When approaching Kathy Butterly’s exhibition High Vibration, I felt as if I had entered a small garden of flowers. The square bases resemble stems, while the irregular forms above unfold like different blossoms. Each “flower” seems to generate its own miniature world, inviting viewers to move slowly through the space and observe the differences between each sculpture.

Each sculpture is cast in porcelain and placed on a handmade ceramic cube. Their shapes and colors vary greatly, and the texture of the glazes differs from piece to piece, ranging from the ultimate monochrome to richly detailed and complex treatments. Some surfaces appear smooth and quiet, while others feel more energetic and layered.

Rather than casting molds from found objects, Butterly develops her own vessel forms. She pours liquid porcelain into plaster molds and repeatedly reshapes the surface by hand, almost as if drawing lines in three-dimensional space. This process allows the forms to feel both controlled and spontaneous at the same time. The final shapes appear through glazing and multiple firings in the kiln, where the colors and textures gain their final intensity over time.

The placement of rounded vessels on top of cubic bases suggests a visual tension between organic form and geometric structure. However, when this same tension is repeated across many sculptures within the gallery space, the effect becomes somewhat diminished. The sculptures begin to produce an unexpected regularity. The lower cubes start to read primarily as pedestals, supporting structures rather than active elements of the composition. Because the cubic forms are relatively small compared to the circular ones and the display height is quite low, viewers must bend down to observe them closely, making the cubic bases easy to overlook.

Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces Review

One might assume that Columbia’s Wallach Art Gallery would extend the university’s ongoing suppression of student led activism protesting ICE raids and the genocide in Gaza. However, Lotty Rosenfeld’s retrospective, Disobedient Spaces, presents an uncensored point of view: political activism and collective art action are powerful tools to combat authoritarian systems of oppression. 

Born in 1943, Rosenfeld grew up in Santiago and lived through the U.S. backed 1973 coup and the rise of dictator Augusto Pinochet. The exhibition highlights the evolution of her work from early etchings to her videography and public art action. It opens with an eye-catching red wall with oversized prints taken from video footage of her pivotal work “Una Milla de Cruces Sobre el Pavimento” in which she laid white tape and bandages across traffic lines to create, as the title suggests, crosses on the pavement. Rosenfeld continued to speak out against Pinochet’s dictatorship with the art collective CADA, whose “NO+” campaign invited the public to finish the sentence “No More…” in their own words. 

Seen today, Rosenfeld’s interventions feel simple yet radical. A strip of tape laid on the pavement is a visual interruption of authority. Disobedient Spaces reminds visitors that small acts of resistance, particularly those carried out in the street during times of heightened military presence, can build visibility, solidarity and community under systems of oppression. 

- Nicole Bunis

Review of "Papunya Tula: Meeting Place for all Brothers and Cousins" at Foreign & Domestic (Group A)

    Papunya Tula: Meeting Place for all Brothers and Cousins features a group of Aboriginal artists from the Western Desert of Australia. The approach of the series is to repeat abstract patterns, using organic lines and geometric shapes to depict the beauty of nature in their ancestral homeland. The color palettes are mostly red, black, and earth tones, representing the red sand desert. Although the Papunya Tula movement is a contemporary art movement that incorporates techniques from other styles, its subject matter, colors, and patterns clearly drew inspiration from the ancient rock and cave paintings in Australia. 

    The design of the exhibition provides an opportunity for each artist to express their style. Sally Nakamarra paints colorful grids representing the rockholes and soakage water of Watunuma. Yalti Napangati paints short red strokes on black canvas, representing the sandhills and the rocky hills. Aubrey Tjangala paints black on black, depicting body paint designs associated with the Dreamtime water. Adrian Jurra Tjungurrayi paints organic dotted lines representing the bush carrot plants. Angus Tjungurrayi paints monochromatic lines of the salt lake site of Wilkinkarra.

    This is my favorite exhibition because it honors the effort in preserving their ancestral Dreamtime culture before colonization, especially when their culture is not well-known in the world. The downside of combining contemporary art with regional culture is that it becomes hard for audiences to understand the meaning behind the series. But overall, I appreciate having the opportunity to learn more about marginalized cultures from different parts of the world.

Review of "Disobedient Spaces" at the Wallach Gallery, Ksenija Carleton (Group A)

      

    “Disobedient Spaces” – showing at Columbia’s Wallach Gallery till March 15^th, constitutes the first US retrospective of the Chilean artist, Lotty Rosenfeld. Remembered as one of the most influential feminist artists from Latin America, Rosenfeld’s practice began in the early 1960’s, and matured into primarily video and performance based work following Augusto Pinochet’s coup in 1973. Censorship, state violence, and female oppression were central themes in Rosenfeld’s work, which was in direct conversation with the brutality of the Pinochet dictatorship. Indeed, Rosenfeld explored artistic intervention as a means for political resistance.

