Tag: Art Cake

Solo Shows

Shuyao Huang: Challenging calmness

Contributed by Taylor Bielecki / In Shuyao Huang’s exhibition “Still Becoming,” currently on view at Art Cake, she investigates color, repetition, and form as modes of experiencing time, interruption, and the transformation of space. Diving deeply into color theory and in line with her longstanding practice, Huang uses strong, simple bands of color as pacing intervals to pull us in and slow us down. The color and thickness of each band are deliberately calculated. The soothing pastel mixtures in, say, Almost the Same, encourage patient contemplation, whereas starkly confrontational primary colors urge jumping to the next. Rather than functioning as a repeated motif, the stripes are a flexible framework for imparting subtle variations in rhythm and affect, which she accomplishes by shifting their proportion, spacing, and color accumulation.

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Gallery news Gallery shows

Hannah Studnick: A practice of persistence

Contributed by Lucas Moran / In early March, when another gallery seemed to disappear every few days, I opened Instagram to find Hannah Studnick’s dashboard confessional announcing that Ruby/Dakota was closing its doors. The speech wasn’t prewritten or staged – just a heartfelt message delivered from a dreary highway drive, the kind we take to mull things over, digest where our lives are headed, and reassess. Hannah turned the camera on herself, as she often does, and let the world in on who she was and what she was going through. Vulnerability isn’t unusual on Instagram, but it is in a gallerist.

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Group Shows

AAA at 90: Keep on looking

Contributed by Leslie Roberts / The exhibition “Abstract by Definition” at Art Cake celebrates the 90th anniversary of the American Abstract Artists (AAA). The show is subtitled “An Index,” but is not one in the usual sense – not, that is, an itemized set of categories, styles, intentions, or formal languages defining abstract art. Curator Saul Ostrow has instead organized groups of several works – usually four. This installation effectively highlights the particular qualities of each piece, and emphasizes the diversity of what we call contemporary abstraction.  

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Artist's Notebook

Sharon’s Substack / May 1, 2026

Contributed by Sharon Butler / A couple of weeks ago, I got a letter from Joy Amina Garnett, a friend, painter, and one of the earliest art bloggers. She stopped painting and left NYC in 2020, moved to LA, started writing a memoir about her family of intellectual Egyptian ancestors – now finished and forthcoming as The Bee Kingdom (Gaudy Boy, 2026)– and hasn’t looked back. She invited me to publish some images of my recent paintings in the Evergreen Review, where she has been the art editor for several years. Evergreen is a storied literary magazine founded in 1957 by…

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Artist's Notebook

Sharon’s Substack / April 1, 2026

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Reading Gary Garrels’ remembrance of Brice Marden in Artforum in 2023, I encountered a Rothko quote to the effect that paintings are about basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. I was not inclined to think about my work in that way, so I spent some time reading about basic human emotions, which, in my placid New England family, were generally dismissed without much examination….

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Conversation

Barbara Owen and Olivia Baldwin

On the occasion of “Slip,” Olivia Baldwin and Barbara Owen’s two-person exhibition at OVERLAP, an interesting artist-run space in Newport, RI, Two Coats of Paint invited the artists to contribute a conversation about their work. Each is engaged with personal history, found materials, and the emotional resonance of color. For both Baldwin and Owen, meaning emerges primarily through the process of making.

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Conversation

Susanna Tanger: 50 years around Mulberry Street

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / A few winters ago, in a small town upstate, I met my neighbor, the artist Susanna Tanger. She’d invited me for tea, and as we got to know each other I felt grateful to have a kindred spirit nearby. Her paintings seemed to grow from concentrated, layered planes of light, the soft colors humming and communing with river vistas framed by her studio windows. Our neighborship was brief. Susanna returned full-time to her Soho loft, where she’s lived and worked since 1975. But her short biography seemed compelling: she’d arrived in NYC in her early twenties to a burgeoning art community, maintained a studio practice, and raised two children as a single parent. I had the urge to learn more about her.

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Ideas & Influences

Artist’s Notebook: Jim Condron

In addition to his regular practice of solitary drawing, painting, and sculpture, Jim Condron is working on a project that involves an array of other artists, writers, and thinkers. The pieces produced are on display in “Collected Things,” a solo exhibition at Art Cake, through June 17. On the occasion of this charming and poignant show, _Two Coats of Paint_ invited Condron to share some of the artists, objects, and ideas that inform his work. Here’s his list.

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