May 212025
 

The Delaware Contemporary is currently showing several exhibitions that reflect on the theme of the dinner table. In one room Nicole Nikolich has created the installation Can I Please Eat In The Computer Room Tonight? which includes an old Macintosh desktop computer surrounded by her colorful textile pieces. The work evokes the nostalgia of a childhood spent eager to be on the computer, even in its then limited capabilities.

From the museum about the installation-

The dinner table is a place of routine and tradition, the daily ritual of which can consist of eating, sharing, and storytelling. However, the dining room is not always the location for eating a meal. Food can be served on the sofa in front of the TV or outside under the stars, and in Nicole Nikolich’s experience, these special occasions were spent in her computer room. Seeking solace as a young teen, there was an excitement in experiencing space and time alone. Nikolich reclaims this memory, reflecting on nostalgic moments through her textile practice.

Nikolich’s artistic interests varied until she taught herself how to crochet; a medium that combined her intrinsic interest in color and texture. Based in Philadelphia, she was jointly inspired by street art and the ever-increasing yarn bombing movement and so took her developing techniques to her surroundings. These early experimentations eventually led to larger projects and commissions; enabling opportunities to further explore the medium on an increased scale. Her bright colors, varied textures, and whimsical designs explode on different surfaces and in all types of environments.

Can I Please Eat In The Computer Room Tonight? is a site-specific installation in response to Nikolich’s sensorial memories, her retelling of these early moments of youth. Combining both two and three-dimensional textiles, Nikolich inserts her audience into a youthful memory that is both individually personal and collectively reflective. The space is transformed by Nikolich’s signature experimental style and bold color, constructing a portal into a textile explosion. In doing so, the installation offers audiences an opportunity to reimagine their adolescent abandon; those remembrances in which routine breaks and adventure begins.

And from Nikolich-

Can I Please Eat In The Computer Room Tonight? explores the positive and transformative view of tech from a preteens perspective growing up in the early aughts. This installation is a memorial to this fever dream of a time period where you could only access the internet in a specifically designated computer room, often decorated in brown hues and overstuffed with knickknacks and office supplies. This space, an escape to another part of your life, often felt like an oasis to explore who you were becoming for the first time without the microscope and confinements of adults and societal expectations. Swapping sandboxes for CD-ROM games and mixed tapes. Inside jokes with friends in chat rooms and staying up until way too late messaging your crush in your own secret language. Taking selfies on the front facing camera and looking at yourself in a slightly different way for the first time. Learning about yourself and the world all from the glow of a little square box in the middle of a little square room.

This exhibition will close on 5/25/25.

May 092025
 

The images above are from Saya Woolfalk‘s exhibition The Woods Woman Method at Susan Inglett Gallery this past March.

From the gallery about this show-

The Woods Woman Method is the newest manifestation of the artist’s ongoing exploration of hybrid identity, accomplished through an elaborate fiction inspired by her own family background. Combining elements of African American, Japanese, and European cultures with allusions to anthropology, feminist theory, science fiction, Eastern religion, and fashion, Woolfalk depicts the story of a chimeric species she names the Empathics, botanic humanoid beings with a highly evolved ability to understand the experiences of others.

The Woods Women, a secret society of forest dwellers, first emerged within Woolfalk’s Empathic Universe, as she prepared for her solo exhibition at the Newark Museum of Art in 2021.  While an Artist-in-Residence at the Museum from 2019 to 2021, she closely engaged with its renowned Herbarium and Hudson River School collections, leading to her reimagining of the earth and sky as she considered the “speculative fictions” of these idealized American landscapes, and her consideration of indigenous North American creation myths, oral histories of the descendants of enslaved Africans, and their uses of medicinal plants.

The exhibition features drawings, prints, mixed-media collages, sculpture, and video. Among the works on view are Birthing a New Sky: Starship Moon Cycle (2022), an inspired visualization of the artist’s sister, sitting in a lotus position, anticipating the birth of her daughter. Woolfalk writes:

“For a new sky to be born she must split herself into a million pieces. Each cell in her body replicates itself, spinning in twirling orbits. Her atomized insides burst apart, cascading into the void around her. Swirling and churning, one cell makes its way back to her center, where her heart had been. This brave new life expands, forcing its way out as new light, new land – a new sky.”

Other highlights include the landscape collages, Birthing a New Sky: Manuscripts 3 and 4 (2021),and 5 and 6 (2022),  in which Woolfalk posits an alternative American creation myth. While appearing to be simple abstractions, these works are quite complex, composed of hundreds of intricately pieced and layered elements created from handmade Japanese papers that she has painted and stained with watercolor and gouache, Japanese silver foil, and acrylic medium.

The series of large-scale prints, The Four Virtues (2017) depict the physical embodiments of Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance, qualities that are vital to the ethos of her world.

