The Brooklyn Rail

The release of Painting in Sound, Hayes Greenfield’s beautiful new CD on Sunnyside Records, his first solo outing provides the occasion for a freely improvised look at Hayes’s life to date in music sound. Sound is indeed the thread he has followed, from his early explorations of his family’s piano to his duets and conversations with Ornette Coleman towards the end of that master’s life. 

Sky Hopinka is from the Ho-Chunk Nation and Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal and non-fictional forms of media. On the occasion of Hopinka’s commission for the Barnes Foundation’s Annenberg Court, Red Metal Dust, the artist joined Chenoa Baker on the New Social Environment (Episode #1334).

While many artists borrow from the past, very few collapse historical timelines with the raw, unsettling energy of Sedrick Chisom. He merges the iconography of the American Civil War, medieval mythology, and speculative sci-fi into a single, distorted world-building project. His canvases function as an ongoing catastrophe where history returns like a persistent ghost, blending a deep, daunting seriousness with a neurotic, unhinged humor.

On the occasion of his new exhibition at Matthew Brown, Chisom spoke with curator and writer Ginevra de Blasio. They delve into a practice that treats the canvas as a physical skin, exploring how the “Russian doll” layering of the past simultaneously produces and constrains our present agency. The dialogue touches upon his latest body of work, exploring how a recent shift to London and the spatial constraints of the theater have informed his newly staged, apocalyptic compositions.

This conversation with Barbara Zucker took place in anticipation of the publication of her book The Second Oldest Profession: The Wet Nurse Revered and Reviled, in February 2026. Decades in the making, the work is a social history, economic case study, cross-cultural art-historical investigation, travelogue, memoir, and quest with a surprising twist at the end.

Padmanabh Singh and Noelle Kadar are at the forefront of an effort to invigorate public interest in contemporary art in Jaipur, India. Recently, they joined Guggenheim President Emerita Jennifer Stockman and Rail Consulting Editor Joachim Pissarro to discuss The Jaipur Centre for Art, the unique history of arts patronage in Jaipur, the importance of color to the city and its culture, and their exhibition now on view, Annotations of Colour. 

Dike Blair’s art is thoroughly cosmopolitan—deeply informed, intensely considered, and visually impeccable. Working at small scale, Blair attends closely to relations among his paintings, sequencing them in what he sees as snippets of conversation rather than extended narratives. We met on a cold January day in a backroom at Karma’s new Chelsea gallery, where the paintings for his current exhibition were temporarily hung, aptly enough, on sliding screens.

I met Ayoung Kim at the start of this year in her studio in central Jongno, Seoul, following a fall season in which her work drew significant attention in New York. After a whirlwind of exhibitions and international visibility, encountering the artist at Nakwon Arcade—one of Seoul’s most unassuming yet historically layered sites—felt unexpectedly grounding. I arrived at her compact studio almost by chance, alongside a delivery courier. We pressed the same elevator button, walked the same corridor, and rang the same doorbell. The courier disappeared immediately; when the door opened, I alone stepped inside. The studio’s walls and tables were densely layered with handwritten notes, sketches, and project plans—evidence that beneath the spectacle of recent success, everything still begins here.

This winter, curator Amira Gad commissioned Mandy El-Sayegh to make her first solo exhibition in the Netherlands, a site-specific survey at Rotterdam’s The Depot titled Figure, Field, Grid that layers years of the artist’s projects across the institution’s third-floor gallery. El-Sayegh’s exhibition feels like entering the wound of our violent present. Images of atrocity, war, mass death, and torture are layered with headlines of political upheaval and paintings and drawings from the museum’s collection.

I first met the painter Paul Pagk in the fall of 1990, and soon was introduced to his work the following year at Thread Waxing Space. Ever since then, I’ve followed his work as frequently as I could in different contexts—from seeing Paul’s paintings in various one-person or group exhibitions, to making occasional studio visits and even once having a conversation before a live audience at the site of his last exhibit at Miguel Abreu in 2023—I’d never had a lengthy conversation in the studio with Paul until recently, just the day before this new body of work were brought to the gallery to be installed for Paul’s current exhibit Inscriptions in a Shade of Color (January 16–February 28, 2026), dedicated to the memory of Franz Dahlen (1938–2025). 

Why, in this moment of compressed time and a feeling of vertigo, do I dwell in the dense pages of a seventeenth-century compendium of sadness? If it is, in part, to turn away from the day’s edicts, it is also to begin to come to terms with an agony I try to bury, and one that surfaces, more insistently, among people I love. Robert Burton’s taxonomy gives me a language for both psychic weather and civic climates that choreograph appearance, lingering, and withdrawal.

This interview with two of the founding members of the Guerrilla Girls, “Frida Kahlo” and “Käthe Kollwitz,” took place July 3, 2025, with follow-up questions in September. It was occasioned by the collective’s fortieth anniversary, which is being commemorated by a show at the Getty Center, in the Getty Research Institute Gallery (November 18, 2025–April 12, 2026), How to Be a Guerrilla Girl, curated by Kristin Juarez and Zanna Gilbert.

The first time I came across the American artist Katherine Bradford (b. 1942) was during the pandemic. I remember being spellbound by her paintings of luminous waters, cosmic skies, or supermen flying high. They offered me freedom at a time of being trapped, and—through the power of Bradford's imagination—were a conduit to hope. Full of humans interacting with each other, they were a reminder of the importance of togetherness. We finally met in November 2024, at her studio in Brooklyn, where she’s been working since the 1980s.