Xinyu Liu is a young Chinese artist whose work is about the journey she undertook to become an artist.  After graduating from the Shanghai Institute of Technology with a degree in product design, Liu immigrated to New York and enrolled in the School of Visual Art (SVA), where she got her MFA in fine art. The subject of her thesis exhibition, which she has continued to expand upon, was migration. Made of acrylic parts fitted together, her motorized ferris wheel goes nowhere, a fitting metaphor for being both an artist and an immigrant who recognizes that art and life are inseparable, and that the destination was not as important as the act of making and growing.

CHINCHINART is pleased to present Lithic Coordinates, a group exhibition curated by Shuhan Zhang, featuring artists Chuanduan Chen, Huanzhe Hu, Kun Juliet Wang, Tingru Chen, Yinghan Zhang, and Zhanyi Chen. The exhibition brings together six artists whose practices explore how contemporary life forms new geological strata across digital, biological, atmospheric, and emotional terrains.

The Shape I’m In

Curated by Wallace Whitney

Featuring works by Michael David, Ron Gorchov, Suzanne McClelland, Elizabeth Murray, Holt Quentel, Kern Samuels, Claude Viallat, and Rachel Eulena Williams.

MDavid & Co presents a selection of works by members of the Yellow Chair Independent Study Program (ISP) in partnership with Yellow Chair Salon.

This exhibition brings together six artists whose practices explore a range of materials and conceptual approaches. Featuring works by Lynn Basa, Margarita Fainshtein, Zoë Elena Moldenhauer, Susan Poirier, Patricia Tewes Richards and Sam Shaffer,

The Shape I’m In, curated by Wallace Whitney connects eight artists involved in abstraction that either accommodates or bends the contours of the world we inhabit. Direct, materially driven and decidedly enthusiastic this group of artists have never been shown together. Whether intuitive in approach or driven by intellectual concerns the work in the show promises strange harmonics."

Featuring works by Michael David, Ron Gorchov, Suzanne McClelland, Elizabeth Murray, Holt Quentel, Kern Samuel, Claude Viallat, and Rachel Eulena Williams.

Feb 6-22, 2026

Opening Reception: Feb 6, 6-9PM
Closing Event: Saturday, Feb 21nd, 12-4PM

Hours: Fridays and Saturdays 12-6PM, Sundays 12-4

By appointment:
janet@steelyjan383@gmail.com /917 667-8754

Please watch our social media listings for special events!

(SHED) MY SKIN is about the transformation of materials presented to the artist. How does each one handle the challenge of decaying and discarded objects? Also, how has this caused their creative process to realign into art? Each of the eighteen sculptors in this show have demonstrated this ability, this alchemy to uplift the mundane and shed light upon that which was unseen.

FANFanFlus and Art Cake are delighted to present a three-artist exhibition, curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan @fanfan_noire

Artists:
Yshao Lin @yshaolin
Soomins Kang @soomin_the_torangoook
Gabriel Siams @gabrielsiams
.

Like Cotyledons Buckled with Loam
The painting of Thomas Nozkowski with Louis Block, Joseph Brock, and Jodie Manasevit, cinematic contribution by Casimir Nozkowski, built and curated by David Dixon

By deconstructing familiar Christian tropes such as the cruciform and the body, Martin Dull’s Worship and Tribute establishes a humanistic command of form and abstraction.

Sam Shaffer is a painter working in a range of media and approaches to abstract imagery and subtle narratives. He is also a prolific maker of drawings and works on paper, which constitute a crucial element in the artist’s studio practice in a broader sense. Featuring scores upon scores of character and setting studies, standalone drawings, and other recent works on paper, Real Life in a Fake World is both an acknowledgment of the fundamentality of these works for Shaffer, and a vibrant celebration of their dreamy mystery and gestural vitality.