The exhibition was held in advance of Woolfalk’s mid-career survey at the Museum of Arts and DesignSaya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe, curated by Alexandra Schwartz. That exhibition includes multimedia installations paintings, sculptures, performance, and works on paper created during the past twenty years and will be on view until 9/7/25.

May 032025
 

Bradley Hoffer’s works in the foreground, Michael McLoughlin’s photos on the wall behind

Images to the left and right by photographer Mike McLoughlin

Asbury Park in New Jersey is most famous for its music scene, but recently murals and other artworks are adding another reason to visit this seaside town. Many of these pieces would not exist without the hard work of local Jenn Hampton, who started the Wooden Walls Project in 2015. The collaborative arts initiative has worked on numerous projects in the area with local artists and others from farther afield.

One of these projects is New Jersey photographer Mike McLoughlin‘s Art Lives Here- a series of portraits of local arts community members. Each portrait is based on a famous work of art. All of them can be found here.

Below are a few of the murals and works created in collaboration with Wooden Walls. They are located around Asbury Park Boardwalk‘s Historic Steam Plant building and the Carousel Casino Complex. They include works by Porkchop and Bradley Hoffer who currently have a joint exhibition on view at The Art Spot.

Hearts by Amberella, work by Tina Schwarz and mural by Keya Tama

Mural by Keya Tama

Work by ONEQ (@negiyakisoba)

Work by Joe Iurato (left) and Beau Stanton (right)

Ray Geary “St. Shadi and the Madd Doggs” Pigmented resin on board

Work by Pau Quintanajornet (@artofpau)- “Yemaya and her Sea Birds”

Mural is by Porkchop and Bradley Hoffer

Mural by Porkchop of Yemaya

May 032025
 

Currently at The Art Spot in Asbury Park are the incredible cardboard creations of multi-disciplinary artists Michael La Vallee (aka Porkchop) and Bradley Hoffer for Anti AI: A 2025 Cardboard Odyssey. Along with the exhibitions, the gallery also serves as a studio for La Vallee and a shop selling items by him and others, including a large section of modified clothing items.

Outside of the gallery are two large murals, pictured below. The first is by Porkchop and Hoffer and the second is by artists Joe Iurato and Logan Hicks.

Mural by Porkchop and Bradley Hofffer

Mural by Joe Iurato and Logan Hicks (with Bradley Hoffer section from the previous mural)

This show is on view until May 8th, 2025.

Apr 252025
 

Work by Roger Halligan

Work by Jan Chenoweth

While visiting Lake City, South Carolina for ArtFields one must see gallery is Chenoweth. Halligan Studios. The gallery showcases the work of artists Roger Halligan and Jan Chenoweth who relocated to the area from Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2019. In addition to being a gallery, it is also a working studio with an outdoor sculpture space.

During ArtFields and other events the gallery is open to the public, but they are also available by appointment.

Work by Roger Halligan

Work by Roger Halligan

Work by Jan Chenoweth

Apr 252025
 

Mural by Donald Walker

ArtFields Community Mural by Jessica Diaz, Morgan Funkhouser, Olivia Cramer, Sam Ogden

Today’s flashback is to 2021 and a trip to Lake City, South Carolina to check out ArtFields.  Started in 2013, the event is a wonderful example of how the arts can revitalize local economies.

So what is ArtFields? Every year for one week local businesses and galleries host works created by artists from the Southeastern United States for a competition with prizes totaling over $145,000. There are also two People’s Choice Awards which are determined by the attendees of the festival. The other awards are chosen by a panel of art professionals. Special events take place throughout the week and ArtFields Jr. offers a chance to see work by South Carolina students.

This year the event runs from April 25th to May 3rd, 2025. Even if you can’t make it, it’s worth taking a look here at this year’s artwork as well as from past years.

Below are a few selections from 2021-

Mural by Lance Turner

“From This Moment Forward” by Herman A. Keith Jr. inspired by Gee’s Bend Quilters

Partially finished mural by Broderick Flanigan honoring Lake City educators Elouise Cooper and Derrick Faison.

“7 Red Wolves” by Joann Galarza Vega

About the work from the above by Joann Galarza Vega

“There may be as few as only 7 red wolves remaining in the wild. These animals, like so many others, are disappearing in the shadows of our periphery. Their very existence depends on us, as did their extinction. Let us see them, acknowledge them, acknowledge that biodiversity and the balance of life matters. They are painted bright red in order to stand out and bring attention, no longer hidden away.”

Pictured above is The House on Church Street which in 2021 was used for several art installations including the two below. The first is New Histories: The Gadsden Farm Project by Michael Austin Diaz and Holly Hanessian.

About the installation-

The installation below, All Too Brief, was created by Gainesville, Florida artist Cindy Steiler.