The retrospective is organized into eight sections that follow a loosely chronological and largely thematic structure. The Wallach explores Rosenfeld via her early works on paper; videos; screen-prints; significant interventions like A thousand crosses on the pavement (1979-80), Una Herida Americana (1982), No+ (as a member of the group CADA); and her decades long collaboration with Palestinian-Chilean artist Diamela Eltit. The sections tend to bleed into each other at the Wallach, where the circulation also feels unspecified. This frames Rosenfeld’s artistic production as a politically and thematically unified body of work, which consistently committed itself to social justice, equality, and liberation of the oppressed.

In the wake of Columbia’s fierce repression of student protests in 2024, and compliance with Trump’s efforts to overhaul academic freedom, the Wallach’s exhibit, by illustrating how the militant potentials of artistic intervention were effectively harnessed by Rosenfeld, serves as an act of resistance in itself – a rebuttal to the institution it is housed by.

                                                                                                                            Ksenija Carleton 

"Education as Resistance" By La Escuela at MoMa PS1

    

Miguel Braceli’s large chalkboard stage

    

Studio Lenca's postcard workshop 

    

Laura Anderson Barbata’s naturally dyed flags

“Education as Resistance” is an installation by La Escuela, an artist-run project led by Siemens Stiftung and Miguel Braceli that uses art as a tool for social learning in public spaces across Latin America. For its first U.S. exhibition, the program transforms MoMA PS1’s Homeroom gallery into a collective classroom, framing education as a form of resistance against social injustice and colonial erasure. The exhibition highlights Latine activism through works by La Escuela’s collaborators.

Among them, Laura Anderson Barbata’s naturally dyed flags, which are colored with pigments extracted from cochineal, rust, nuts, spices, and flowers. These materials invoke Indigenous knowledge passed down through colonial trade. Her process also links ancestral techniques to contemporary themes of gender, labor, and ecology.

In adjacency, Studio Lenca offers a hands-on postcard workshop that invites visitors to reflect on the ideas of belonging and displacement. Both themes are central to his ongoing series Rutas. This participatory activity presents the migratory narratives derived from his broader practice.

Anchoring the space is Miguel Braceli’s large chalkboard stage, a flexible platform for gathering, writing, and sharing resources. It operates as both sculpture and furniture, emphasizing learning as an embodied, communal act grounded in everyday practice.

Presented as a functioning classroom, “Education as Resistance” creates a space for dialogue, co-learning, and collective expression. While the themes of the exhibition are clearly articulated through the works on view, some installations leave visitor participation ambiguous. More explicit invitations or prompts could clarify how audiences are meant to engage, which would strengthen the exhibition’s main intention.

 

 These works share many similarities. Structurally, they all

demonstrate a kind of diffused state, yet visually they

converge at certain focal points. The first image, with its

urban landscape, immediately reminds me of materials

used in rock climbing. It suggests that the artist may be

exploring an opportunity to merge naturalistic elements

with a commentary on social conditions. To me, this piece

reflects on the “spectacle” of society—an existential

revelation of how we inhabit and perceive our

environment.

In the second group of sculptures, numerous human faces appear. This motif exists across many

cultural histories, yet the facial forms here evoke the aesthetics of the Americas—something

primal, an original beauty. The artist shapes the clay into smooth, refined surfaces, producing a

sensorial tactility. When displayed collectively, these figures remind me of Bizet’s Carmen—a

kind of silent theatricality. The work also brings to mind the ceramic pieces I saw at Marian

Goodman, though I believe this artist’s sculptures extend beyond references to agrarian

civilizations. They feel like a postmodern form of primal art. Moreover, by using different types

of clay, the artist introduces a sense of “union,” as though hinting at the gathering of different

peoples and cultures across the world.

The black sculptural work conveys a quality of black linear tension. This artist, represented by

David Zwirner, has long treated space itself as a canvas, playing extensively with negative space.

However, from a technical perspective, negative space alone does not fully account for the

work’s effect. While the materials and fabrication methods are not immediately clear, what is

directly perceptible is the piece’s persistent sense of instability—teetering yet stubbornly

resilient. Coming from my own Chinese cultural background, I associate this work with the

aesthetics of Go. It feels incredibly playful. Compared to the other pieces, this is the one I find

most compelling. The artist seems to create an internal set of rules, generating countless

variations from limited elements and forms. What emerges is a kind of silent poetry—an artistic

form of literature expressed through spatial rhythm and restraint.

 

   The work titled On the Hunt begins with an apparently calm textual study, placing more than a century’s worth of personal ads alongside surveillance-like imagery of hunters and animals, forming a powerful and thought-provoking metaphor. By examining the qualities men and women sought in each other from 1895 to 2019, the artist reveals both the changes and continuities in social values, gender expectations, and the structure of intimate relationships. When these texts are set into double-sided frames—one side showing the “hunter’s space” of elevated stands, the other presenting nighttime images of animals being watched and captured—the viewer can hardly ignore the sense of “pursuit” that often appears in human emotional life as well: who is searching for whom? Who is active, and who is being observed? With a restrained yet incisive approach, the work raises deep questions about desire, power, gender roles, and the consumerist nature of modern intimacy. It leads the viewer to constantly shift perspectives between reading and looking, as if oscillating between the roles of hunter and prey. In this way, the piece becomes not just a visual presentation but also a mirror that exposes the hidden structures within intimate relationships—sharp, honest, and revealing.