May 062026
 

Detail from the center work in the image above

In Stone Formations, Kira Krell‘s exhibition at the Mezzanine Gallery in Wilmington, her large multilayered paintings and smaller delicate sculptures find a cohesive balance, much like the natural formations that inspired them.

From Mezzanine Gallery and Delaware Division of the Arts-

Stone Formations is a solo exhibition by Kira Krell that guides viewers from volcanic deserts to beautiful coastlines. Through diverse geological imagery, and weathered forms, the work traces place and time, evoking memory, endurance, and the lasting presence of landscapes once called home.

Krell’s process begins by layering sand, plaster and earth pigments to create relief-like texture paintings. Adding, subtracting, and distressing these elements is necessary to achieve surfaces that appear weathered and time-worn, in pursuit of capturing geological structures: Stone Formations. Intricate details are revealed through dry brushing and mark making techniques, using acrylic and pencils. Fascinated by natural forms and their portrayal of permanence and strength, the artist offers an impression of steadiness and belonging. This acts as a counterpoint to our fast-paced, ever-changing world. Krell invites viewers to take a moment to pause, breathe and reflect on our beautiful world.

The exhibition will be on view until 5/29/26.

Apr 102026
 

Debra Cartwright, “Marked Infertile, 1873”, 2025, watercolor and oil on canvas

Tiana McMillan, “Venus Skirt”, 2018, ceramic

Tiana McMillan, “Self portrait”, 2017, underglazed ceramic (with work by Debra Cartwright in the background)

Debra Cartwright, “Whispers of care”, 2025, watercolor, pencil, ink, and collage on paper

Debra Cartwright‘s paintings and Tiana McMillan‘s sculptures work well together in Constellations of Belonging, currently on view at The Delaware Contemporary.

From the museum’s website-

Constellations of Belonging unfolds within a moment shaped by surveillance, bodily regulation, and persistent demands that Black women be legible, visible and consumable. The body is monitored, narrated, disciplined, and asked to explain its own presence.

This exhibition considers how artists tend to their inner world under these conditions. Interiority is approached as a political and ethical practice—a site of care, imagination, and endurance beyond public demand. The exhibition takes its structure from constellations: provisional patterns drawn across distance. Belonging, here, is composed across difference, pressure,and time.

Within the gallery, this idea appears through light and weight. Darker works, anchored at a concentrated point within the gallery, function as repositories—holding what has become too heavy, too charged, or too historically burdened to remain invisible. In doing so, they allow other forms within the space to move with greater restraint and quiet, unencumbered by what has already been borne.

This distribution frames fragmentation as strategy. The body, like a constellation, is extended across multiple sites as a means of protection and care. What is held in one place reshapes what becomes possible in another.

Constellations of Belonging invites viewers to consider belonging as a continual practice –made and remade in relation, sustained through imagination, and carried collectively rather than alone.

This exhibition closes 4/26/26.

Apr 102026
 

Lindsey Cherek Waller, “Making Plans”, 2025, acrylic on stretched canvas (It was also used for the cover of the upcoming book “Girls Our Age” by Phoebe Thompson)

Perry Picasshoe, “Splitting Heaven”, 2025, oil on unstretched canvas (part of a performance piece)

Perry Picasshoe, “Splitting Heaven”, 2025 (detail)

Creative Influence(r), currently on view at The Delaware Contemporary, features work by Lindsey Cherek Waller and Perry Picasshoe, two artists who use social media platforms to increase their visibility and success.

From the museum about the exhibition-

For centuries, art museums have wielded their power to define a predictable, prescribed path for aspiring artists. An artist striving to build a career from their work traditionally starts with a formal arts education, then builds a portfolio, hoping to secure gallery representation, which will garner the attention of collectors, galleries, and museums. But since the 2010s, that has shifted. Increasingly, young and emerging artists are utilizing social media platforms to subvert the traditional routes to becoming a working artist; a path that, for many, has numerous real and perceived barriers to entry. Using social media platforms, like TikTok and Instagram, artists have found ways to circumvent the traditional hierarchy of the art world, building their own audiences and collector bases by sharing their work online for millions to discover and appreciate. By utilizing these platforms, artists have also found a way to reinvigorate art for younger generations and those who feel excluded from institutional structures, making contemporary art more accessible for all.