Singing In Unison, Part 12: Painting In Space, curated by Michael David, presented by M. David & Co. and Rail Curatorial Projects at Art Cake

Featuring works by Al Held, Elizabeth Murray, Judy Pfaff and Frank Stella

October 18 – December 7, 2025

Hours: Friday & Saturday, 1-6 pm and Sundays, 11 am-4 pm
and by appointment

Summer Creature presents a new body of work by Brooklyn-based painter Jan Dickey, which includes pieces created during his recent two-month residency at TUR telpa in Rīga, Latvia, alongside large-scale paintings made in his Art Cake studio. In Rīga, Dickey experimented with traditional dyes native to Latvia and egg tempera on paper, tracing ephemeral sunlight patterns across his studio and capturing the shifting qualities of light as summer moved into autumn.

A simple wooden stool, used nightly by the building’s security guards, became a compositional anchor in the afternoon. Its shadow and presence helped shape abstract forms that emerge from the interplay of light, earth-based materials, and absorbent surfaces. Alongside these works on paper, the exhibition features paintings executed at Art Cake on cloth using distemper, tempera, casein, acrylic, natural dyes, and oil. Across all works, Dickey explores superposition as a material phenomenon, in which higher-dimensional forms collapse onto a two-dimensional surface, layering in ways that appear inextricable even to the most practiced eye. Colorants, binders, translucency, and texture form an “accretion disc,” wherein four-dimensional reality accumulates on the surface-turned event horizon, preserving moments that compress into a nearly flat and irreversible record. Rather than simplifying or losing information through abstraction, the works seem to reveal more and more with each inspection.

The artists of the Art Cake Studio Program are pleased to announce the Program’s Open Studio event.

Artists will welcome the public into their studios on the second floor on Friday evening from 6-9PM and Saturday afternoon from 2-5PM.

The following Exhibitions will also be on view:

•MDavid & Co presents Singing in Unison, Part 12: Painting in Space curated by Michael David, and presented by M. David & Co. and Rail Curatorial Projects.

This exhibition features works by Al Held, Elizabeth Murray, Judy Pfaff and Frank Stella

Opening reception: Saturday, October 18, 6-9pm October 18 – December 7, 2025

•Jan Dickey: Summer Creature is on view in Studio 10 on the second floor. Dickey exhibits pieces created during his recent two-month residency at TUR telpa in Rīga, Latvia, alongside large-scale paintings made in his Art Cake studio.

DRAWING IN, DRAWING OUT

Curated by John Yau at Art Cake
Presented by M. David & Co.
Friday / Saturday, 1 - 6 pm and by appointment

September 7 – September 28, 2025
214 40th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11232

Opening Reception:
September 7, 2025, 4-8pm

M. David & Co is pleased to present Drawing In, Drawing Out, a group exhibition of works by Thornton Dial, Steve DiBenedetto, Joanne Greenbaum, Harriet Korman, Joshua Neustein , Thomas Nozkowski, David Reed, Michelle Segre, and Gary Stephan.

Drawing In, Drawing Out

Essay by John Yau

In the late 1970s, shortly after I began writing reviews for Art in America, I met Paul Cummings, who was the adjunct drawing curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the publisher of Catchword Papers, which brought out poetry books by Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Ron Padgett. He decided to be my mentor, which I gladly accepted.

We soon established a ritual. We would meet on Saturdays, either in Soho or on 57th street, and go to galleries to look at drawings by artists Paul had written on a list. This meant being ushered into the backroom by a bored, young gallery attendant and given access to the flat files. No one ever talked to us once we started looking at the drawings, many of which had never been unwrapped until Paul asked to see them. This is how I learned about the drawings of Richard Artschwager, Paul Cadmus, Bruce Conner, Jim Nutt, and A. R. Penck, among others.

He got me to write for Drawing, a journal he started in 1979, and which no longer exists.

After we made the rounds, we had lunch, either at Larres, a French restaurant on 56th street that Frank O’Hara mentioned in his poems, or at The Century Club, where he pointed out who everyone was, and said something about them, inflected by his boyish grin.

Cheerful and serious, Cummings talked passionately about drawing, poetry, and wine during our long, unhurried lunches. “Don’t drink any merlot or cabernet sauvignon if it’s mixed”). At one of these lunches, I asked him why he devoted all his attention to drawings? His succinct, unhesitating answer has stayed with me nearly half-a-century: “You cannot lie in drawing. You can lie in painting and sculpture, but not in drawing.”

