Mara De Luca's

portrait by Lile Kvantaliani

(b. 1973, Washington D.C.) paintings evoke a sense of atmospheric abstractions that bring to mind dusk, sunsets, and planetary orbs. Throughout her work there is a sense of reflected ambient light. De Luca's work today extends the celebration of illusionism, romanticism, and the sublime with a deeply informed response to modernist painting.

De Luca received an MFA from CalArts, Los Angeles, CA and a BA from Columbia University, NY. Her work has been displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and is in prominent collections, including the Buck Collection at UC Irvine, JP Morgan Chase, New York; Fidelity, Boston; Alexander Plaza Berlin, Germany; New York Medical College, New York; and the University of Oslo, Norway. She has been reviewed in Artforum, Cultured Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Artweek LA, and others. De Luca is a recipient of the 2019 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists. She has taught Painting at UC San Diego, UC Irvine, UC Davis and UC Riverside.

Based in Los Angeles for over two decades, De Luca now lives and works in New York.

Mara De Luca, Western Gate 1, 2024 mixed media on canvas with copper plated element 54 × 96 inches (137 × 244 cm)

Mara De Luca, Western Gate 2, 2024 acrylic on primed and unprimed canvas with brass plated element 59 x 132 inches (150 x 335.5 cm)

Mara De Luca, Cut Western Clouds, 2024, mixed media on cut canvas with copper plated elements, 48 x 42 x 3 inches (122 x 106.5 x 7.5 cm).

Eun-Ha Paek in her studio in Brooklyn, 2024. Photo by Helmi Korhonen. Courtesy of Hostler Burrows

Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Eun-Ha Paek’s sculptures give physical form to the artist’s inner narratives and personal history, while exploring broader themes of identity and human experience. Paek’s hybrid approach to ceramics is informed by her background in animation and film. Her attempts to roll increasingly smaller, tighter coils eventually led her to introduce 3D printing to her practice, enabling detail that would not be possible by hand. The resulting pieces, while finally static, are created through a process that in many ways mimics stop motion animation. Paek’s work, across media, investigates questions of identity through storytelling. Hints of recognizable references and motifs are present in her figures, but this host of characters is the unique product of a visual language developed to give shape to the artist’s internal dialogue.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1974, Paek currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BFA in Film/Animation/Video from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she has also been a guest lecturer. Paek’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, and she is the recipient of several awards and grants including the Windgate Scholarship and Rudy Autio Grant from the Archie Bray Foundation. Paek’s animated films have screened in the Guggenheim Museum, Sundance Film Festival, and venues around the world. She has been a guest lecturer at the Fashion Institute of Technology, a visiting critic at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and she currently serves on the faculty at Parsons School of Design/The New School.

Eun-Ha Paek, Pied Piper, 2025. Glazed stoneware. 17" H x 15.5" W x 9.5” D. Photo by Joe Kramm. Courtesy of Hostler Burrows

Eun-Ha Paek, Duck Lips Redux, 2024. 3D printed glazed stoneware. 17.5" H x 14" W x 8” D. Photo by Joe Kramm. Courtesy of Hostler Burrows

Eun-Ha Paek, Mongmong Mountain, 2025. Glazed stoneware, gold leaf. 17" H x 22" W x 16”D. Photo by Joe Kramm. Courtesy of Hostler Burrows

Fanny Allié was born in Montpellier, South of France. She received her Master’s Degree from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (The National School of Photography) in Arles, France in 2005 and moved to New York City.

Princeton University, Equity Gallery, Hyatt Centric (Philadelphia), DOT Art, A.I.R Gallery, New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, Fresh Window, Chashama and St Eustache Church (Paris, France), Hudson Yards Alliance have organized solo exhibitions and public installations of her work. Tappan Gallery, Owen James Gallery, NYU/Gallatin Gallery, Dorsky Gallery, Freight + Volume, BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Dekalb Gallery/Pratt Institute, UConn University, Mana Contemporary, Hamburg Museum of Arts and Crafts, The Bronx Museum, Teachers College Columbia University among others have featured her work in group exhibitions.

Fanny is the recipient of various fellowships and residencies including AIM (Bronx Museum), BRIC Lab Fellowship, Emergency Grant (Foundation for Contemporary Arts), A.I.R. Fellowship Program, Robert Blackburn Printmaking SIP Fellowship, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program, Yaddo Residency, Dieu Donné Workspace Residency, NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship (Craft/Sculpture), MacDowell Fellowship, Puffin Foundation Grant, Wildacres Residency and National Arts Club Artist Fellowship.

Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Time Out, ARTnews, NY Magazine, Brooklyn Magazine, Hyperallergic, Le Monde Diplomatique, Blouin Art Info, DNA Info, Marie Claire Italy, AM New York among others.

Her neon light sculpture “The Glowing Homeless” and sound installation will be exhibited at the Church of St. Eustache in Paris from December 18th 2024 until May 31st 2025.

