Peter Stankiewicz: Small Works
Ranging in date from 2020-2025, these sculptures build on the artist’s explorations with lightweight plastic as a sculptural material that simultaneously serves as a support for painterly passages that could be the result of oxidized metal. Subtle adjustments to this consistent approach over years of practice reveal a honed sensitivity to his craft. “Small Works” is at once an apt and misleading title. Though on average around a foot in any direction, the sculptures carry a monumental heft that belies their scale and activates the space around them.
Stankiewicz states: “What you see here are the results in a long process of refinement. The arrangement is a grammar of sculpture, presenting a versatile and harmonious set of possibilities. But don’t believe everything you read.”
On view through June 13, 2025
Adjacent to Life Gallery @ Ninth Street Espresso
341 E. 10th Street, Manhattan
Free
Falcon Art Collective: R U Still Painting???
I had a feeling I was going to love this show and I was right. An entire raw unfinished floor of a corporate midtown high rise is the setting for an abundant selection of adventurous canvases that seduce the optic nerves in many good ways. Organized by Falcon Art Collective, an independent group of artists and curators, “R U Still Painting???” brings together the work of at least 50 painters, including some recognizable names.
From the organizers: “With R U STILL PAINTING???, FALCON carries onward the spirit and playfulness of New York’s early 2000s art scene. R U STILL PAINTING??? is not a question posed to the artists, but a provocation drawn from online culture both a meme and an ironic response to a digital visual world where the human hand is allegedly no longer required to generate multiple imaginaries. This survey celebrates the imperfect nature of the physical — painting that bleeds and groans, stumbles and laughs as it fractures imagery into unexpected forms. These canvases reclaim inconsistency as a virtue, discovering meaning through the push and pull of physical gesture. Far from being a relic of history, painting reemerges here with evolving urgency: in a disembodied age, paint becomes a declaration of the artist’s embodied presence.”
On view through June 10, 2025
520 8th Ave, 15th Floor, Manhattan Free (bring photo ID for building entry)
Jack Whitten: The Messenger
Among some other things not to miss at MoMA right now, this exhibition tops the list.
Whitten was an influential African American artist and clearly one of the most innovative abstract painters since abstract painting was a thing, full stop. After spending close to five decades working between Lower Manhattan and Greece, he made Jackson Heights, Queens his home (also Epicenter’s home!) after Sept. 11, 2001. He died in 2018.
On view through Aug. 7, 2025
Museum of Modern Art
Manhattan
MoMA is now open late every Friday night;, and admission is free for all New York State residents from 5:30- – 8:30.