Lindsey Cherek Waller and Perry Picasshoe built their artistic career on social media platforms where their art is activism. Their public artwork has protested ICE abductions, it has protected queer virtual and physical queer spaces, and has raised funds to support causes important to them. These artists are only two of many who are redefining “success in the art world”, their success comes directly from their fearlessness and advocacy for their work and communities.

Creative Influence(r) is on view until 4/26/26.

Apr 092026
 

Thea Abu El-Haj, “Architecture of Exile”, 2023, oil on board

Rayan Elnayal, “The courtyard lit up-Al Hoash Nawar”, 2023, digital print

Shira Walinsky’s installation

For This Place Meant at The Delaware Contemporary, artists Thea Abu El-Haj, Rayan Elnayal, and Shira Walinsky each present work that reflects aspects of what home means to them.

From the museum about the exhibition-

This Place Meant explores how three artists think about and imagine home when they are far from it. Each artist explores their lived or past relationship with the place they call home and where they are now. Thea Abu El-Haj remembers the home she once knew, Rayan Elnayal imagines a home she hopes to know, and Shira Walinsky shares the home she knows with new neighbors. If you were forced to leave your home, whether to be closer to family, to find a better life, to escape natural disasters or political trouble, how would you share memories from where you once lived? What parts of that place would you describe: the colors, the smells, the sounds?

We hope you tell them what that place meant to you.

Below are some additional works and the artist bios from The Delaware Contemporary’s website.

Paintings by Thea Abu El-Haj

As a Palestinian American artist, Thea’s work excavates personal and collective narratives of loss, exile, and resistance, even as it celebrates the beauty and joy around us. She is drawn to the imprint of human history on the natural landscape. Growing up in the Middle East, the colors, quality of light, and traces of millennia of human presence continue to resonate through her work, even as the landscapes of the Northeastern U.S. where she has lived her adult life influence what she paints. Buildings and stone walls in the process of decay; light coming through dark and dark through light; the quality of color at different times of day are all sources for her work.

Digital prints by Rayan Elnayal

Rayan Elnayal is a Sudanese artist, designer, and educator based in London, with a background in architecture. In 2020, she transitioned from traditional practice to an alternative one that fosters a more equitable and creative approach to design but also nurtures her artistic pursuits. She is also the co-founder and director of Space Black, a collective of Black professionals in the built environment, dedicated to imagining alternative spatial futures for marginalised communities.

Her pieces invite viewers to step into these imagined spaces and explore them. Her work challenges us to reflect on our personal attitudes toward futurism and futuristic aesthetics, while reminding us that our envisioned future built environments can honour our heritages, communities, and shared joy.

Shira Walinsky is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher. Her work centers on people and places in the City of Philadelphia. She has worked in Philadelphia for 20 years on murals, paintings, photography, films and other public participatory work. The map can be a portrait of places and the face a map of our experiences. She is interested in how the vibrant and the sensory can amplify the stories of people and place. This manifests in bus wraps, films, photography, painting and murals. In 2012 she co-founded Southeast by Southeast with Mural Arts Philadelphia. Southeast by Southeast is a community space co-created with social workers and artists and community leaders for and with refugee and immigrant communities. Shira strives to create innovative projects which elevate the resilience of immigrant and refugee stories.

This exhibition, part of the museum’s Winter/Spring exhibitions, closes on 4/26/26.

Apr 032026
 

“American Pastorale”, 2016, Acrylic, latex, glitter on linen

“American Pastorale”, 2016 (detail)

American Pastorale, by Elisabeth Condon, part of the Tampa Museum of Art‘s permanent collection, is currently on view in the museum’s group exhibition Avant Garde: Remarkable Women in the Permanent Collection.

