An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Contributed by Katy Crowe / “Significant Properties,” the title of Mary Jones’s current exhibition at as-is.la and her first in Los Angeles in some years, aptly suggests real estate worth seeing. Los Angeles is rich in such properties, and the cinematic allusions in her paintings are also broadly resonant of Tinsel Town, where Jones lived, worked, and showed before she moved to New York.
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 Mary Jones / One of many pleasures in “Mashups,” Nancy Evans’s show at Sargent’s Daughters, is the sensation of immersive color. Eight abstract paintings, all 26 x 20 inches, reverberate softly with veils of translucent gradients and undulating organic form. The work is grounded in American Modernism, and a baseline of particular influences come to mind: Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keefe, Charles Burchfield, and, as a watercolorist, Helen Frankenthaler. But Evans finds her own domain through a mediated technical process that generates luminous depth.
Contributed by Mary Jones / Katy Crowe returns to as-is.la with “Lunar Shift,” a superb second show of eleven lively and resonant abstract paintings. All are oil on linen works completed within the last year, six of them 52 x 42 inches and five 24 x 18 inches. A strikingly linear installation puts two opposing walls of the gallery into play, with the paintings equally spaced. The formality of the presentation underscores the dichotomy between window and object inherent in all paintings but Crowe’s especially, and brings out buoyant rhythms from painting to painting.
Contributed by Mary Jones / Allen-Golder Carpenter’s debut NYC show, “To Dream of Smoke,” examines the aesthetics of hip-hop culture as a window into “masculinity, pride, posturing, incarceration, censorship and social programming.” A gender non-conforming interdisciplinary artist, activist, and poet born in Washington, DC, in 1999, Carpenter’s view is personal and close to home. Their work centers on rap music as a vibrant expression of Black culture, including the discomfiting relationship rap often has to violence as a statement of manhood, and the subsequent trap of prison. Carpenter explores the unrealistic expectations that many young Black people develop when drawn to an aesthetic that glamorizes violence, money, and fame. They deliver a complex message with the brutal declarations of an activist, but also the compassion of a poet.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / This month, Marian Goodman has opened her new space in Tribeca—a thoughtfully renovated building at 385 Broadway. Just nearby, at 394 Broadway on the third floor, Pierogi Gallery, a longtime staple in Williamsburg, is marking its 30th anniversary with a pop-up exhibition. The show features works by numerous represented artists, along with selections…
Welcome to the early edition of our October painting-centric gallery guide. Later in the month we will be updating the list with more exhibitions that open in the second half of the month. Galleries that would like their shows considered for inclusion should send a note to…
Painting-centric guide to exhibitions in NYC galleries
What to see: This month, on the Lower East Side, we recommend Two Coats contributor Riad Miad’s solo show at Equity Gallery and Chris Dorland’s show at Lyles & King. In Brooklyn, look for Jessica Weiss at 490 Atlantic, and note that Sheila Pepe has curated a show at Platform Project Space that opens March 2. We’ve never been to Field of Play in Gowanus, so we’re going to try to get over there to see Hopscotch, with Alyson Ainsworth, Kat Chamberlin, and Leonora Loeb. CLEARING is opening a new space at 260 Bowery at the end of the month, with a big group show called “Maiden Voyage.” In Chelsea, who can resist “Ass Backwards,” philisophical wise-ass David Humphrey’s latest at Fredericks & Freiser? And we’ll try not to forget Josephine Halvorson’s “Unforgotten,” which opens at Sikkima Jenkins on March 17. The news from our neighbors in the global art world is that Gerhard Richter, who left Marian Goodman Gallery last year, is having his inaugural show at Zwirner this month, featuring “new and recent abstract works.”
There is a bit of urgency to get out and see some shows in the next few weeks because it looks like we might be […]
The galleries are reopening and polite viewers, social-distanced and masked, are emerging, eager to run into one another and talk about what we’ve all just […]
Despite the distraction of the art fairs, March must be a good month to present�exhibitions. Several gallerists and former gallerists are stepping out from behind […]
February is a short month, which makes visiting�all the shows that much harder, but before the onslaught of NYC art fairs��in March (the�6th through 10th),�try […]
Contributed by Mary Jones / Veteran Los Angeles artist Nancy Evans is bringing an installation of sculpture, painting and works on paper to Two Coats of […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / We were born several years apart, but James Rauchman and I have the same severe late-February birthday. Babies born in the northeast […]
