Contributed by Sharon Butler / Diana Cooper’s new public art project “Double Take” is rich with art historical references and playful wit, breathing life into an otherwise unsightly ventilator shaft installed opposite the egress from the Roosevelt Island subway tunnel, where it blocks a magnificent view of the city across the East River. The mosaic, crafted in collaboration with glass artists in Italy, incorporates fractured and twisted linear perspective to create the illusion of roiling depth, blurring the boundary between static skyscrapers and the roaring East River ..read more

Contributed by Jason Andrew / In her solo show “The Scenic Route” at High Noon, Theresa Hackett remains committed to a process of reimagining nature through abstraction, texture, and bold compositions. Inspired by the dynamic interplay of form and environment, the show echoes the pastoral and sublime themes of classical landscape art – where balance and harmony were paramount – while pushing boundaries with modern kick. Like the early modernist Oscar Bluemner, Hackett’s paintings are – and long have been – architectural distillations of landscapes, structured yet only symbolically realistic.&n ..read more

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Kate Shepherd’s 2025 exhibition “ABC and sometimes Y," at Galerie Lelong & Co. in New York, hums in the space between precision and poetry. The paintings are specific and unshowy, rendered in colors that Shepherd selects for their emotional undercurrents. She teases out big questions: How do we interact with the world? How can we untangle what we see? And how do color and form quietly alter our perceptions? The result is a kind of geometric sorcery whereby shapes don’t sit still – they shimmer, shift, and keep you guessing. Every line, every wobble feels hear ..read more

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The phenomenon of the selfie, an artifact of the smart phone, is a supreme irony. The act itself suggests a narcissistic preoccupation with recording one’s presence, but its frequency and ubiquity indicates that it doesn’t matter much what person or place gets that honor. Warhol’s fleeting fifteen minutes is compressed into a pandering fraction of a second. I was here; please care. The only auto-photographers who really seem to get durably noticed are the Darwin Award winners whose acrobatic exertions towards drama topple them into the lethal maw of treacher ..read more

Contributed by Jason Andrew / In ‘Wild Birds,” Emily Noelle Lambert’s second solo exhibition at Freight+Volume, she provides an unbridled experience of color and tactility. The show includes five paintings that fence in an array of stacked ceramic works on improvised pedestals. Known for her vibrant, abstract work, Lambert is bold and direct in her exploration of organic forms and dreamlike compositions ..read more

January news: Astonishing. Completely astonishing. Thanks to you, Two Coats of Paint raised about 20% more last year than in 2023, setting a record for our year-end fundraising campaigns. Due in large part to the Open House art and merch sale in December, this result affords us the resources to continue operating: to pay the server fees and the writers and to craft an online publication that matters to the NYC art community and beyond. Your donations and purchases, combined with our modest advertising revenue and your generous recurring contributions, will keep the lights on ..read more

Contributed by Karlyn Benson / December is the month for small works and holiday group shows, such as LABspace's annual "HOLIDAY" show featuring 400 artists and "ALL small" at Pamela Salisbury. There are a few weeks left to see Chie Fueki's "Petal Storm Memory and Non-Objectified" at Kino Saito; "When the Spirit Moves You" and Eve Biddle's "I have time for death and rebirth" at Geary; and "All At Once" at SEPTEMBER. December 6 is the opening of "The 5 by 7 Show" at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, marking the 25th anniversary of this popular fundraising exhibition. On December ..read more

Contributed by Saul Ostrow / In “The Painted Protest: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art” in the December issue of Harper's, Dean Kissick presents a provocative critique, arguing that since the 1990s art’s politicized expressions of discomfort have diminished its quality and impact. As a remedy, he calls for artists to return to romantic ideals of beauty, strangeness, and emotion. He contends that artists should prioritize innovation and aesthetic rigor while focusing on universal human experience rather than political correctness. While his case is compelling on the surface, Kissick over ..read more

Contributed by Elizabeth Hazan / During the night of election-related insomnia, I was thinking about how we find meaning in this crazy world and that reading personal histories can be life-affirming in a time of chaos. One of the delights of Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women was learning how all these artists who were fixtures in the art world when I was a child came to New York to start making art in the first place. For a number of years, I shared a studio with the artist Trevor Winkfield. While he has done some long-form interviews, I think his lively storytelling deserves fresh attent ..read more

Contributed by Peter Schroth / In “Spirit Level,” Emily Berger’s solo show at Starr Suites, she continues to expose the depths of a kind of abstract painting that she has intriguingly investigated and perfected over the past decade.  Her minimal compositions are poised confidently between the formal and the lyrical. There is an almost primitive simplicity to what she reveals and purposefully little made of light, movement, and space in the ways we would typically anticipate ..read more