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….
Tag: Long Island City
Jan Dickey: The art of breakdown
Contributed by Lucas Moran / In art, limitations often define, shape, and mold strengths. We can embrace drawbacks and spin them into gold. An impoverished de Kooning, living off ketchup packets and free coffee, turned to house paint to create some of his most compelling work. A bedridden Matisse cut paper. Scarcity, oppression, impairment – these forces have shaped the course of art history. Rather than relying on convention, Jan Dickey – investigator, tinkerer, and forager as well as painter – has immersed himself in studying how things break down, bond, and hold together. “The High Collapse,” now on view at 5-50 Gallery, is the culmination of that endeavor….
Twofer: Patrick Neal and Zach Seeger
Contributed by Sharon Butler and Jonathan Stevenson / Last month we stopped by the LIC building where Patrick Neal and Zach Seeger, two formidable painters, have studios. Both write on occasion for Two Coats of Paint, and we hadn’t seen what they’d been up to since we saw their solo shows – Zach’s “Sports” at Gold Montclair and Patrick’s “Winter was Hard” at Platform Project Space in DUMBO.
Hannah Antalek’s crystal ball: Magical and disconcerting
Contributed by Heather Drayzen / “Superseed,” Hannah Antalek’s debut NYC solo exhibition at 5-50 gallery in Long Island City, draws on our species’ overall apathy about the environment. A surreal, dream-like sensibility informs a bio-luminescent vision of nature, cumulatively derived from dioramas she constructs from recyclable materials. She pulls us into a magical but also disconcerting world. Seminal Landing, the largest work, projects a haze of cobalt blue and violet that feels both subterranean and post-apocalyptic. Antalek’s signature “daisy dupe” swollen flowers are clustered together – glowing pearl yellows, tinged with pastel pink, in lilac shadows – as they reach towards twisting branches, dripping goo, and unexplained crystalline forms nestled around them.
Nola Zirin and the march of abstraction
Contributed by Michael Brennan / It has sometimes been assumed that abstraction is unlimited in its possibilities. While that’s still broadly true, abstraction also has been exhaustively explored over the course of a century or more. All painting is organized around some kind of form. Abstraction is burdened with establishing form in the absence of figuration, the readiest and most natural source. There are only a few ways to define form without a figure – for instance, through geometry or gesture. It’s a limited playbook. Much of the success of Nola Zirin’s new paintings, on view at Mosaic Artspace in Long Island City, comes down to her bold expansion of the index of abstraction. Many are striking in their recombination of form and unusual mix of materials.
