5 Women Artists Who Shaped the Studio Glass Movement in the U.S. https://ift.tt/CRPlMcs

When curator Tami Landis began developing a show on women of the 1960s American Studio Glass Movement, she found countless early glass experiments by men. Many weren’t even that good—“ugly and floppy,” she recently recalled. But it was male artists who’d dominated the “hot shops” who became central to the mythology of the movement. Traces of the women who experimented with the medium were far harder to find. “It annoyed me that there’s not enough collected evidence of that in institutions,” she said.

Yet Landis persisted and has assembled a formidable trove of glassworks by women in “Tough Stuff: Women in the American Glass Studio,” on view at the Corning Museum of Glass in New York through January 10, 2027. The show offers a new history that foregrounds the pioneering female figures who worked in glass, despite incredible adversity. Much more than a historical revision, the arresting presentation features luminous and technically daring works that feel incredibly contemporary.

Landis spoke to many women artists who shared stories about being actively discouraged from working with glass. Some had professors and peers who intentionally broke their work, removed pieces from kilns early so they would crack, left notes on desks telling them to quit, or physically barred them from studios altogether. Women were routinely told they were not strong enough. They were simply unwelcome. Many ended up working alone, often at a smaller scale and outside of the studios that helped define the American Studio Glass Movement. Yet they made groundbreaking innovations in kiln-forming, stained glass, pâte de verre, and other techniques that broadened the possibilities of the medium for generations of future practitioners.

The exhibition includes rarely seen works by both well-known and lesser-known artists. Many capture moments of great invention, like the artists’ earliest encounters with glass. There are several works on view that Landis has catalogued, photographed, or properly mounted for the first time. The exhibition’s position within the museum is also significant; it occupies the museum’s prominent Heineman Gallery, which previously showcased works from the family who endowed the museum’s studio glass collection and offered a traditional, collector-driven narrative. For Landis, this project demanded a structural shift as much as a curatorial one. “We’re museums, we’re institutions,” she said. “We need to tell a different story than just what a collector says.”

Here are five artists in the exhibition to know:

Edith Franklin

B. 1922. D. 2012.

Vessels from the First Toledo Studio Glass Workshop (1962)

When Edith Franklin first tried to join the invitation-only Toledo Museum of Art Glass Workshop, she was told she couldn’t attend because she wasn’t a university professor. She asked again and was once again denied. She learned there was still space and finally paid a fee to participate. Franklin recalled: “I wasn’t invited. I invited myself.” The experimental glassblowing workshops, held in two sessions in 1962, are widely considered the birthplace of the American Studio Glass Movement, but very little work survived.

One of Franklin’s vessels greets visitors at the show’s entry. It’s one of the few works from the 1962 workshops that has endured. The three bulbous, translucent vessels, which are on loan from the Toledo Museum of Art, are small and humble but full of personality. Franklin went on to teach ceramics at the 577 Foundation in Ohio, where she served as director until 1997. She also co-founded the Toledo Potters’ Guild in 1951 and became a trustee of the Toledo Area Glass Guild in 1981.

Ruth Tamura

B. 1943.

Marbles from The Great Marble Tournament on Bay Fill (1969)

The exhibition title comes from artist Ruth Tamura, who once described the glassmaking process as “rather tough stuff.” Tamura was a pioneering figure in the American Studio Glass Movement and continues to create sculptural glass works that emphasize organic forms. She studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC, now the California College of the Arts) in San Francisco and earned a BFA in 1966. In 1969, she received the first-ever MFA in glass from CCAC while simultaneously completing an MFA in ceramics at Mills College in Oakland, California. While still a student, Tamura helped develop the glass studios at both institutions.

The artist graduated and became acting head of the CCAC glass program, and was one of the first women to lead a university glass program in the United States. She worked closely with Dale Chihuly to write the grant that, in 1971, helped establish Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington; it’s now one of the most important glassmaking institutions in the world.

The show features three black marbles from Tamura’s 1969 thesis performance at CCAC, The Great Marble Tournament on Bay Fill, in which the artist covered the gallery floor with sand and dozens of large-scale marbles and invited visitors to interact with the work.

Only three marbles survived, she later recalled, because visitors walked away with the rest. Tamura was deeply inspired by the performance art movement in 1960s California, and she believed that glassmaking itself was participatory and performative.

Mary Shaffer

B. 1947.

Nail Pillow (1972)

Mary Shaffer is best-known for using fused and slumped glass to expand the language of studio glass towards Minimalism and Conceptual art. She began working with the medium in 1970, both at the Rhode Island School of Design and at home with a small kiln. Shaffer quickly developed a technique that she called “mid-air slumping,” in which she used gravity to soften plate glass. She often integrated metal objects into the material. They created a sense of tension and left permanent marks, which the artist associated with the lasting imprint of trauma and memory.