From the museum about the work-

The foliage growing near her Tampa studio, traditional Chinese scroll painting, vintage fabrics, and wallpaper samples inspire Elisabeth Condon’s paintings of tropical flora. She often isolates an object or pattern from these source materials and incorporates it as a central image or texture in her paintings. In American Pastorale, a chrysanthemum anchors the painting. To create various layers in this work, Condon applied color with expressive brushwork and poured paint directly onto the canvas. The artist’s palette of intense reds, oranges, and pinks, as well as cooler blues and greens, evokes Florida and Southern California’s vibrant landscapes. Iridescent glitter adds texture and luminosity to the surface.

Feb 272026
 

Pictured is one of Nick Cave‘s Soundsuits, created using found fabrics and metal and wood toys. It was on view at Columbus Museum of Art in 2024.

From the museum about the work-

Nick Cave’s Soundsuits are sculptural costumes, some of which were made to be worn, others to remain stationary. Although these suits often appear whimsical and joyful, they also respond to suffering and injustice. Cave created his first suit in response to the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers in 1991, an event that focused attention on discriminatory policing and racial profiling. Reflecting the artist’s lived experience as an African American man, the Soundsuits camouflage the wearer’s body, concealing markers of race, gender, and class.

In the Art21 video below you can see some of his Soundsuits in motion. He studied with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and that influence can be seen here as well.

Art 21-Nick Cave in Chicago- Season 8

Cave’s latest exhibition, Mammoth, recently opened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. and will be on view until January of 2027.

About that show from SAAM-

In Mammoth, Cave remakes the museum’s galleries into an immersive environment marked by the crafted hides and bones of mammoths, a video projection of the long-dead animals come to life, and hundreds of transformed found objects—from vintage tools to his grandmother’s thimble collection—presented like paleontological specimens on a massive light table. By showcasing the ordinary and often forgotten bits and pieces of the world we live in, Cave’s work shines light on what we value and how we make meaning together. It evokes the lives and cultures we have lost, as well as the magical possibilities of a universe created through imagination and the humblest of materials.

Focused on the fundamental connections between people and their environment, Cave asks how we can begin to make sense of our relationship with a landscape that continues to evolve. How might we adapt, persevere, even thrive? As the contemporary world increasingly challenges what it means to be human, Cave envisions a space of both grief and possibility.

 

Feb 132026
 

Currently on view at Philadelphia International Airport, It’s A Wrap 2, brightens a section of the airport with art work and installations by several local artists.

Included in this post are works by Nicole Nicolich (pictured above), Tim Eads of Tuft the World, Olivia Chiaravalli, and on the ceiling tiles- work by Miriam Singer and Eurhi Jones.

From the airport about the exhibition

This exhibition features work by Philadelphia area artists who were invited to create unique architectural interventions within the Airport terminal. Using yarn, fabric, felt, found objects, tape, paint, wheat paste, and wood, the artists applied their work to the ceiling tiles, columns, rockers, walls, walkway, and windows. They have visually transformed this location into an immersive and experiential art-filled passageway.

The artists responded to the existing architectural elements to create an unexpected visual experience and an engaging space for people to pass through. It is a form of urban interventionism where art activates the built environment with the intention to see a public space in a new and creative way.

Work by Tim Eads of Tuft the World

Olivia Chiaravalli, “Brick by Brick”

Miriam Singer, “Dreamliner”

Eurhi Jones, “Tinicum”

Feb 062026
 

Giorgio de Chirico, “Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire”,1914, Oil and charcoal on canvas

René Magritte, “The Secret Double”, 1927, Oil on Canvas

Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents a large collection of works, in a variety of mediums, from the artistic movement. The show takes you through Surrealism’s history and is filled with many inventive and imaginative pieces- including several from lesser-known artists.