In 2025, Kaliner Gallery in New York City and Giovanni Bonelli Gallery (Milan, Italy) will present her work in solo exhibitions.

Fanny lives in Brooklyn and works from her studio at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in Manhattan, NY.

Exhibits discussed are KALINER and Giovanni Bonelli.

A Longing, March 6 - April 12, 2025, Installation view at Kaliner Gallery, 42 Allen St, NYC

Ladder Leg, 2024, found fabric, collagraph print and acrylic paint, 32.5in x 50in

The Night the Wind Learned to Dance, April 24 - May 25, 2025, Installation view at Giovanni Bonelli Gallery, Milan, Italy

Shelved, 2025, found fabric and collagraph prints, 59in x 38.5in

Circles, 2024, found fabric and collagraph prints, 55.5in x 55.5in

Photo by Dan McMahon

Born 1989 Atlanta, Georgia. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and works in the Bronx, New York. Emma McMillan searches for the pulsing vitality of life through non-human figurative paintings. Drawing, collage, macroscopic photography, and archival research are avenues for abstraction of the animal form. For several years a local Spotted Lanternfly infestation has been a commentary on the current state of human and animal affairs. The series, now expanded across species, takes on lusty and religious overtones of reincarnation. Sampling psychology, the natural world, and pop culture, her gem-hued oil paintings are complex reflections on living and its mutations across time. Emma McMillan has had institutional exhibitions at Atlanta Contemporary ArtsCenter, Atlanta Georgia, “Project X” (2019) She has had solo exhibitions at Sebastian Gladstone, New York, 2025, Sebastian Gladstone, Los Angeles, 2024, PhilippZollinger, Zurich, 2024, and a solo booth with PhilippZollinger at Liste Art Fair Basel, in June 2024. Other solo exhibitions include “Bleu de Prusse” at Edouard Montassut, Paris, France (2019), “Ornament and Crime” at Lomex, New York City, New York (2018), and “Live Burial” at Bad Reputation Fine Arts, Los Angeles, California (2017). As well as select group and two-person exhibitions “Discard Phase” at Triest, Brooklyn, New York (2021), “Downtown Painting” at Peter Freeman, New York City, New York (2019), “Responsibility Fest” at Kunstverien Braunschweig Wolfe Island, Canada (2019).

Emma McMillan, Imago, 2025 Oil, oil pastel on linen 55" H x 42" W. Image courtesy, Sebastian Gladstone, and the artist.

Emma McMillan Crush, 2024 Oil on linen 36" H x 24" W. Image courtesy, Sebastian Gladstone, and the artist.

Emma McMillan, Cocoon, 2025 Oil, oil pastel on linen 55" H x 42" W. Image courtesy, Sebastian Gladstone, and the artist.

Greg Chann has shown his work with Denise Bibro Fine Art, NYC; Dorsky Gallery, NYC; Margaret Thatcher Projects, NYC; The Drawing Center, NYC; among other spaces around the country. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, NY Arts, and Time Out New York.

He has received a NY Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, and the NY Foundations of the Arts/Felissimo Award and lives and works in New York.

Greg Chann, Stack XVI, 2024 Acrylic and ink 7 x 6 x 4 in.

Greg Chann, Vertegres, 2024 Acrylic and ink 20 x 30.5 x 1.25 in.

Greg Chann, Wall Stack IX, 2024 Acrylic and ink 15 x 13 x 3 in.

Photo: by Philip Bennett

Jessica Helfand (b. 1960) is an artist and writer.

She grew up in Paris and New York City, and received her BA and MFA from Yale University where she taught for more than two decades. She is the author of numerous books on visual and cultural criticism, and was the first-ever recipient, in 2010, of the Henry Wolf Residency at the American Academy in Rome.

A 2018 Director’s Guest at Civitella Ranieri and a 2019 fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation, Jessica Helfand was also the 2020 Artist in Residence at Caltech. She lives and works in New England.

A view of some of the paintings which will be on view from May 1 to June 1 at Jim Kempner Fine Art in New York. (Photo courtesy of the artist.)

Agnes Grey, Anne Brönte, 1847, Mixed media and oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches, 2024The cold wind had swelled and reddened my hands, uncurled and entangled my hair, and dyed my face of a pale purple; add to this my collar was horridly crumpled, my frock splashed with mud, my feet clad in stout new boots, and as the trunks were not brought up, there was no remedy … so having smoothed my hair as well as I could, and repeatedly twitched my obdurate collar, I proceeded to clomp down two flights of stairs, philosophizing as I went.

Claudine, Claudine in Paris, Colette, 1901, Mixed media and oil on canvas, 52 x 42 inches, 2025.                  Pointed chin, you’re attractive but don’t, I implore you, overdo that point. Hazel eyes, you persist in being hazel and I can’t blame you for it; but don’t retreat under my eyebrows with that excessive modesty. Mouth, you’re still my mouth, but so pale that I can’t resist rubbing those short, colorless lips with petals pulled from the red geranium in the window. (Incidentally it only gives them a horrid, purplish tinge that I promptly lick off.) As to you, my poor little white, anaemic ears, I hide you under my curly hair and secretly look at you from time to time and pinch you to make you redden. But it’s my hair that’s the worst of all. I can’t touch it without wanting to cry ... they’ve cut them all off, just below the ear—my auburn ringlets, my lovely, smoothly-rolled ringlets!

