An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Contributed by Kathryn Myers / Having retired after 40 years of teaching in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Connecticut, I set out in my camper van in late December on the first of what I hope will be a series of annual winter road trips. On this inaugural journey, I decided to avoid larger cities and major highways, heading first to Arizona and California and then taking a month to meander home along the south and east coasts.
Contributed by Mark Wethli / “Edgy” is a word we commonly use to describe daring or provocative art. If anything has been a measure of artistic success in the modern era, it’s been the degree to which new art pushes the boundaries of the work that came before. The term is usually rooted in the theoretical and formal aspects of art making, but the paintings of Nora Sturges – now on view at Sarah Bouchard Gallery in Woolwich, Maine – transport us to edges of another kind…
Contributed by Adam Simon / Two galleries with a focus on abstract painting, a short walk from each other in downtown Manhattan, currently have exhibitions that share a vocabulary of basic geometric forms, directional brushwork, and an emphasis on color relationships. Both shows present the rectangle as a primary condition of most painting and the dynamic interplay of forms within the rectangle as a drama unfolding. Yet these two shows couldn’t be more different. Seeing one after the other, as I did, was a study of how affect itself, manifested through color choices and paint application, becomes a subject for abstract painting, analogous to but different from a subject for representational painting.
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / “Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945” an exhibition of more than 70 paintings and sculptures on loan from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin to the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, runs on three tracks. The first carries the art, two-thirds of which has never before been seen in the United States. The second, via informative and well-written wall texts, follows political developments in Germany during three-and-a-half fraught decades. The third consists of the imaginations of museumgoers who, like me, can’t help but see similarities between Weimar Germany in the years leading up to Hitler’s rule and America during Trump’s rise and authoritarian presidency.
Contributed by Saul Ostrow / When Ted Stamm’s career was cut short by his death at age 39 in 1984, he had already begun to attract attention in the United States and internationally. Critics including Edit deAk, Peter Frank, Robert Morgan, and Kay Larson recognized Stamm’s ability to bridge formal rigor with playful urban references. In 1975, deAk wrote in Artforum that “Stamm’s work confounds its own apparent simplicity; the shape’s tense complexity and stubborn definition of itself make it totally the artist’s like an insignia. The color is equally personal, and the painting’s presence is quietly assertive. This is certainly not the elegant nihilism of reductive solutions.” Conceptual endeavors were central to his ambition of making the border between art and everyday life porous.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Katie Butler (no relation to me as far as we know) creates vivid still life paintings that dive into the fraught realms of American politics and economics, riffing ironically on the “kitchen-table” and “bread-and-butter” issues affecting average people that political figures are supposed to address. While she establishes a journalistic sense of authenticity by sourcing her imagery from White House archives and the Ohio Statehouse, the discrepancy between reality and painted presentation raises burning questions about the veracity and integrity of the sources.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / June, academics’ favorite month, is here. I’m looking forward to checking out Smack Mellon’s“Remains to be seen,” a group show that brings together nine emerging artists whose practices find meaning in waste. Artist Austin Eddy has curated a star-studded exhibition called “A Movable Feast” at Halsey Mckay’s Greenpoint outpost. Abbey Lloyd has a solo at Ptolemy, a newish gallery in Queens. I’m looking forward to seeing some aggressive abstraction, with Iva Gueorguieva’s solo at Derek Eller and…
Contributed by Ben Godward / Meg Lipke and Jeff Williams seem to dance through the fledgling Roundabouts Now Gallery – once a medical office conference room in an industrial park – in Kingston, New York. The central collaboration comprises a large sewn and stuffed canvas with ruin-like drawings enveloping three deliciously odd sculptural objects. This union casts a pervasive spell. Pushing the interior accretion forms further into the unreal are surfaces that appear to be made of dust or remnants of ashes. Spectral in their essence but protected in the upholstered pool, they look as if they could dissolve into a pile if touched.
