Tag: Sharon Butler

Biennial

Doomscrolling 3-D IRL: The 2026 Whitney Biennial

Contributed by Sharon Butler / The Whitney Biennial 2026 has a knack for knocking the human project, wistfully and ruefully examining the past, and planting dread about the future. Curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, with Beatriz Cifuentes and Carina Martinez, made 300 studio visits, ultimately winnowing the roster down to 56 artists, duos, and collectives. The curators’ definition of what is “American” is expansive; the artists’ birthplaces span the globe, and many have settled in the US after fleeing wars and other forms of political turmoil….

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Gallery shows Resident Artist

Two Coats Resident Artist: Stephanie McMahon, March 8-13, 2026

Contributed by Sharon Butler / This March I am delighted to welcome Stephanie McMahon to the Two Coats of Paint Residency Program. Stephanie lives and works in Alfred, New York, where she is a professor at SUNY Alfred and co-founder of the Alfred/Düsseldorf MFA in Painting and Residency Program. Up in Western New York, she is surrounded by an unruly and tangled 17+ acres of forests, fields, and ravines. While her rural environment has informed her paintings, it is the visual form of the twisting branches, leaf shapes, and shifting color that most fascinates her. Stephanie’s primary interest is the activity of painting itself.

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Group Shows Interviews

palladium/Athena Project: Democratizing art

Contributed by Mary Shah / Greg Lindquist and Theresa Dadezzio, co-founders of palladium/Athena Project, just opened their inaugural show, “Works on Paper,” featuring an impressive 175+ artists at their new curatorial space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I sat down and talked with Theresa and Greg about the project.

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Solo Shows

Alan Butler: Data-driven

Contributed by Sharon Butler / In “Assets,” on view at Green on Red Gallery in Dublin through December 13, Alan Butler – no relation – practices what could be called digital-age synesthesia, the neurological quirk by which the senses get their wires crossed. Synesthetes may taste color or see it as numbers. While Kandinsky had the insight and talent to create arguably the first Western abstract paintings by translating music into painting, Butler has taken on a distinctly twenty-first-century project: transforming open-source digital information – stock quotes, climate data, video game coding, and other assorted online effluvia – into playful physical objects that directly engage the senses.

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Artist's Notebook

Sharon’s Substack / December 4, 2025

Contributed by Sharon Butler / A few days after the final 2025 Two Coats of Paint Resident Artist left, I packed a bag and tagged along with the editor on a short trip to Dublin. He had a non-art-related conference, and I so I walked around the city, admiring countless wool tweeds and hand-knit sweaters, checking out art, and catching up with friends. When we got back, he wrote about Stephanie Deady’s painting show at Kevin Kananvaugh, and I tackled Alan Butler’s mind-spinning data-driven spectacle at Green on Red.

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Group Shows

Spring Projects’ epic subway series

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Most New Yorkers couldn’t live without the subway. It is their savior if occasionally their oppressor. They love it so much that they hate it when it lets them down, but the opprobrium is often oddly affectionate. Barroom arguments have fulminated and flourished over which subway line is worse – the F or the 7, the 2 or the L. Patronizing the subway can be a point of gritty cosmopolitan pride: real New Yorkers don’t use Uber. And it’s a great social equalizer, as reflected in Ralph Fasanella’s 1950 folk-art painting Subway Riders, now ensconced in the wall of 53rd Street/Fifth Avenue Station and as idealistic as ever. “Subway Riders” the group show is now up at Springs Projects. It keenly captures the subway’s pervasive, multivalent thrum through New York life with work by over 100 artists and a few eager amateurs (one is me).

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Solo Shows

Paul Feeley: When paintings want to be sculptures

Contributed by Sharon Butler / “Paul Feeley: The Shape of Things” is Garth Greenan Gallery’s fourth solo exhibition for the painter, who died in 1966. But it is the first to ask – and answer – what happened when Feeley, known for re-introducing geometry to post-war abstraction, grew tired of his signature style. This show at last gives proper attention to Feeley’s drive to move beyond the flatness of the canvases he had been producing for years.

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Resident Artist

Two Coats Resident Artist: Lawre Stone, October 20 – 27

Contributed by Sharon Butler / On October 20, Two Coats of Paint welcomes Lawre Stone from the countryside near Hudson, New York. She is aesthetically as well as socially concerned with ecological displacement and how species adapt, invade, and persist in landscapes reshaped by human intervention. Her paintings reveal the hidden-in-plain-sight world of botanical life.

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Resident Artist

Two Coats Resident Artist: Alice Pixley Young, October 12–17

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.

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