Whenever I look at drawings, Paul’s comment makes an appearance.

*

I remember a drawing by Pablo Picasso of the writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris and Louise Godon, the stepdaughter of Picasso's art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. They were having a picnic. The drawing was done on a large piece of gray laundry cardboard, which he divided into a grid. In each rectangle, Picasso made a quick, largely abstract, red line drawing of the couple until the entire grid was filled. I saw this drawing at the Pompidou and knew that I would never see it in a show in America.

American museums seldom do exhibitions of drawings. When they do, they are often small and hidden in an out-of-the-way part of the museum. Once, at the Los Angeles County Museum, no one could tell me where I had to go to see a show of lithographs and works on paper by Matsumi “Mike” Kanemitsu, who was friends with Jackson Pollock and Norman Bluhm. Frank O’Hara wrote about him in “Personal poem,” and he was in one of the 14 Americans at the Museum of Modern Art. Finally, after lots of false leads, including being told to look for it in the Japanese Pavilion, I found his work in a small gallery in the part of the museum devoted to period furniture.

Museum directors and curators want blockbusters. They forget that a company by that name went out of business when the product they rented became obsolete.

Drawing never became obsolete. Even when painting was declared dead, conceptual artists said it was necessary to draw lines on a wall. One of them made it part of his practice to write careful instructions detailing what to do to make a pencil drawing on a chosen surface.

*

Speaking on another matter, Mae West said, you can use what’s lying around the house.

This is a partial list of what these artists found in their house: black and white tape (Gary Stephan), thread (Michelle Segre), ballpoint pen (Joanne Greenbaum and Thomas Nozkowski), crayon (Harriet Korman), colored pencil and pencil (Steve DiBenedetto and Thornton Dial), graph paper and reproductions (David Reed), layered sheets of carbon paper (Joshua Neustein).

*

You don’t need a patron, an assistant, or a yacht, to make a drawing.

If you get bored making a drawing, you are no fun to play with and won’t be happy here. Pleasure is not your thing.

About these drawings, you cannot say: I like your style.  What great detail. Wow, it’s beautiful.

*

There are no liars here.

Every drawing in this exhibition is perfect.

Disguise the Limit 

M. David & Co. @ Art Cake
Gallery B

 September 7 - September 28, 2025

Opening Reception: 
Sunday, September 7, 2025, 4-8pm

 Hours: Friday / Saturday, 1-6pm and by appointment

M. David & Co. and Yellow Chair Salon are pleased to present Disguise the Limit, A Selection of Works from John Yau’s Symposia! 

Curated by John Yau, this group exhibition brings together fifteen artists following an intensive studio and virtually-based program with esteemed poet and art writer John Yau, alongside Symposia! faculty members Astrid Dick and Michael David. Disguise the Limit will run in tandem with Drawing In, Drawing Out, a phenomenal exhibition of master drawings, curated by John Yau in Gallery A.

This exhibition showcases the participants' creative development and collaborative exploration.

Featuring works by Lynn Basa, Kate Brown, Robin Dintiman, Carrie Johnson, Eric Laverty, Jennifer Mawby, Zoë Elena Moldenhauer, M. Pettee Olsen, Patricia Richards, Sam Shaffer, Scott Sherman, Robert Solomon, Maya Strauss, Ali Vaughan, and Lindy Wood.

Reynolds

Puki Punditry
Studio 10

On View Sept 3- Sept 27

Opening Reception: Friday, September 5, 6:00-9:00 PM

Hours: Wed- Sat. 2:00- 6:00 PM

Special Screening: Friday, Sept 19 6-9 PM The Puki Panoptic video 15 minutes at 7:00

The Puki Monsters were birthed in the midst of the nineties culture wars, under the Hercules statue in Kassel, Germany, as a critique of phallic monumentality. Puki means vagina in Filipino. As small watercolors that fit in carry -on luggage, they have romped through art history, exposing it’s hidden, while subverting masterpieces. Ready to install guerilla style, they stop to admire non hegemonic references. Originally the watercolors were revenge romps as Reynolds created a feminist demonology. Later, mirroring her own Motherhood, they revealed the fallacy in the phallocracy, by playing with the imagery of the Madonna, while sparing no religious representations of the saintly mother. Finally, as Anonymous was a woman, so was the Allegory, a major pictorial practice of colonializing cultures. Allegorical Pukis appropriate the imagery to reimagine the forms as chimeras.

