Paul Higham, Installation view of Data Sculpture
Exhibition Review by William Corwin

Searching for the Philosopher’s Stone: Paul Higham’s Data Sculpture

In the gallery at Eberle Studios in Homestead, Pittsburgh, we find ourselves transported to the workshop of a modern-day alchemist, Paul Higham, who has been experimenting with the digital creation and manipulation of form for almost fifty years. This is a space in which D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (author of On Growth and Form) would be ecstatic, for everything flows teleologically through space and time: the flight pattern of a fly (Descartes Fly) intersects with the growth of a tobacco plant virus, and the Nike of Samothrace overlaps with segments of the program code for the video game Call of Duty.

Plumb Line, installation view
In Dialogue by Etty Yaniv

Plumb Line: Irit Baniel and Alexis Granwell at Medium Rare

Medium Rare Project Space in DUMBO opens the season with Plumb Line, a two-person show pairing Irit Baniel’s paintings with Alexis Granwell’s sculptures. The two artists work with different materials and processes, but their work shares a concern with the body, vulnerability, memory, and grief. Medium Rare is an artist-led space rooted in making, looking and conversation. Surrounded by artists and studios, it has close ties to the Brooklyn art community and uses exhibitions, talks and workshops to connect artists with a wider public. In this conversation, co-founder Narelle Sissons discusses the curatorial process, the visual axis linking the two artists, the venue’s origins, and its plans for the year ahead.

Francis Barth, Bridging, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 30” x 40”, photo courtesy of Marc Straus Gallery
Exhibition Review by Gail Winbury

The Prime of Your Life at Marc Straus

Aging is a paradox. Wisdom and clarity of purpose increase, while deterioration and physical impairments begin to ravage the body. The exhibition and panel, The Prime of Your Life, at Marc Straus Gallery, exemplifies that dichotomy, bringing to bear aging female artists’ dilemmas while celebrating their enduring passion, talent, and productivity.

Nancy Cohen and Anna Boothe Breach, 9 x 27 x 15 inches, Glass, 2026. Third View. 9 x 27 x 15 inches. Photo credit of Edward Fausty
Exhibition Review by Etty Yaniv

Confluence: A Synergetic Vision at UrbanGlass

Artists Anna Boothe and Nancy Cohen met more than twenty-five years ago, and that serendipitous meeting grew into a lasting collaboration. Confluence, their current show at UrbanGlass, features their new body of work. It grew out of joint research and material studies they began in 2024 during a Creative Glass Fellowship at WheatonArts in Millville, New Jersey, where they studied the region’s glassmaking history from the 18th century to the present, with emphasis on how the industry affected the local ecology, waterways, and inhabitants. As Dr. Ferris Olin notes in the exhibition essay, glassmakers settled along the Maurice River for the quality of its sand and its route to market. The industry grew alongside Philadelphia’s pharmaceutical companies and their need for glass containers, which helps explain why scientific glass is prominent in this work.

This Candy Has Teeth, curated by Shuhan Zhang, 2026, image Courtesy of Weicang Wang
Exhibitions by Sherly Fan

This Candy Has Teeth: Can Nostalgia Really Comfort Us?

Is nostalgia really a safe space for us to process the uncertainty of the rapidly changing present? This Candy Has Teeth, curated by Shuhan Zhang, features five Chinese artists, Shengjie Jiang, Weican Wang, Jiaqi Mao, Yukun (Chloe) Ba, and Cindy (Zhaoyue) Chen, who move through childhood, memory, and nostalgia in different ways. Together, their works reflect our current desire for nostalgia, a desire that perhaps reveals just how uncertain the present feels. Yet the more we try to grasp onto the soft, safe, familiar places of the past, the more complicated those memories become. If you really delve back into them, they are also full of discomfort: moments of being forced to accept what happened, and the stiffness of a choke at the throat. As the curatorial text suggests, it is a “sensory misalignment”—an apple is sweet, yet hard to swallow.

Diane Burko, Extraction, A Dialogue of Extremes, Installation Featured Image
In Dialogue by Etty Yaniv

Diane Burko: Extraction, A Dialogue of Extremes at Rowan

Extraction, A Dialogue of Extremes, Diane Burko’s solo exhibition at Rowan University Museum of Contemporary Art, pairs two bodies of work: Arctic paintings based on NSF-funded climate research and works on Amazon mining and deforestation. The show was created as the research grant’s community engagement component. In this interview, curator Mary Salvante discusses how the exhibition came together, the tension between the two series, how the work uses beauty to address climate change, and what the museum hopes visitors take away.

Exhibition Highlights by Taylor Bielecki

SPRING/BREAK highlights: Hide and Seek

This year’s theme for SPRING/BREAK Art Show was Hide and Seek. The fair was within this new and exciting office space that felt like a labyrinth at first, but then it evolved into a wonderful journey- meeting new artists and old friends. Full of amazing works and installations, the booths caught my attention through either a detail, a connection, or a wonderful conversation. The themes varied, from Peter Gynd’s focus on the joys of the everyday to Juan-Manuel Pinzon and Matthew Logsdon’s connections through material, action, and discovery. David Howe and Jesus Benavente’s team brings urgency and humor, showing how decisions from up high affect our everyday lives. My experience of the fair concluded with the works of Noa Charuvi and Shmuel Charuvi, exploring connections to a sense of place and ways of viewing the world, often influenced by the works of family, while Braden Bandel’s paintings and drawings bring us into another world entirely- allowing us a place to rest and contemplate. 

Danny Balgley, installation view, Wexler Gallery, Courtesy of Wexler Gallery, Philadelphia
Exhibitions by Art Spiel

Pentimento: Danny Balgley at Wexler Gallery

The abstract paintings in Pentimento, the debut solo exhibition at Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia by New York artist Danny Balgley, live up to their title. Like geological strata, the urban palimpsest of peeling billboards and weathered facades, or memory itself, their layers let traces of earlier marks show through, revealing themselves gradually, the longer we look.