From the museum about the exhibition-

Surrealism burst onto the scene in Paris in 1924. French writer André Breton announced the aims of this revolutionary literary and artistic movement in his Manifesto of Surrealism. It started with a question: How, ideally, should we live? Breton observed that, at about twenty years of age, we make the error of trading our childlike imaginations for adult good sense and logic. Yet it’s the imagination that allows access to the innate state of freedom that we all possess. And maintaining freedom, Breton proposed, should always be the highest human aspiration.

Surrealism’s ambitions were broad and bold: its adherents wanted nothing less than a revolution in consciousness. To that end, they explored a method of experimental poetry called automatic writing, comparable to spoken free association, done spontaneously and, as far as possible, without conscious intent. Sigmund Freud’s theories about the role of the unconscious and the interpretation of dreams were an important inspiration. The Surrealists looked to access the unconscious mind to break free from the constraining rationality of the modern world.

Visual artists were part of the Surrealist movement from the start. They took up surprising and often challenging subject matter, imagery, and techniques across many mediums: painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, book illustration and design, and film. In Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100, we explore how, from the movement’s 1920s beginnings through the 1950s, these trailblazing artists made good on Surrealism’s revolution in consciousness.

The exhibition is split into six categories- Waking Dream which features Surrealism’s beginnings in the 1920s, Natural History, focused on the influence of nature, Desire, Premonition of War, Exiles, and Magic Art, which focuses on the new type of esotericism that emerged within Surrealism in the aftermath of World War II.

Lee Miller’s photographs of natural rock formations

Salvador Dalí, “Aphrodisiac Telephone” 1938, Plastic, metal

From the museum about Aphrodisiac Telephone, one of the artworks in the Desire section

Salvador Dalí likened the Surrealist object, which uses found items, as a symbolic creation with improbable juxtapositions, comparable to poetry and sexual perversion. He applied this idea in Aphrodisiac Telephone. Its basis is the substitution of a lobster— a real lobster in the sculpture’s first iteration for display in 1938, a factitious lobster in white plastic for the editioned version —for a similarly shaped telephone handset. The title alludes to the lobster’s reputation as an aphrodisiac when eaten.

Max Ernst, “The Fireside Angel (The Triumph of Surrealism)”, 1937, Oil on canvas

From the museum about the Max Ernst painting above, from the Premonition of War section-

Ernst painted The Fireside Angel (The Triumph of Surrealism) to protest the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War as well as the defeat of the Republican side. But this depiction of a rampaging bird-headed beast also served as an allegorical reflection on the nature of evil. Ernst exhibited this painting as The Triumph of Surrealism — a despairingly ironic title given the situation in Europe — at the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris.

During World War II many European artists escaped to New York City and Mexico. The Exiles section features works by these artists, as well as Mexican (like Roberto Montenegro pictured below) and American artists whose work could also be seen as part of the Surrealist movement.

Roberto Montenegro, “The Double”, 1938, Oil on panel

The last section of the exhibition Magic Art, focuses on the increase in post-war interest in supernatural themes. There was also a room devoted to the work of artist friends Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, who had moved to Mexico during the war.

Leonora Carrington, “And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur”, 1953, Oil on canvas

Remedios Varo, “Creation of the Birds”, 1957, Oil on Masonite

This exhibition is on view until 2/16/25.

Dec 222025
 

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born today, December 22nd, in 1960. The painting above, Untitled (1981) is currently on view at The Broad in Los Angeles.

From the museum about this work-

Many of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings are in some way autobiographical, and Untitled may be considered a form of self-portraiture. The skull here exists somewhere between life and death. The eyes are listless, the face is sunken in, and the head looks lobotomized and subdued. Yet there are wild colors and spirited marks that suggest a surfeit of internal activity. Developing his own personal iconography, in this early work Basquiat both alludes to modernist appropriation of African masks and employs the mask as a means of exploring identity. Basquiat labored over this painting for months — evident in the worked surface and imagery — while most of his pieces were completed with bursts of energy over just a few days. The intensity of the painting, which was presented at his debut solo gallery exhibition in New York City, may also represent Basquiat’s anxieties surrounding the pressures of becoming a commercially successful artist.