The Puki Procession was started in conjunction with David Medalla to protest the invasion of Iraq, and destruction of cultural antiquities. It is a participatory performance with the paintings on silk banners, which are paraded to protest monuments, museums as mausoleums, and honor private places in public gardens. Reveling and revealing the grotesque, the Pukis have performed in Brazil, Chile, London, Liverpool, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Brooklyn and Peekskill N.Y., and in Freehold and Newark, New Jersey. They have been in one person exhibitions in Brazil, Liverpool, and twice at Studio Ra in Rome. Pukis use the public pulpit to create a praxis of pop propaganda: a sort of visual punditry.

Reynolds studied painting at Sarah Lawrence with Richard Pousette-Dart, political theory with Eqbal Ahmad, and graduated with a concentration in Women’s History. She also holds a BFA and MFA from School of Visual Arts. She has worked as an Artist Educator for 25 years as Museum Artist /Educator in New York museums, most recently at The Brooklyn Museum, where she started as a Gallery/Studio Educator in 2007.

Previous Puki Processions are on YouTube; reynoldsnart including The Puki Procession 2004, La Pucelle Puki 2008, Puki Pacifista 2009, Antiquarian Puki Prayers 2011, and Puki Pollination 2018. Art Cake is her first one-person exhibition of the Pukis in New York.

In her exhibition, From One to Another, Massey presents new sculptural weavings and a video of a collaborative dance created during her two-year residency at Art Cake. Each piece embodies a state of transition: between lushness and decay, stillness and motion, industrial and organic. Through shifting color palettes and dual-sided compositions, the works reflect natural cycles and the delicate balance between beauty and breakdown. The exhibition also marks a personal shift in Massey's practice, bridging one creative chapter into the next.

The School of Visual Arts is pleased to present the MFA Art Practice 2025 Thesis exhibition “…From Inside the House” with work by Casey Correa, Natasha K. De Armas, Jacqueline Ehle Inglefield, Frank Rapant, Beckett Sky, and DW Zinsser. The artists explore the intersections of memory, identity, and transformation through diverse mediums and personal narratives in varied media from assemblage to immersive installations. Themes of recollection, home, displacement, desire, nostalgia, the unconscious thread through contrasts of scale, material, and emotion. Sculptural shrines and grotesque reliquaries explore queerness, spirituality, and harm reduction through intimate, devotional practices. “…From Inside the House,” challenges viewers to reflect on the interplay between personal memory and cultural identity while inviting engagement with experimental forms of artistic expression. At its core, the exhibition celebrates the rawness of emotion, the beauty of the unexpected, and the deeply human need for connection and transformation.

Four artists Lynn Basa, Janet Jaffke, Winston Mascarenhas and Barbara Owen traveling from Chicago, France, New Mexico, and Rhode Island worked together for a month in the glorious spaces of Art Cake's galleries A and B.  This beautiful experiment resulted in bodies of amazing work that could have only happened in this space at this moment, at this time, with these four strangers coming together.  

No Longer Strangers, is the title originally conceived by Astrid Dick to describe the pop-up exhibition running concurrently in gallery C, featuring the artists from her 2024 Spring Salon.

It became apparent the title perfectly embodied the sprit of the Yellow Chair Salon and both of these exhibitions.

On the Other Side consists of a selection of works created by Eozen Agopian during her six-month residency at the ArtCake, which are shown alongside earlier works.  Agopian incorporates various techniques of drawing, painting, sewing and weaving, creating visual parallels between rational and cosmological worlds through constructing and deconstructing, layering and erasing, scraping and marking, unravelling and reconnecting.

Eozen Agopian is an artist of Armenian descent born in Athens, Greece. She has received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, N.Y., (1993), Bachelor of Fine Arts, (magna cum laude) from Hunter College, N.Y., N.Y., (1989), and Associate Degree in Graphic Design from F.I.T, N.Y., N,Y., (1987).

