The curators of Greater New York really captured the energy of the city well - not the out-of-towner's New York with its glossy surfaces, brands, and trendy fare, but the gritty New York that's always in the process of formation, that rejects surface in favor of rawness.
Inframundo invites visitors to look inward and become a rock, drawing on the landscape shaped by cenotes, which are thought to be portals to the Maya underworld.
Pilar Zeta builds environments like dreams that feel like stepping into a thought mid-formation. Her sculptural works take shape in the form of portals and objects that invite direct engagement, as visitors are invited to walk through them and notice subtle shifts in perception.
Much of Instagram's video content is organized around transformation-the virtual magic of the before-and-after and clips that show cause and effect. A person makes pasta from scratch in 20 seconds via edits that compress time-intensive labor.
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.
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.
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.