In the video below (also from The Broad) LeVar Burton discusses the work and its possible connection to Basquiat’s childhood and family.

Dec 182025
 

Work by Mel Rosen (sculpture) and Stass Shpanin (mural, video, and paintings)

Detail from Stass Shpanin’s “Dance of Birth” animated video

Ceramic sculptures by Mel Rosen

Paintings by Stass Shpanin

The Delaware Contemporary is currently showing three exhibitions as part of its 2025 Biennial  Art + AI programming. This post covers two of them, the third is here.

Construct | Disrupt: Artificial Intelligence as Tool and Material features work by artists Mel Rosen, Stass Shpanin, Sol Kim, and Mark Burchick.

From the museum about the exhibition-

In an age when reality itself feels unstable—filtered through algorithms, fragmented by digital archives, and refracted through competing narratives—artists are increasingly turning to the tools of fiction and speculation not to obscure the truth, but to question how we construct it. Construct | Disrupt brings together the work of Mel Rosen, Sol Kim, Stass Shpanin, and Mark Burchick, four artists who use artificial intelligence, language, and archival material to explore the porous boundaries between perception, memory, and belief.

Across diverse practices—from ceramics, drawing, and painting to video, installation, and text—these artists engage with AI not as a replacement for the hand, but as a provocateur, a co-conspirator, and a mirror to the human imagination. Rather than seeking resolution or certainty, their works open up space for doubt, complexity, and contradiction.

Together, the artists in Construct | Disrupt invite us to consider how we construct meaning in a world where the archive is no longer fixed and where the image can be endlessly generated. The work of these artists does not offer answers, but rather asks: What do we trust? What do we remember? And how do we decide what is worth believing?

About the two artists pictured above, from the museum-

Stass Shpanin engages history as a space of imaginative reconstruction. Working with visual fragments from American folk traditions and immigrant archives, he uses AI to distort and reconfigure the past, generating speculative images that blend glitch, myth, and memory. His paintings and drawings present broken, layered timelines where visual language is both preserved and interrupted. Rather than restoring a singular truth, Shpanin’s work embraces the possibility of many coexisting histories—ones shaped as much by fantasy as by fact, as much by the digital as the ancestral.

Mel Rosen’s practice draws from archaeology, natural history, and personal memory to create objects and images that feel both ancient and otherworldly. Her use of AI image generation allows her to iterate quickly, mutating prompts based on her own drawings and a mental library of organic and cultural references—from Pompeian frescoes and fossils to barnacles and talismans. The resulting images feed back into her ceramics and drawings, where mythic forms and geometric distortions coexist in a suspended cosmology. Rosen’s work suggests that artifacts—whether material or digital—are always evolving, reshaped by time, environment, and interpretation.

Still from the video “Person Enough” by Sol Kim

Sol Kim (video still above) approaches language as a material form, using words to subtly disrupt social and technological systems. Her works often begin with a textual prompt—an instruction, label, or survey—that gives rise to absurd, humorous, or quietly unsettling performances. In The Cookiest Cookie, cookies are judged and destroyed by AI based on their perceived “cookie-ness,” while in Person Enough?, performers attempt to become more legibly “human” to computer vision systems. Through these gestures, Kim reveals the tensions between human nuance and machine classification, exposing the strange logic that governs our interactions with technology—and with one another.

Mark Burchick Installation

Images from Mark Burchick’s “Felt Presence”

Mark Burchick’s Felt Presence explores the intersection of faith, media, and artificial intelligence through the lens of Catholic mysticism. Drawing on archival photographs from the 1917 “Miracle of the Sun” in Fatima, Portugal, Burchick trains AI models to generate photorealistic images of miracles that were never captured on film. Presented alongside historical documentation and witness testimony, these fabricated scenes invite viewers to question the boundaries between belief, evidence, and visual truth—highlighting the unseen technological, institutional, and spiritual forces that shape our perception of reality.

