled paintings (and one beguiling wooden carving) now up at Frosch & Co., continues his discerning visual exploration of how, psychically, people live.
Contributed by Leslie Wayne / For as long as I’ve known Suzanne Joelson – over 40 years now – she has pushed the limits of painting, much as I have tried to do. In what is now an abundantly expanded field, though, I have wondered whether we have much to push against anymore, which makes the endeavor all the more challenging.
Contributed by Doug Milford / Good art can have multiple sources of meaning – material, color, scale, intention, chance, change, process, metaphor, ontology, epistemology, philosophy, biography, zeitgeist, history, and more. These may or may not be apparent or even deliberate, but they make up the work’s internal structure and shape its style. Ideally though certainly not always, these influences operate in concert while remaining distinct. The nine works in Claudia Parducci’s exhibition “Blue”, at Ochi Gallery in Los Angeles in February and March, achieve this balance, both as individual pieces and as an ensemble. The six years that had passed since her previous show included a three-year hiatus from painting after the death of her husband, the artist Peter Alexander, in 2020. This body of work was a response to his passing.
Remember Hurricane Sandy? It was a devastating superstorm that struck the northeastern United States on October 29, 2012, and turned into one of the most […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Make today a day you, like me, refrain from doomscrolling in despair or listening to pundits vainly in search of packaged optimism. Cued by this guide, you might instead opt for art feeds on Instagram and ultimately the shows themselves because nothing is more hopeful than art in the fall in New York. We kick off the first week with the art fairs and then turn our attention to gallery exhibitions, hopping from neighborhood to neighborhood, absorbing new work by artists we’ve known for years and others we’ve never met. For a good time, this is the place to scroll.
