Jessica Holmes

Jessica Holmes is a New York-based writer and critic. She is an Art Editor and ArTonic Editor for the Brooklyn Rail.

 

This conceptual framework of covering and uncovering has played out consistently through the decades of Beverly Semmes’s long and varied career, and Slip, a focused show at Susan Inglett Gallery, justly highlights this thematic pursuit across the artist’s sculpture, installation, and performance photography.

Beverly Semmes: Slip

Inside the new Calder Gardens, it quickly becomes clear that most of the construction has taken place below ground level, which at first seems a startling decision for an artist so associated with effervescence and air.

Calder Gardens, Philadelphia, 2025. Artwork: Alexander Calder © 2025 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Iwan Baan. © Calder Gardens.

“Looking out at those / Open plains / Nothing on either side / And your heart / Syncs up / With other animals / Until there’s one beat.” These words, excerpted from artist and poet Pamela Sneed’s poem, “Speaking Tongue,” are scrawled on the wall of Dashwood Projects alongside the paintings that make up her current exhibition.

Pamela Sneed, Ostrich 2, 2024. Watercolor on paper, 7 x 10 inches. Courtesy the artist and Dashwood Projects.

Berry Campbell Gallery is presenting BINGO, an important show of the Bernice Bing's artwork that will surely do much to further scholarship on this under-acknowledged artist.

Bernice Bing: BINGO
Francis Bacon, the indomitable twentieth-century painter whose gritty and chaotic life was expressed so eloquently in the turmoil of his canvases, was not known to make women the subject of his portraits.
Francis Bacon, Triptych, Studies of the Human Body, 1970. Courtesy Ordovas.
The lobby of Anton Kern’s Upper East Side townhouse gallery has been transformed into a dimly lit room housing a dilapidated shack made from corrugated tin; a floor to ceiling curtain onto which a looped fragment of film is projected hangs opposite the shack.
John Bock, Dead + Juicy, installation view, 2018. Courtesy the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York. © John Bock. Photo: Thomas Müller
The music hits you as you walk through the door of Kate Werble Gallery, where Walking Backward Running Forward, a new show of work by artist Marilyn Lerner, is on view.
Marilyn Lerner. Left: Eight Circles, 1989. Oil on wood, 36 inches diameter. Right:Walking Backward Running Forward, 2018. Oil on wood, 36 inches diameter. Courtesy the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY. Photo: Gregory Carideo.
The exhibition, whose title subverts Brownmiller’s epithet, recaptures the experience of rape from this art historical romanticizing, presenting work by twenty female artists from the past forty years on its decidedly “un-heroic” nature.
Carolee Thea, Sabine Woman, 1991. Chicken wire, electrical wire, sockets, bulbs, sound, dimensions variable. ©1991/2018 Carolee Thea. Courtesy the artist.
“I don’t actually keep a diary but sometimes I write things down on A4, and I sort of faintly hope they survive,” says Sean Scully.
A Note on Insets. Dated August 18, 1989. Courtesy the Artist.
For the past twenty years, Sue de Beer has been using, challenging, and subverting the tropes of horror to make experimental films that are by turns unsettling and beautiful, and infused with a sly-eyed humor. Her sixth major production centers in and around a medical clinic located on a remote island off the New England coast, whose doctors, nurses, and patients all hold their secrets, and are possibly not what they seem. De Beer has long wished to make a werewolf film, and on the occasion of her fourth exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, I sat down with her to preview and discuss her newest piece, The White Wolf.
Portrait of Sue de Beer, pencil on paper by Phong Bui.

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