From the ArtFields website about the installation-

All Too Brief was inspired by the movement of time and the unconscious process where our present moment is being continuously converted to memory. The elements comprising All Too Brief include a series of scrolls of cyanotype photographs and repurposed textiles wound on antique industrial weaving bobbins. Each scroll has a WW2-era laundry pin embossed with a number that corresponds to the written narrative of the images and textiles it holds. This piece is my attempt to document and archive people, places, and fleeting moments I hold dear. This piece became even more meaningful to me this year. My studio assistant at the time this piece was created has since passed.

Finally- while in town it’s also worth checking out the Ronald E. McNair Life History Center and Memorial Park. The Lake City-born astronaut and physicist died tragically in the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.

Apr 222025
 

“Matsushima Triptych”, 2025, Monofilament, cotton, linen, kid mohair

“River Triptych”, 2023, Monofilament, cotton, linen, kid mohair

The two triptychs above are from Hiroko Takeda‘s solo exhibition, The Ten Thousand Threads at Hunter Dunbar Projects. These works evoking environmental patterns are presented along with others more focused on geometric forms.

From the gallery about the artist and her work-

Hiroko Takeda (b. 1966, Nagoya, Japan) is a Brooklyn-based artist who expresses her world in thread. She has taken her rigorous training in the Mingei Undo-the Japanese Arts and Crafts Movement-which honors and emphasizes the characteristics, capacities, treatments and beauty of materials-to boundary-crossing distances and depths in nearly 40 years of global practice. Mingei was developed in the mid-1920s in Japan by philosopher and aesthete Yanagi Soetsu (1889-1961), along with a group of craftsmen, including the potters Hamada Shoji (1894-1978) and Kawai Kanjiro (1890-1966).

The Ten Thousand Threads takes its title from the Taoist concept of “the ten thousand things.” Often attributed to the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, it refers to the notion that in spite of the variety visible in the world, all things are fundamentally one. Applying this to Takeda’s practice, the multitudinous variations in weft and weave, color, pattern, and structure in her work can be seen as having an underlying connection; the works reside within the “the rule-bound world of weaving” and simultaneously emphasize an “invitation  to the accidental, disorderly, or unexpected.” Takeda’s works in The Ten Thousand Threads strive to transcend boundaries between light and dark, raw and refined, geometry and fluidity, painting and sculpture. 

The exhibition features works from 2016 to 2025, consisting of varying approaches to structure, pattern, and color. The Blueprint and Still Life series utilize the ‘Giant Waffle’ technique to evoke Minimalist rectilinear patterns. The deeply structured grids created by the warp and weft of Takeda’s weaving push the compositions dramatically into three-dimensional space.

Works using transparent thread, on the other hand, imply subtle and dreamlike landscapes. In her recent Matsushima triptych (2025), for example, Takeda uses staggered horizontal passages of fine and coarse textures to suggest the seascapes and islands of tsunami-weathered northeastern Japan. Whether underscoring geometric form or expressive vistas, Takeda’s work illuminates the fundamental tensions between tradition and innovation as well as complexity and reductionism.

As Takeda points out, “the world I see, like the world of warp and weft, has rules and constraints that are supposed to be good for us, but disorder happens naturally, and the other side of tension is fluidity. I manipulate and orchestrate the elements and welcome accidental moments of material behavior.” Whether underscoring geometric form or expressive vistas, Takeda’s work illuminates the fundamental tensions between tradition and innovation as well as complexity and reductionism.

This exhibition is on view until 4/26/25.

Apr 172025
 

Currently on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is the Thomas Scheibitz exhibition Argos Eyes. The show includes paintings, sculptures, and in the upstairs gallery, a table of tools and objects related to the work.

From the press release-

Internationally renowned for his mastery of painting, Scheibitz subverts traditional notions of the medium with radical juxtapositions of color and a unique formal language that lands ambiguously between abstraction and representation. Drawing from classical painting and architecture, the contemporary urban landscape, and popular culture, Scheibitz deconstructs and recombines signs, images, shapes, and architectural fragments in ways that challenge expected contexts and interpretations.

Scheibitz’s practice has been at the center of contemporary artmaking since the late 1990s with early solo exhibitions at the ICA London, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, as well as breakthrough presentations at the German pavilion of the 51st Venice Biennial, MUDAM Luxembourg, Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, and more recent major shows at Kunstmuseum Bonn, MMK Frankfurt, and Pablo Picasso x Thomas Scheibitz at the Museum Berggruen, Berlin.

