An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Sunday, December 28, 2025
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / The summer heat has given way to mild and sunny weekends, making it the perfect time to explore the Hudson Valley. There are notable exhibitions opening throughout the month, starting on September 6 with What’s That Sound Everybody Look What’s Going Down, a group show at Private Public in Hudson including work by Richard Artschwager, Ross Bleckner, Sharon Butler, Michael David, James Esber, Ellen Kozak, Stephen Maine, Donna Moylan, Michael Rodriguez, and more….
Contributed by Mark Wethli / Technical drawing – the kind we see in plans, elevations, and orthogonal perspectives – is not the obvious choice to explore feelings of isolation, sadness, or loss. For over a century, the painterly gesture has been the primary signifier of these emotions, while drafting has been the province of the designer and the engineer. Given this disparity, Tom Butler’s choice of this medium, in his show “I Became a Room” at Sarah Bouchard Gallery in Woolwich, Maine, is a surprising one; not for its own sake but the result of a creative process that transforms the art of technical drawing in unexpected and meaningful ways.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In September, Two Coats of Paint welcomes Chicago-area painter Anne Hayden Stevens. Her primary endeavor is to examine how we navigate and relate to physical and psychological spaces. How do we claim territory, seek refuge, and forge paths, literally and metaphorically? Her deft brushwork captures the psychological nuance of this exploration, creating surfaces that from a remove present as bold but reveal their fragility up close. Images of shadowed groves seem to offer sanctuary, and tiny, meandering figures speak to one’s often precarious search for a place in the world.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / In “The Art Critics Who Don’t Want Good Art,” Anna Gregor describes a cultural hospice. The caretakers are a set of bad actors. They’re online critics who have replaced the labor of criticism with the catharsis of complaint, trading in “likes and clicks” for a smooth, sugary candy that requires only passivity and attention from its audience while it rots their teeth. This feedback loop, she argues, drowns true engagement and criticism in a “deluge of mediocre art.” It is a compelling diagnosis, but one delivered from the one place a critic cannot afford to be: behind a veil. Gregor deals exclusively in archetypes and generalizations while allowing the reader to “fill in the picture.” The playboi, the intellectualist, the yelper, and so on. She’s built a perfect haunted house and populated it with ghosts of her own making.
Contributed by David Carrier / Sobia Ahmad makes silver fiber prints and inkjet images responding to Sufi traditions of poetry and oral storytelling. Her The Breath within the Breath is a 30-foot-long inkjet print on Japanese paper, mounted on a platform running diagonally across the gallery. Maggie Bjorklund does oil paintings. Her Assumption of the Virgin (After Titian) is a close-up rendering of that subject. Centa Schumacher manipulates photographic images, and her Salt Fork, Rain on Lake superimposes a white circle on an archival inkjet print. Elijah Burger had developed private codes of quasi-abstract images, like Hex Centrifuge. The unifying theme of the four-artist exhibition “I Believe I Know” that includes this work, now up at the Tomayko Foundation in Pittsburgh, is concern with transcendence. With due reference to William James’s The Variety of Religious Experience, the four artists’ shared goal is to offer visual presentations of mystical experiences. That is a familiar and traditional modernist theme, but here it receives strikingly original treatment.
Contributed by Anna Gregor / If yesteryear the call for negative art criticism rang clear and true, today complaints about the state of art blur into an inarticulate whine. Be they artist or critic, Marxist or capitalist, academic or anti-intellectual: everyone is dissatisfied. Or so it seems. Despite their complaints, however, one starts to suspect that few of the YouTubers, Substackers, or Instagrammers who presume the title of critic want the circumstances they complain about to change, so lacking are they in convincing diagnoses of present problems and convinced visions of alternatives, not to mention actual critical engagement with artworks.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / For a group show keyed to current events, the trick is to balance political messaging with the stream of life, achieving provocative encapsulation without preachiness. “Made in Paint, Twelve” at the Sam & Adele Golden Gallery of Art, situated in the legendary Golden Artist Colors paint factory in New Berlin, New York, pulls this off with style and heart.
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Cecilia Whittaker-Doe’s current show at the Interchurch Center on the Upper West Side, comprising close to 50 works, sheds generous light on her process, range and subject matter. The exhibition’s title, “Beneath the Trees it Rains,” conveys the dynamism of Whittaker-Doe’s landscapes, which demonstrate nature’s seasonal abundance and power.