For Shaffer, glassmaking carried symbolic meaning: Glass would warp and bend under heat, then settle back into flatness, which mirrored patterns of pressure and recovery. In her work, sheets of plate glass slump over wire grids into delicate, subtly distorted forms that are both fragile and rugged.

From 1979 to 1983, Shaffer chaired the Craft Department at New York University, where she also developed a public street workshop for glassblowing. Across her practice, including later works in metal, stone, and cast glass, Shaffer has remained engaged with environmental concerns and the use of recycled materials. Her first major solo exhibition devoted to glass, in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1974, featured installation-based works suspended by chains and meat hooks.

Cappy Thompson

B. 1952.

The Kingdom Within (2001)

Cappy Thompson populates her vessels with mythological and intensely personal symbols that reference memory, transformation, and spiritual reflection. The artist began her career in stained glass and is largely self-taught, with a strong commitment to experimentation.

Thompson began working with glass while studying painting and drawing at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. During the summer of 1975, she found a new creative home at Mansion Glass, a small studio where she decided to complete her degree. She taught herself glass painting and developed early technical fluency. She learned the grisaille technique in glass, which she used for commissioned portrait panels. Her work at the time also included multi-paneled screens inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and ideas of harmony and pattern.

By the end of the 1970s, Thompson was renting a live-work studio equipped with a ceramic kiln and working part-time as a carpenter’s assistant. After moving to Seattle in 1984, she met the sculptor Flora Mace, who encouraged her to paint on vessels rather than flat surfaces. Since then, she has worked consistently with curved surfaces, which activate her painterly language. Thompson’s process begins with a blown glass vessel that she allows to cool completely. She then paints it and fires it again, often using enamel pigments that permanently fuse to the surface.

Toots Zynsky

B. 1951.

Clipped Grass (1982)

Toots Zynsky’s work is deeply connected to movement, rhythm, and sound. While the artist is often celebrated for her later works, she has received far less attention for her role in the experimental culture of the late 1960s. Zynsky initially trained as a dancer and was strongly influenced by music; she was drawn to the hot shop by both its sounds and the material itself. During her “spinning experiments,” fragments of colored glass would fall to the floor, which she imagined could become their own sculptural forms.

Among Zynsky’s earliest experiments were sound studies in which she dropped pieces of glass onto sheets of plate glass and recorded the resulting tones and vibrations. Although the works no longer survive, Zynsky documented these investigations, which treated glass as an instrument that could produce rhythm and resonance. They led her to pursue the filet de verre technique for which she became internationally recognized, in which fine threads of colored glass are layered and fused in the kiln, then shaped into undulating vessels.

Clipped Grass (1982), the first work Zynsky made entirely with hand-pulled threads of glass, reflects a memory central to her practice; after spending time at the renowned Pilchuck Glass School in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s, which she helped build during its formative years, Zynsky returned to New York and longed for the sensation of walking barefoot outdoors.

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Wolfgang Tillmans wins 2026 Roswitha Haftmann Prize. https://ift.tt/Oy2zKDX

German artist Wolfgang Tillmans has won the 2026 Roswitha Haftmann Prize, Europe’s most financially significant arts prize, in recognition of his four-decade photography career and his longstanding social advocacy. The prize, administered by the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation, includes a no-strings-attached monetary award of 150,000 Swiss francs (about $190,000). The prize was established in 2001 and is named after the late Swiss dealer Roswitha Haftmann.

Tillmans, who is best known for his intimate photography of European subcultures, will receive the award in person during a ceremony at the Kunsthaus Zürich on September 17. Past winners of the prize include Cindy Sherman, Cecilia Vicuña, Sigmar Polke, Rosemarie Trockel, and Jeff Wall.

Tillmans was born in Remscheid, Germany and rose to prominence in the 1990s with his candid portraits of LGBTIQ+ youth and rave nightlife culture. Over the years, his practice expanded to include still lifes, astronomical imagery, camera-less photographic experiments, multi-media installations, sound works, and video. In a press statement, the foundation said the prize recognized Tillmans’s role in redefining photography through portraiture, abstraction, installation, publishing, and political engagement. Globally, the artist is co-represented by David Zwirner and London’s Maureen Paley. He is also represented by Regen Projects in Los Angeles, Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris, and Galerie Buchholz in Berlin and Cologne.

“Wolfgang Tillmans is unquestionably one of the trailblazing artists of his generation in the field of photography internationally,” said Bernhart Schwenk, chief curator of contemporary art at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, who will present the award. “His artistic practice goes far beyond the purely aesthetic, harnessing public presence and language to foster a collective democratic consciousness founded on openness and solidarity.”