In an age of infinite images and visual information, Argos, the multi-eyed, all-seeing guardian giant of Greek mythology, serves as a kind of avatar for Scheibitz. Like the panopticon-esque figure, the artist’s painting and sculpture absorb and dissolve visual material, encoding and decoding, mapping, measuring, penetrating and exploring a pictorial inventory. For Scheibitz, Argos Eyes are the observers of events and circumstances; that which we see directly, or indirectly via our ubiquitous technological devices, lenses, and screens. For the artist, a picture has always been a summary of different sources of observations and experiences which remain in the mind’s eye like “double exposures”. The eye, or by proxy the lens, is the entrance to the conscious or unconscious processing of what we see or do not see. A fundamental question for the artist remains the philosophical question: do we only see what we already know?

In the main ground floor gallery, Scheibitz presents a dynamic range of painterly compositions and a sculpture. Bringing together selections from his vast lexicon of images, Scheibitz builds up these compositions meticulously yet intuitively, using maquettes, drawings, collage, photography, and sketches. Recognizable forms such as eyes, cubes, droplets, and pyramids are translated into multilayered and complex pictorial structures that urge the viewer to consider multiple perspectives.

In the upstairs galleries, more intimately scaled paintings encircle the room, in addition to an Atlas-like master table filled with models, stencils, and other tools representative of the repeated motifs found in the artist’s studio. This conceptual landscape illustrates the core nature of the work, offering interrelated exercises in form, color, and material.

This exhibition closes 4/18/25.

Apr 162025
 

The images above are of two sections of Laura Owens’s immersive multi-media exhibition on view in two of Matthew Marks locations. It’s a lot to take in with so many details in the layered paintings and throughout the various rooms.

Walking through a door to the brightly colored green of the second room gives the feeling of entering a magical secret world, an impression that continues throughout the galleries. Adding to this is a humorous video tucked away in a tiny space behind another door, and small panels that open from the walls revealing additional paintings.  In the other gallery location are more rooms, including one with boxes containing various items and handmade books. It’s an overwhelming but wonderful show best seen in person.

From the gallery-

Laura Owens began exhibiting her work in the mid-1990s and quickly became known for her innovative approach to painting. Her work synthesizes traditional methods with unconventional ones, including printmaking and digital manipulation, to create destabilizing illusions of depth, extending her paintings beyond the confines of the canvas into three-dimensional space. Her paintings are often self-referential and draw extensively from art history, decorative arts, and craft traditions, as well as mass media and personal anecdotes.

The exhibition demonstrates Owens’s both meticulous and experimental approach to artmaking. Each element is hand-made in the artist’s studio through labor-intensive processes pioneered by Owens. A single panel may have over one hundred fifty layers of hand-printed silkscreen, on top of which Owens then paints further. The exhibition also includes kinetic elements, moving pieces within the artworks that continually point to their spatial and temporal contexts. “Though Owens is a master of composition, and the dynamism of her works has much to do with her sophisticated resolution of the problems that occur within the picture plane, it is at the edges, relations to external aspects such as architecture, interior space, landscape, time, geography, subject matter, style, and discipline, that their restlessness is found,” Kirsty Bell has written. “There is always more room to be surprised.”

This exhibition closes 4/19/25.

Apr 162025
 

“Night”, 2014, Oil on canvas

“Ocean Ladies”, 1988, Oil on canvas

“Untitled”, 1964, Oil on canvas

Currently on view at Matthew Marks Gallery is Good Things and Bad Things, an exhibition of paintings, drawings and objects by the late Suellen Rocca. The collection highlights the artist’s use of a variety of styles throughout her career to express similar themes.

From the gallery-

Suellen Rocca’s work is marked by dream-like ambient landscapes filled with pictograms arranged in loose grids. She drew inspiration from various types of “picture writing,” such as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, advertisements, and children’s activity books. Fantastical, witty, and deeply personal, Rocca’s unique visual language comprises a collection of images from her life, including 1950s dollhouse furniture, jewelers’ catalogs, bodily sensations, and the work of artists such as Marc Chagall and Max Beckmann. Rocca combined these symbols in eccentric compositions. As one critic observed, “Rocca offers up mysterious mystical visions for contemplation.”

The exhibition, whose title, Good Things and Bad Things, is borrowed from one of Rocca’s paintings, includes two large-scale paintings made in 1964. In one painting, palm trees, shoes, and gold rings with gemstones emerge from a turquoise ground. Another painting presents repeating images of Santa Claus, dancing couples, and winter landscapes. Later canvases envision interior worlds in electrifying fields of vibrant color.

Purses were also an important motif for Rocca, which she first developed from images in a 1940s manual on how to crochet purses. For Rocca, they were examples of “the cultural icons of beauty and romance expressed by the media that promised happiness to young women of that generation.” In the late 1960s, Rocca expanded this imagery to sculpture and began painting on purses. Describing Rocca’s sculpture Purse Curse (1968), Dan Nadel has written, “it reminds me of a world of images that did not have double meanings, and of the fantasy of love, pure and simple. But the purse also conceals. What’s inside?”

This exhibition closes 4/19/25.