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / The first weekend of May is packed with shows opening and closing around the region. On Friday, May 2, “The River That Flows Both Ways: Ever Baldwin, Erika DeVries, Clarity Haynes, Portia Munson” opens at RUTHANN in Catskill. On Saturday May 3, Hudson-based Italian artist Lucio Pozzi opens at Philip Douglas Fine Art in Hudson, and “Ellon Gibbs: The Color Blue is Warm” opens at Gallery 495 in Catskill. Nearby in Hillsdale, LABspace opens two solo shows, Susan Meyer and Carlton Davis. In Kingston, “More Than Any Mirror” with Benjamin Herndon and Adie Russell opens at Headstone, and in Cold Spring, an exhibition of landscape paintings by Lisa Diebboll opens at Buster Levi. In the Catskills, Wade Kramm, Howard Schwartzberg, and Susan Silas are opening at Catskill Art Space, and a group show “Feeding Our Demons” opens at 1053 Gallery. Also on May 3, “Nature Reimagined” blooms with Rachel Burgess, KK Kozik, F Lipari and Warner Friedman opens at Bernay Fine Art in Great Barrington, MA. In Kent, CT, Carol Corey Fine Art will host an exhibition of works by legendary New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast for the gallery’s final show. Sunday, May 4 is the last chance to see three excellent exhibitions at CPW in Kingston: Mary Ellen Mark’s “Ward 81, My Sister, My Self;” Colleen Kenyon and Kathleen Kenyon, and Keisha Scarville in “Recess.” Sunday is also the last day for Amy Talluto’s solo show at the Garrison Art center. A new gallery, Ligenza Moore Gallery, is opening in Cold Spring on May 24 with a group show featuring work by Katherine Bradford, Don Voisine, Judy Pfaff, Chris Martin, Meg Hitchcock, and others.
Contributed by Mary Jones / In “Prehistory,” Randy Wray’s dazzlingly encyclopedic show at Karma in the East Village, some 37 sequential drawings map a vast exploration of investigative study. Like a library, Wray’s array offers far more material than one can take in over the course of an afternoon. But it is worth trying.
Contributed by Katy Crowe / The German noun Umwelt means environment. “ultraUMWELT,” the title of Rosy Keyser’s current solo show at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, denotes a world of dynamically connected matter. You can read a great deal into it – earth, ecosystems, subterranean root networks, and of course decay. Her work recalls biomorphic/organic abstraction, but the serendipity her process allows gives her paintings bracing and distinctive freshness.
Contributed by Zach Seeger / Dennis Congdon, whose paintings depict acrid colored heaps of art garbage, once told me, “I tend to appreciate painters who work economically with what they’re given from their surroundings. You know, like my grandmother, who lived on a farm, and would whip up a meal with practically nothing in the fridge.” I too was raised to appreciate this beauty-through-austerity approach, and in light of tariffs and stagnating sales, painting with economy and valuing actual pigment may not just be in fashion but necessary. “The Big Seed,” Eric Hibit’s painting show at Morgan Lehman, is a tribute to physical pigment and the conservationist spirit, and a showcase for acute observational detail and the sheer joy of painting.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / At first blush, Hope Gangloff’s remarkable new paintings, on view at Susan Inglett Gallery and largely set in a notional rustic retreat, could be mistaken for blown-up greeting cards for vacationing hipsters, perhaps with a sly nod to David Hockney. Pristinely applying acrylic paint, she crafts them like illustrations, and they are unabashedly luminous. But the ecstatic vibe that characteristically radiates from that quality, though present, is winkingly deceptive. While Gangloff paints friends and actively cherishes the intimate golden moment, existential concerns burn through her work.
Contributed by Will Kaplan / Curatorial collective Immaterial Projects calls its group show at The Active Space in Bushwick “The Beginning of the End.” It might seem a bit late for the beginning. We can trace the sense of perpetual crisis as far back as we like: Trump’s first term, Citizens United, the Reagan years, and farther still. But by keeping the show’s formal scope to semi-traditional paintings, Immaterial Projects captures elements of past and present alike that still smack us in the face. The show’s colors span cement and sepia, hanging along the gallery’s opposing corners to illustrate decay in both urban and natural landscapes.
Contributed by Patrick Ryan Bell / Situated in Baltimore’s Old Goucher neighborhood, art hall has rapidly established itself as a pivotal space for contemporary art. Once a Hells Angels bar, the venue has undergone a thoughtful transformation that embraces its history and urban context by way of significant international artists tailored to Charm City’s audience. In a city shaped by economic precariousness, institutional neglect, and fierce grassroots creativity, art hall presents an alternative model: serious contemporary programming without the trappings of market pressure or institutional polish. Owner and director Shawn Mudd is not looking to feed or mimic New York but instead to divert its pipeline, bringing established artists to Baltimore. Now up is Sam Anderson’s solo exhibition, “There’s a Girl in My Soup,” which features a wide range of her work. It fits the gallery: rigorous, poetic, and strange.