She has had thirteen solo shows. Her most recent exhibitions, “Sheds of Light”, took place at Officinenove in Rome, 2023, and at High Noon Gallery, NY in 2024. Some others are: “Passages”, Chashama, NY, “The Fabric of Space”, Greek Consulate of Greece in New York, N.Y., 2018, “Persistent Dichotomies, Fox Gallery NYC, 2017, “Traverse” Eleftheria Tseliou Gallery, Athens, 2015, “Underthread” Kaplanon Gallery, Athens, 2011, “Invisible threads”, Michael Walls Gallery, N.Y., N.Y., 1993.

Her work is shown in several group shows in Greece, France, Italy, Germany, China, Russia and the United States, such as, Shiva Gallery of the John Jay college (New York), Hellenic American Union (Athens), AAW Gallery, (Beijing), Museum of Contemporary Art Crete (Crete), State Museum of Contemporary Art, (Thessalonica), Greece, Freud’s Dream Museum (St. Petersburg), Lesley Heller Workspace, N.Y. ,Smack Melon (N.Y).

She divides her time between living and working in New York and Athens.

Field Within, is an ongoing body of work exploring how marks, shapes & passages unfurl, finding their way to some kind of unified release in the space of the painting. The undulating movement of the hand and paint create openings to relationships on the surface of the painting as well as within the inner landscape- the psyche, spiritual, emotional - these are always in concert with the infinite synchronicities in nature and its elements.  

When I let go of questions like “what is this” or “why is this,” and instead just accept that the painting “just is,”  I  feel that what is within me is co-creating with energy outside, in nature.  Otherwise the painting doesn’t work.  

My painting is always in flux. As soon as the painting begins, it becomes a living thing in the world- like trees brought to life from within. The painting never really ends even when it is “finished” because the paint, the human touch, and the history of its making breathes and has a pulse of its own.

My work ranges from rich, deeply layered stretched paintings to dry, flat paintings that tend to have a more fervently drawn nature on loose canvas, relinquishing itself from the constraints of formality. 

I often think about the compositions of my paintings as mirroring human collective energy.  A strong, positive collective engagement has never been more crucial than at this dangerous time in our culture. The unfurling movement and freedom from tension in a painting can be kind of a beacon or symbol of hope. Art is always hopeful.

The artists of the Art Cake Studio Program are pleased to announce the Program’s Open Studio event.

Artists will welcome the public into their studios on the second floor on Friday evening from 6-9PM and Saturday afternoon from 2-5PM.

The following Exhibitions will also be on view in the downstairs space:

• MDavid & Co presents Breath curated by John Yau, featuring works by Philip Allen, David Baker, Clarice Blanche Hu, Deborah Dancy, Douglas Degges, Astrid Dick , Gabriele Evertz, Suzan Frecon, Joanne Greenbaum, Harriet Korman, Jule Korneffel, John Mendelsohn, Tom Nozkowski, Harry Roseman, Peter Shear, Gary Stephan, Maya Strauss, and Richard Tinkler.

•MDavid & Coalso presents Roxy Savage: hourglasspearrectangleinvertedtriangleblob

•Charity Baker: Ocean Blue is on view in Studio 10 (second floor).

Curated by John Yau at Art Cake Presented by M. David & Co. May 9 - May 31, 2025 214 40th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11232

Hours: Friday & Saturday, 1 - 6 PM or by appointment

David & Co. is pleased to present Breath, a group exhibition featuring works by Philip Allen, David Baker, Clarice Blanche Hu, Deborah Dancy, Douglas Degges, Astrid Dick , Gabriele Evertz, Suzan Frecon, Joanne Greenbaum, Harriet Korman, Jule Korneffel, John Mendelsohn, Tom Nozkowski, Harry Roseman, Peter Shear, Gary Stephan, Maya Strauss, and Richard Tinkler.

Charity Baker: Ocean Blue
ArtCake: Studio 10
May 3-17, 2025
Opening Reception: May 9, 6-9 PM