Contributed by Wells Chandler / Inserted in extravagant interiors, the hybrid creatures in Hannah Barrett’s paintings, now on view at Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown alongside the work of four others, embody both psychic and material liminality, performing the delicate work of chronicling personal and cultural becoming. As seraphic intermediaries contemplated by the likes of Hildegard von Bingen, Barrett’s elastically protean tricksters play as queer homunculi, perhaps resurrected from the margins of illuminated medieval manuscripts, reanimated and thriving in Victorian polychrome. Cloistered in very gay Akashic libraries, they are fierce androgynous gatekeepers, summoning rune light from somewhere over the rainbow.
Contributed by Katarina Wong / In the heat of summer, “Curvilinear Abstraction” at McKenzie Fine Art is a bracing group show that takes the viewer on a journey by turns lyrical, cosmic, regenerative, and intimate, calling on the imagination as much as formal appreciation.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / At 68 Prince Street Gallery, a spacious new gallery in Kingston, now featuring Jeanette Fintz’s paintings alongside Monika Zarzeczna’s architecturally oriented work in “Elusive Thresholds,” Fintz engaged in a freewheeling conversation with noted painter Stephen Westfall. I was fortunate enough to get hold of the recording and here try to distill some wisdom. Both artists are geometric abstractionists, and they discussed the evolution of Fintz’s artistic practice from cubist-influenced studies in the 1980s to her current explorations of the environment through geometry, touching on philosophical and technical considerations underlying contemporary abstract painting.
Contributed by Marcy Rosewater / “Cautionary Tales,” a retrospective of works on paper by artist Harvey Weiss, is located in Holden House, a grand old mansion in historic Newburgh, New York, now restored and hosting occasional art exhibitions. Both the work and the house beckon melancholic remembrances. The show comprises paintings, drawings, and collaged and manipulated magazine pages and photographs, spans almost 40 years, and presents twelve distinct series. Each begins with a familiar image that undergoes a transformation revealing the artist’s emotional, physical, conceptual, and spiritual processing, yielding a narrative duet between what is seen and what is felt.
Contributed by David Carrier / Rebuilding seems to be a cyclical occurrence for older art museums. The collection expands, styles of display change, more capacious restaurants and shops may be needed. Older museums have to construct new galleries. To the original European galleries, entered atop the stairs at the entrance, the Metropolitan Museum of Art added space for Islamic art, contemporary work, and Asian paintings. Alternatively, a wealthy museum can rebuild almost from scratch, as MoMA has repeatedly done. Yet, for most of the time I have been going to art museums, New York’s Frick Collection has been basically unchanged, an island of stability. I remember once being shocked that one of its masterworks – Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider – was away on loan. No other major New York art institution has remained basically the same over such a lengthy period, celebrating idiosyncratic displays that mix sacred and secular works in a luxurious setting. Henry Clay Frick had a great eye.
Contributed by Adam Simon / One of the most evocative and lyrical artworks I’ve experienced recently was not located in a gallery or museum, but in the woods on the western edge of the Catskills, behind the Catskill Water Discovery Center in Arkville, New York. To be clear, mine was not the ideal encounter. I was aware of the project, “Headwaters,” and set out to find it.
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / It has been a really busy summer in the Hudson Valley, and as we move into August the momentum continues with dozens of noteworthy exhibitions throughout the region. Highlights include Ashley Garrett’s solo show opening August 16 at SEPTEMBER in Kinderhook, Janet Biggs’ multi-channel installation Eclipse (Amazon, September 7, 1858) at Private Public Gallery in Hudson, In This Here Place, We Flesh at Gallery 495 in Catskill, Jeanette Fintz and Monika Zarzeczna at 68 Prince Street in Kingston, and opening August 30, Nicole Cherubini, Susan Jennings, and Michelle Segre at Tanja Grunert in Hudson. Don’t miss the outdoor sculpture exhibitions MUSKEG, curated by Jacob Rhodes and Jessica Hargreaves at Mother-in-Law’s in Germantown and S.C.A.P.E., curated by Linda Dubillier and Jen Dragon at a new sculpture park in Woodstock.