Alan Bray was born in Waterville, Maine, and grew up in Monson, a small slate-quarrying town set in the northern reaches of the Appalachians. Bray attended the Art Institute of Boston before graduating from the University of Southern Maine; he received his MFA in painting from the Villa Schifanoia in Florence, Italy. It was during this formative time in Florence that he was exposed to casein tempera on panel.

Bray’s work has been the subject of no less than 25 solo exhibitions and is included in the public collections of the Portland Museum of Art, ME; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, MA; the Farnsworth Museum of Art, ME; Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY; Zillman Art Museum, ME; Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, WI; Lyman Allyn Museum of Arts, New London, CT;  Maine Savings Bank Collection, Memphis Cancer Center, Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts, Menlo Park, CA; among others. The artist lives and works in Sangerville, Maine.

As both a naturalist and a painter, Bray is drawn to what often goes unnoticed. “I paint what is right around me,” he says. “Occasionally it’s a big subject, but more often it’s a bird’s nest or a farm pond.” Like the subtle geometry of his compositions, Bray’s preference for modest, unassuming subjects—backwater meanders over mountaintop vistas—is deliberate and quietly profound. He has become an expert observer of bogs and shorelines, rock slides and fallow fields, daybreaks and dusks, the shifting edges of seasons. In the overlooked landscapes of his native Maine, Bray uncovers a deep sense of spirituality that gives his work its quiet power—transformative in its presence, not merely descriptive.

Bray paints in casein, a milk-based tempera that has virtually no drying time. Necessarily, his paintings are technically complex because they consist of thousands of tiny brush strokes, built up in layers, out of which the images – the vision – advance from the foundation of a mirror-smooth, absolute void of white ground. It is a method of painting that follows directly from his method of exploring his subjects.

Alan Bray, Neighbors, 2025 Casein on panel, 11 x 14 in.

Alan Bray A Whisper Breaks the Silence, 2024 Casein on panel, 15 x 20 in.

Alan Bray Refuge, 2024 Casein on panel, 16 x 20 in

Zuriel Waters was born in 1984 in Philadelphia, PA, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Received an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2010 and a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from San Diego State University in 2007.

Has shown work in group exhibitions throughout New York City at galleries such as Underdonk, Marvin Gardens, Tappeto Volante, CANADA and others and has recently had solo shows at Left Field Gallery in Los Osos, CA, My Pet Ram in NYC and Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in NYC.

Tongue Drum, 2025 acrylic pigment-dyed burlap, canvas and twill, upholstery thread, felt, eye-hooks 28 x 42 in.

Elle, 2024 acrylic on denim, thread, industrial felt, cotton duck, hardware 35 1/2 x 21 in.

am/pm, 2025 acrylic pigment-dyed burlap, canvas and twill, upholstery thread, felt, eye-hooks 43 x 28 in.

Laurie Sheck’s novel A Monster’s Notes, a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,  was long listed for the Dublin Impac International Fiction Prize. Her book of poems, The Willow Grove, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Her work has appeared widely in the Paris Review, the New Yorker and elsewhere. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A member of the MFA Creative Writing faculty at the New School, she lives in New York City.

This interview focuses on her new book, Cyborg Fever.

Portrait of artist in studio, 2016 Photo: Don Stahl Courtesy of Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC.

Hope Gangloff (b. 1974)attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science andArt. She is well known for her vibrant portrait and landscape paintings that combine a distinctive bright palette with intricate line work. Her early portraiture garnered attention for its intimate observation of relatable moments, from a road trip with friends to a late-night houseparty. Gangloff's work was recently exhibited in "Forces of Nature: Voices That Shaped Environmentalism" at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C. and in "Women PaintingWomen" at the Fort Worth Modern, with an upcoming solo exhibition at Susan Inglett Gallery,NYC, from 1 May–7 June 2025.

Solo exhibitions include the Cantor Arts Center, StanfordUniversity; the Broad Art Museum, East Lansing; and Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Grinnell CollegeMuseum of Art, Grinnell; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the Broad Art Museum,East Lansing; the Kemper Museum, Kansas City; and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,Philadelphia, among others.

Hope Gangloff, James (Case-Leal), 2025 (Detail) Acrylic on linen 36 x 26 in. Copyright The Artist Courtesy of Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC.

Hope Gangloff, 'Bittersweet' barn, 2025 (Detail) Acrylic on canvas 48 x 72 in. Copyright The Artist Courtesy of Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC.

Hope Gangloff, Matthew (Holtzclaw) & Prakash (Puru), 2025 (Detail) Acrylic on wood panel 80 1/2 x 48 in. Copyright The Artist Courtesy of Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC.