Flashback- Ohio Art Shows- “Immersive Spaces from the CMA Collections” at Canton Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Canton, Ohio Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jan 162026
 

Jerome Witkin– “Lockhart“, 1972, Oil on canvas

Gary L. Schumer– “Interior Landscape”, 1983, Oil on canvas

Sometimes it can feel like the world is too noisy and filled with too much information to take in at once. One way to slow it down is to find moments in your days to connect to something around you- a person, an object, nature, or a work of art.

The two paintings above, Jerome Witkin‘s Lockhart and Gary L. Schumer‘s Interior Landscape, are from Canton Museum of Art‘s 2024 exhibition Immersive Spaces. For the show, the museum used selections from their permanent collection to encourage visitors to spend time engaging with the work.

From the museum’s website about the exhibition:

Have you ever wished you could step inside a work of art?

Art pulls us in by utilizing and activating our senses, and resonates with us based on our personal memories and experiences. In Immersive Spaces, learn how artists, through their imaginations and unique artistic processes, create art that envelops the senses.

Though we may not actually be able to feel or hear the objects and scenes depicted in a painting, artists invite us to use all of our senses when we explore a work of art—encouraging us to imagine the textures, smells, and even tastes of what is depicted. Some painters take this invitation to another level by painting details with such precision that we are tricked into believing what is painted is real.

Scientifically, by fully immersing yourself and “stepping into a painting,” you’re activating a process known as embodied cognition, where mirror neurons in the brain turn the things you see in art into actual emotions you can feel. Studies show that immersive art is beneficial; the more time you spend analyzing a piece of art, the more you are able to stimulate brain functions, which can increase your analytical and problem-solving skills in everyday life. Some studies also show that looking at art can increase blood flow to the brain by as much as 10% — the equivalent of looking at someone you love.

Curated from our Permanent Collection, Immersive Spaces brings together works of art that engage all of our senses and activate our brain functions. How do artists invite us into their paintings so that we can imagine ourselves stepping inside the picture and experiencing it firsthand? Let your senses come alive in Immersive Spaces, and get ready to experience art in a new way!

The museum has their entire collection available to view online, including the paintings above. They have also included artist biographies and sometimes, additional information about the work itself.

Here, Witkin describes the history behind his painting Lockhart, pictured above-

“In my first year at Syracuse University, I was asked to paint the Chancellor of SU at his house. The commission took place in a vast attic of the home. To my surprise, Chancellor Eggers agreed that I could use the space as my studio! That is the setting for “Lockhart.” This is one of my first ventures into painting multiple figures in space. The attractive couple chose their pose – I suggested they stay comfortable – she reading a book and he looking towards her. His legs were angled against the darkness in an interesting way, and Presto! The Pose! The couple was very in love and the title reflects their relationship. The formality of the picture is my naiveté in putting multiple figures in space…I’ve since become more comfortable but that painting taught me a lot about using the figure in space.”

Flashback- Florida Art Shows- Kimowan Metchewais at USF Contemporary Art Museum

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Florida Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Tampa
Dec 192025
 

While reading through the recently released list of artists selected for next year’s Whitney Biennial, I was very happy to see Kimowan Metchewais on the list. I discovered his work when it was part of USF Contemporary Art Museum‘s 2023 exhibition, Native America: In Translation.

The exhibition included a slide show of Metchewais’s polaroids that was particularly captivating. The images in this post are just a few favorites. For more on the artist, this Aperture article from 2023 is very informative.

Below are a few more selections-

Delaware Art Shows- “Biennial Art+AI” Exhibitions at The Delaware Contemporary

 Animation, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Conceptual Art, Delaware, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film, Wilmington
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 Dinkins’ Not 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.

Delaware Art Shows- “Reclaim/ Reframe: Challenging the Algorithmic Gaze” at The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Delaware, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film, Wilmington
Dec 182025
 

Portraits by Carrie Ann Baade

Reclaim | Reframe: Datasets and Cultural Visibility, is one of three exhibitions that make up The Delaware Contemporary’s 2025 Biennial- Art + AI. The timely show features work by Carrie Ann Baade, Tyanna Buie, Blažo Kovačević, and Tara Youngborg.

From the museum–

Through AI and computational technologies, artists Carrie Ann Baade, Tyanna Buie, Blažo Kovačević, and Tara Youngborg construct layered narratives that reclaim overlooked and marginalized histories. In doing so, these artists unsettle dominant cultural and media frameworks that have long erased, distorted, or commodified lived experience. Exploring themes of identity, ancestry, and displacement, they use generative tools as critical instruments to question, expose, and reconfigure the archival and institutional biases embedded in history, culture, and the environment. From ancestral reclamation and speculative futures to immersive storytelling and data-driven environmental translations, their work advances a reimagining of social justice through the lens of artificial intelligence.

Together, these artists offer a complex portrait of making in the age of AI, revealing how tools shaped by those in power can both perpetuate bias and enable resistance. Their work asks: Who shapes the cultural record? When an AI model “remembers,” whose truth is it repeating? How can we reclaim agency within these systems (built on our collective labor)?

The images at the beginning of this post are from Carrie Anne Baade’s series, Birthplace. Her mixed media portraits of her ancestors, created with the help of AI, present a fascinating look at the stories of several women from early in American history.

From Baade’s statement about the work-

Birthplace is a visual exploration of personal ancestry, delving into the lives of women from colonial Louisiana between 1690 and 1750. Through oil painting, collage, and Al-generated imagery, I reconstruct the presence of these women-figures shaped by French colonial rule, Indigenous displacement, and Romani migration-whose stories have been largely absent from recorded history. Employing a methodology that blends archival research with imaginative storytelling, I create portraits that serve as visual hypotheses-acts of artistic and ancestral repair. The compositions incorporate antique lace, colonial maps, domestic fabrics, and found objects, mirroring the intertwined textures of lineage, migration, and identity. Al-generated image blending aids in synthesizing historically plausible references, speculating on the appearance and presence of women who were never visually recorded.

This project is not about one family, but a shared American inheritance. It reveals the complexity of identity in a land shaped by colonization, migration, and erasure. In rematriating these women to history, Birthplace offers viewers a visual counter-history-one rooted in survival, interconnection, and the enduring power of maternal lineage.

Pictured below are works from the other artists in the exhibition along with information provided by the museum.

Tara Youngborg examines how institutional data and machine learning shape our understanding of land and environment. Using field research, environmental archives, and US Geological Survey datasets, her datastream translates waterflow data and topographic maps into immersive video installations that highlight the limitations of digital representation. By transforming statistics into layered, shifting media, Youngborg portrays landscapes as dynamic terrains of knowledge. Glitches and ruptures in the work expose gaps between digital abstraction and lived experience, prompting questions about algorithmic authority and what is lost when place is reduced to data.

Tara Youngborg’s installation

Tara Youngborg’s installation (detail)

In AR (Argumentative Reality) and Truck for Three Illegal Passengers, Blažo Kovačević uses augmented reality, 3D modeling, and game engine software to confront invasive state surveillance and the dehumanization of migrants. Using digitally enhanced X-ray images from European Border Patrol inspections, he reconstructs a 2015 tragedy in Serbia where 54 undocumented passengers died in a van crash. His works shift between detached aerial views and intimate interior scans, altering typical media frames into ethical engagement. Kovačević warns how AI-driven technologies can perpetuate oppression through automated surveillance, data collection, and erasure, urging reflection on the politics of visibility and mediated violence.

A still from Blažo Kovačević’s video

Tyanna Buie reconstructs erased family histories and reimagines Black identity through speculative Afro-Futurist frameworks. Using ChatGPT and DeepFake technology, she remixes images, sound, and text to create narratives where absence becomes presence. In The Guardians of Nyala, Buie overlays her own likeness onto eighteenth-century Dutch dignitary portraits, then collaborates with AI to imagine a family history untouched by colonization. Rooted in personal narrative and Black popular culture, her counter-archive elevates erased lives and transforms AI from a tool of replication into one of radical self-authorship.

Two of the portraits from Tyanna Buie’s “The Guardians of Nyala”

This exhibition closes 12/28/25.

Delaware Art Shows- “Colorful Voices” at John William Gallery in Wilmington

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Delaware, Mixed Media, Music, Painting / Painters, Wilmington
Dec 102025
 

Alim Smith, “Floating” and “Thought A New Dress Would Make it Better”, 2025, Oil on canvas

Paintings by Alim Smith

Taylor Gordon, “To Be A Black Woman”, 2023, Oil on canvas

Taylor Gordon, “Dear Tay”, 2023, Oil on canvas with cardboard

Manuel Ramos, “Abuela Gorin”, 2025, Oil on canvas

Manuel Ramos, “Abuela Olga”, 2025, Oil on canvas

Currently on view at John William Gallery in Wilmington is Colorful Voices: Taylor Gordon, Alim Smith, Manuel Ramos, featuring unique paintings by the three Delaware artists.

From the gallery about the exhibition-

Colorful Voices: Taylor Gordon, Alim Smith, Manuel Ramos brings together three distinctive practices that articulate the richness of contemporary community life through color, portraiture, and cultural reference. The exhibition seeks to foreground the vitality of local voices while offering a space in which viewers might consider how identity, humor, and heritage are translated into visual form.

Taylor Gordon’s paintings situate themselves within the lineage of Black contemporary art, yet remain deeply personal. Her chromatic sensibility infuses each figure with layered emotional resonance, encouraging conversations around beauty, resilience, and the multiplicity of Black experience beyond reductive narratives. Manuel Ramos, or “RAmos ART,” approaches portraiture with a keen attentiveness to light and surface, imbuing his sitters with an understated dignity that resonates quietly yet powerfully. Emerging from a self-taught practice shaped during the pandemic, his canvases record moments of presence that hover between the intimate and universal. Alim Smith, or “Yesterday Nite,” works in a spontaneous visual language, fusing surrealism, popular culture, and sly humor. His rhythmic compositions and vivid palette translate music, memory, and cultural archetypes into forms at once playful and incisive.

Together these artists propose color as more than visual pleasure: it becomes a conduit for empathy, critique, and joy. Colorful Voices invites us to engage with works that are celebratory yet searching, attuned to both the textures of daily life and the broader currents shaping our communities. In gathering their practices, the exhibition hopes to affirm art’s capacity to nurture dialogue and to render visible the stories that animate shared experience.

This exhibition is on view until 12/18/25.

Alim Smith’s work may look familiar- he created work for the television series Atlanta and the cover art for Mac Miller‘s second posthumous album, Balloonerism, released earlier this year. Miller reached out to him in 2018, after finding his work on Instagram. Smith was recently nominated for a Grammy award for “Best Recording Package” for this album.

Mac Miller’s “Balloonerism” cover art by Alim Smith

Flashback- Los Angeles Art Shows- Vhils at Over the Influence

 Architecture, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Egypt, Germany, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Munich, Painting / Painters, Public Art, Sculptors / Sculpture
Dec 052025
 

In addition to his numerous street art pieces, Alexandre Farto, aka Vhils, has shown his unique creations in various galleries around the world. The works above are from his 2018 exhibition Annihilation at Over the Influence gallery’s temporary location in Los Angeles.

From the gallery about the show-

Presenting a reflection on the current model of globalized development and the forces shaping and affecting local identities around the world today, Annihilation emphasizes the global impact of Los Angeles culture and the subsequent breakdown of unique global identities across continents. For his first solo exhibition in the United States since 2011, Vhils has taken the opportunity to set up a dialogue between the United States, Europe, and China to address the growing struggle for hegemonic supremacy between global powers and the ensuing social and economic impact on the world at large. Annihilation shares the stories of the citizens who breathe vitality into densely populated urban epicenters. Based on a variety of source material, from advertisements collected in cities worldwide to salvaged wooden doors, the new patchwork-like series intentionally dilutes the readability of each individual portrayed, a reflection on how identity is both formed and affected by the city’s visual discourse. This intentional juxtaposition of contrasts mirrors the interplay between elements from various cultures which we observe at work today in large urban contexts.

Vhils-Strata, which presents a selection of his work from the past twenty years, is currently on view at the Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art (MUCA) in Munich, Germany until 3/1/26.

He also recently created the site-specific installation, Doors of Cairo, located near the Pyramids in Giza in Egypt. It is part of  Forever is Now 05 and is on view until 12/7/25.

Los Angeles Art Shows- Robert Therrien at The Broad

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Dec 032025
 

Robert Therrien‘s larger than life sculpture of a table and chairs for Under The Table (1994) has been delighting visitors to The Broad in Los Angeles for years. Robert Therrien: This is a Story, recently opened at the museum is the largest exhibition of the late artist’s work to date.

From The Broad about the exhibition-

Therrien’s meditations on scale and material are a deeply influential and well-known approach within the field of contemporary sculpture, significant to The Broad’s own identity as a museum, and long admired by visitors of all ages. The installation showcases Therrien’s personal vocabulary of images and symbols—from enormous tables, chairs, and dishes, to intimate drawings of snowmen, birds, and chapels—as they become a language of continuous creation and transformation for the artist over time. Featuring more than 120 works spanning five decades, the exhibition offers unprecedented access to the artist’s exploration of scale, memory, and perception, just miles from the downtown Los Angeles home and studio space he operated out of for close to thirty years beginning in 1990. Many of the works on view, including those created just before Therrien’s untimely death in 2019, have never been featured in museum exhibitions and will offer new avenues of understanding his practice.

The exhibition is on view until 5/5/2026.

Substack Newsletter- Autumn Begins and Spooky Season Takes Over in The Recap

 Art, Artists, Day of the Dead, Films, Glasswork, Halloween, Mixed Media, Music, Musicians / Bands, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Public Art, Sculptors / Sculpture, Spotify Playlist, Street Art, The Newsletter
Nov 212025
 

In The Recap this month- music, art, art shows, murals, spooky season posts and more. Check it out here and subscribe!

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Clive Smith at Marc Straus Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Nov 072025
 

“Drexler Pigeon (Columba blued)”, 2022, Oil on wood panel

Clive Smith‘s incredibly detailed trompe-l’œil paintings of birds were part of the 2024 exhibition From Cellar to Garret at Marc Straus gallery in NYC.

The first image is of the painting Drexler Pigeon (Columba blued) which uses elements from fellow artist Lynne Drexler’s 1961 painting Blued.

 

 

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