Under the Radar

Tom Martinelli

Tom Martinelli’s artistic journey might be said to begin with a real journey, when he and some friends repurposed a New York City school bus and drove it west as far as Tucson, AZ, in 1971. Seventeen years old and just out of high school, he and his sidekicks were on...

Barbara Kemp Cowlin

One way or another, many artists end up following a circuitous path to maturity, but Barbara Kemp Cowlin seems to have stumbled across more landmines and detours than most, partly because of fate, partly because of the times in which she came of age. She moved...

James Deeb

Though he has been painting and drawing them for years, James Deeb’s cast of ghoulish characters seem especially attuned to the present moment. Realized in thick impasto and often sickly color, they are bloated, demonic, smug, and menacing. They have obvious...

Anne Gilman

Anne Gilman’s oversized scroll “drawings” unfurl across the floor, against walls, from the ceiling, and sometimes over tabletops with a graceful ease that belies their sometimes anguished or anxious content. I put drawings in quotes because there is so much more going...

Lisa Blas

At the start of each week, subscribers to Lisa Blas’s RSS feed called “Monday’s Image” are treated to a visual puzzle, an intriguing exercise in compare and contrast, an introduction to a work by an artist you’ve probably never heard of before (paired with the front...

Ira Wright

There are many artists who might be said to channel the impulses of childhood into their mature works—Picasso, Klee, and Dubuffet are three who come to mind. But few I know of carry over a talisman from their earlier years as an important subject in their so-called...

Valeri Larko

For more than three decades, Valeri Larko has celebrated the strange appeal of some of the most desolate spots around her home and studio. Up until she moved to New Rochelle, NY, her favorite stomping grounds were close to Jersey City, NJ. “The beauty and the grit I...

Claire Lieberman

For most of her career, Claire Lieberman’s sculpture has walked a fine line between beauty and danger, seduction and destruction. Take her last show at Massey Klein Gallery in New York, for example, aptly titled “Unidentified Dangerous Beautiful Objects.” Elegantly...

Mila Dau

Two preoccupations have remained constant in the art of Mila Dau as it has unfolded in the last 25 years: a fascination with people and a love of architectural spaces, specifically the interiors of museums, here and in Europe. It seems inevitable that the two were...

Sandra Filippucci

A little more than 30 years ago, pregnant with her first and only child, Sandra Filippucci took a break from her marriage and spent a couple of months at her sister-in-law’s house in Normandy, France. Just behind the house, a former rectory, was a tiny chapel, which...

Susan English

When Susan English was three or four years old, she lived in Belgium with her family for a couple of years. Years later she still remembers a babysitter named Hele placing a candle inside a child’s play igloo. “It made a big impression on me,” English says. “The light...

Judy Sigunick

Judy Signunick It’s a rare contemporary artist who dares grapple with literary masters. Cy Twombly summoned the ancient classics through a series of paintings that pay homage to the gods and heroes of Greek mythology. Frank Stella has been inspired by the 18th-century...