"These works are an exploration of the human body's elasticity and capacity to metamorphose. Informed by my own experience of pregnancy and the birth of my first child last year, these paintings are a meditation on physiological transformation and the body's underlying animalistic and mammalian nature."
All but one of the song titles on Body Sound, the debut album from experimental string trio Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart, line up nicely-a few words, usually two, usually nouns, separated by a vertical line. The straight line in the middle means different things in different disciplines. In computing, it's called a 'pipe' and serves as a conduit. In poetry, it denotes a pause or break. In music, it marks the beginning and end of measures.
"Can I give you some tea as the kids say? I just moved here. Ever since I was a little kid and I got to come here for the first time I always promised myself that I would do a season or a chapter of life in the city and that season and chapter is right now. I don't know how long that's gonna last, but I'm really loving it."
It was literally the rise of the Phoenix. All these places that we knew and loved, they dissolved and died. Everybody had so much energy because we were mandated to stay in the house. When we made the announcement that we have a store, people were coming up, masking up, and they were buying shit.
I am very partial to Cha Pa's Noodle and Grill on 52nd. I love their whole menu, but particularly their pho, and the service is always incredibly fast. You can get in and out between shows with plenty of time to take a nap or wander the streets of Midtown before your evening call time.
Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.
She wrote 10 books while she was here, and that includes children's books, you know, volumes of poetry. It was a busy and bustling place back then. Lucille and her husband, Fred Clifton, had six kids running around. Neighbors were in and out. Artist friends were over constantly. But Lucille Clifton managed to carve out time and space to write.
"I have been reading your book The Lonely City: The Art of Being Alone and I wanted to write and say how very good it is," "I discovered Henry Darger's work about 15 years ago. I am so interested in how you write about him and [Edward] Hopper, [Andy] Warhol and [David] Wojnarowicz."
The new New Museum is many things: contemporary, perhaps, but also a science, history, anthropology, and many other museums in one. It echoes the desire of its patron class to own the world and its affiliated courtier class to deliver it to them on a silver platter, or encased in perforated metal, in this case.
Dealers like artists with established sales records because it lowers their already considerable financial exposure. Renting a gallery space in Tribeca costs anywhere between $8,000-30,000 a month on top of staff, marketing, and daily operations. With that kind of overhead, very few business owners can afford to take on the financial risk of untested artists.
On Franklin Street in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, one non-commercial gallery fosters 'a small, stubbornly human space for friction.' Friction—the ubiquitous buzzword that captures the simultaneous delight and discomfort of doing things the slow way—is at the heart of artists Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré's current show at Subtitled NYC. It also reflects the overall spirit of this little exhibition space and of a burgeoning movement to reject our culture of optimization in favor of a bumpier, more intimate, less alienating experience.
I wanted to translate that idea into public space, to imagine the trail as a site of encounter between visitors and works by artists whose visual language already centres otherworldly beings, creatures or ecologies. In that meeting, the strange or unfamiliar hopefully becomes a source of curiosity and interconnectedness.
Since she graduated in the late 1980s, amid the Aids crisis, Opie has made portraits of her community, friends and family, adopting unflinching realism, saturated colours, and dramatic tonal contrasts from the 16th-century portrait painters. Many of Opie's most famous portraits included in her new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery use these devices deliberately, a declaration that these people deserve, as the title of the show underlines, to be seen.
This year, we opted to sort our spring guide into categories, the better to match your mood. There are the shows everyone's talking about - big names like Duchamp and Raphael (seriously, how is this the first major survey of his in the city?), Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. There are major surveys, like the New Museum's inaugural show in its expanded building, MoMA PS1's Greater New York triennial, and of course, the Whitney Biennial.
Raw Material: The Art and Life of Susan Kleckner, on view at Haverford College's Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery through April 5, 2026, is the first comprehensive retrospective of the pioneering feminist artist, filmmaker, photographer, and performance artist. Bringing together nearly 100 works, many never before publicly exhibited, the exhibition seeks to reposition Kleckner as a foundational figure in feminist, queer, and activist art histories.
The paintings are charged with potential discomfort- from middle school angst to family dynamics. The work wrestles with the nebulous nature of memory and piecing together the past. Taylor embraces the power of sentimentality and nostalgia, but also confronts the complexity of misunderstood communication. Even shared experiences can be perceived vastly differently. By looking to the past we can begin to better understand ourselves, and those around us.
Karina Lumiere paints like someone who trusts color more than language. Her work does not whisper its intentions. It glows, pulses, seduces. This is abstraction born not from theory, but from devotiondevotion to intuition, to sensation, to the unapologetic power of hue as an emotional instrument. Her path to abstract expressionism was never academic. It unfolded in solitude, shaped by meditation and spiritual practice, where listening became more important than learning and presence eclipsed instruction.
Mornings are best for concentrated work. In the winter, I turn on the heat at 8am and get started around 10am. Summer, I start around 9am. I have two areas in the studio for projects. The large, heavy wood sculptures are carved in the front section of the studio, closest to the roll-up wide door. Smaller sculptures are placed on a hydraulic workbench. Before I start, I focus, connect with the Source, and ask for guidance.
I work outside, carving and shaping the stone. Outside my house, I have a table, an extension cord, and tools. It's very cold and I have to wear all my winter clothes. When it's too cold, I do the filing and finishing work inside after I shape it outside. I listen to all kinds of music. I listen to Eminem all the time; his albums are all my favorites. For drawings, I work at Kinngait Studios or at home on my kitchen table.
Last summer, I did face painting at a block party in my Brooklyn neighborhood. In the sweltering August humidity, I rendered pink butterflies and Spiderman webs on tiny, sticky faces; unsurprisingly, my designs didn't last very long in the bouncy castle. Except for the glitter. For weeks, I found it in my hair, on my cats, in my sink, and in random corners of the house, migrating to and fro like dandelion fuzz.
Sprouting from the roof of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, artist Rose B. Simpson's newly installed bronze sculpture "Behold" has its gaze fixed on the cityscape before it. The Tewa of Khaʼpʼoe Ówîngeh artist, herself a mother, crafted a tender portrait of an interconnected parent and child that "asks us to be human with each other, to change our narrative through wonder, witness and a foundation in the soft warmth of our humanity," she said in a statement.