In NOO Icons, Burchick expands this inquiry through an immersive video installation framed like a reliquary. A five-minute rear-projected loop, trained on over 100 images of stained glass Rose Windows, morphs into abstract color fields via AI animation. At its center is a 3D-printed altar piece generated using DreamFusion, a text-to-3D tool prompted to create a “solar monstrance.” The resulting object—gold-finished, internally lit, and housing Lithium batteries—evokes both the Communion host and a technological relic. As Kate Crawford notes in Atlas of AI, Lithium is a sacred yet finite resource driving modern AI. By encasing it in plastic and low-res form, Burchick critiques the planned obsolescence and ecological cost of our AI-powered age, reframing divine presence through the lens of material decay.

In another of the museum’s galleries is- Reimagine | Reveal: Challenging the Algorithmic Gaze featuring work by Danielle Glovin, Stephanie Dinkins, and Leah Modigliani.

About the show from the museum-

The works covering this exhibition theme approach AI not as a neutral instrument, but as a complex cultural system—one that reflects, amplifies, and at times distorts the values of its makers. Through the intersecting strategies of critique, reimagination, and bias exposure, Danielle Glovin, Stephanie Dinkins, and Leah Modigliani probe the systems—algorithmic, archival, social—that dictate what is preserved, who is recognized, and how knowledge circulates.

Together, these artists ask urgent questions: Who trains the algorithm? Whose histories are encoded, and whose are left out? What does it mean to build an intelligence—and who is it built for? In doing so, they model a critical engagement with AI, one that challenges default narratives, centers marginalized perspectives, and opens up space for new possibilities. Their practices call us to reconsider what it means to know, to remember, and to be recognized in a world increasingly shaped by invisible systems of intelligence.

Stephanie Dinkins’ interactive sculpture Not The Only One (N’TOO)

Stephanie Dinkins’ “Conversations with Bina48” (back wall) and Leah Modigliani’s AI generated letters for “Cultural Capital”

From Danielle Glovin’s series “Future Generations”

About the artists’ work pictured above-

Stephanie DinkinsNot The Only One (N’TOO) and Conversations with Bina48 extend this inquiry into the realm of relational AI, specifically that of minority groups in the tech sector. In N’TOO, an interactive sculpture gives voice to the oral histories of three generations of Black women, creating an AI entity intentionally designed, trained, and aligned with their values and lived experiences. It is a poignant reversal: instead of AI extracting meaning from biased data sets, Dinkins encodes her AI, reorienting the goals of intelligence design toward inclusivity and equal representation.

In Conversations with Bina48, Dinkins engages in an evolving dialogue with one of the world’s most advanced humanoid robots- probing the limits of kinship, consciousness, and identity. The recorded exchanges navigate tensions between human and machine, emotion and algorithm, intimacy and abstraction—underscoring the urgency of developing AI systems coded to reflect the full richness and diversity of human stories, cultures, and embodied experiences.

Leah Modigliani’s Cultural Capital offers a satirical yet incisive intervention into the circuits of artistic legitimacy. Through a fictional archive of AI-generated letters of recommendation and rejection—authored in the mimicked voices of historical critics and curators—Modigliani reveals how the rhetoric of value and genius in the art world is both constructed and recursively reinforced. The project uses generative tools to lay bare the biases embedded in cultural gatekeeping, drawing attention to the ways AI might amplify inherited hierarchies under the guise of neutrality.

Danielle Glovin’s Future Generations presents AI-generated reinterpretations of inherited family photographs, exposing the mechanics of machine vision and the flattening effects of automated classification. By transposing Midjourney text outputs onto her photographs, Glovin literalizes the collision between personal history and digital taxonomy. The result is a visual language at once familiar and estranged—where nostalgia meets simulation, and memory is rewritten through the aesthetics of machine learning.

These exhibitions will close on 12/28/25.