Tillmans is also a committed social activist. He has organized campaigns opposing Brexit and encouraging voter participation in German and European elections. In 2017, he established the nonprofit foundation, Between Bridges, to support democracy, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and anti-racism initiatives.

The artist’s recent exhibitions include the traveling survey “To Look Without Fear,” which opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2022 before traveling to Toronto and San Francisco, as well as the 2025 exhibitions “Weltraum” at the Albertinum in Dresden and “Nothing could have prepared us–Everything could have prepared us” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

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5 Artists Inspired by Moroccan Rugs and North African Weaving https://ift.tt/dI3xu4h

The loom has always been a form of thinking. For centuries in North Africa, weavers have articulated narratives and philosophies through colorful, patterned rugs. They use a grammar of signs, stitches, rhythm, color, and designs to communicate.

While these tapestries were once diminished by academia and the avant-garde as mere “womanly craft,” contemporary artists from the Maghreb region in Northwest Africa are transforming the medium in ways that both honor and update longstanding traditions. Many grew up around looms and recall their grandmothers’ hands on raw wool, their mothers’ crochet, or the cooperative workshops in their region. They attend to the labor, gestures, and knowledge that lived in the bodies of their women ancestors. Finally, biennales, fairs, and museums around the world are starting to catch on.

Here are five of the most exciting contemporary artists inspired by Moroccan rugs and North African weaving.

Amina Agueznay

B. 1963, Casablanca, Morocco. Lives and works in Marrakech, Morocco.

“Weaving is both sculpture and heritage, tactile and insulating,” Amina Agueznay told me days before the opening of her pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, where she is representing Morocco. “It’s an amazing medium for improvisation.”

The title of Agueznay’s monumental presentation, Asəṭṭa (2026), comes from the Amazigh (a Berber tribe) word for ritual weaving. Asəṭṭa, which was curated by Meriem Berrada and developed through workshops and on-site research with artisan communities across Morocco, centers on the concept of âatba: the threshold.

In the Arsenale, the artist has mounted more than 150 wool panels, woven on vertical looms and stitched with raffia, which cascade from the ceiling. From afar, they resemble Japanese scrolls. Up close, they reveal composite surfaces threaded with Murano glass, metallic filaments, and materials native to the North African craft tradition. Visitors settle into an expansive woven sofa, contemplate the fabric, and become part of the composition.

“Palm husk, wool, natural fibers…these materials have been used by artisans from different regions in their vocabulary, and together they form my lexicon,” Agueznay said.

The artist trained as an architect in Washington, D.C., before returning to Morocco in 1997. She presented her first monumental installation, titled Skin, in 2016 at the Museum Mohamed VI of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat, Morocco. The work emerged from a workshop the artist organized in Bouznika, a fishing town on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, where Agueznay collaborated with a group of craftswomen skilled in crochet, knitting, weaving, macramé, braiding, embroidery, and beading. The resulting sculpture, composed of recycled fishing nets interwoven with twine, wires, sequins, and paper, documented a social process and collective female knowledge.

Agueznay has now worked with artisans for almost two decades. She sees this process as a sacred act, requiring her to leave her ego at the door. “It’s about communicating with gestures, drawings, individual kindnesses, and encouragements, embracing flaws, understanding matter,” she said.

Ghizlane Sahli

B. 1973, Meknes, Morocco. Lives and works in Marrakech.

The Flows that Weave us 04, 2025
Ghizlane Sahli
Galerie le sud

A weaver once told Moroccan artist Ghizlane Sahli: “From the womb, a girl from a weaving tribe feels the rhythm of the loom. As a baby at her mother’s breast, she is surrounded by the scent of raw wool.”

Sahli, who initially trained as an architect in Paris, has similarly connected with textile practices via matriarchal traditions. Femininity and the body became central to her artistic language, which embraces softness, repetition, and time.

“My mother, who used to sew and knit, transmitted this early sensitivity and love for textiles through everyday gestures that were both simple and meaningful,” Sahli said. “These domestic practices formed an intimate environment in which threading became something natural and familiar.”

Et la sève fut... 8, 2023
Ghizlane Sahli
Christophe Person

La Mer, Origine du Monde (MOM 021), 2021
Ghizlane Sahli
Firetti Contemporary

Sahli spent years working alongside local artisans in embroidery ateliers in Morocco. “Our relationship is based on respect, trust, and love,” she said. “It creates a space of exchange where knowledge circulates horizontally rather than hierarchically.” Such collaboration connects and passes knowledge through different generations of women.

The artist is best known for her “Alveoles,” elements in her sculptural compositions made from recycled plastic bottle caps, which the artist wraps and assembles with silk thread. They resemble membranes, tissues, protective skins, sea anemones, or bulging coral as they evoke the fragility of the human body and the vulnerability of the natural world. Sahli first presented her “Alveoles” in Metamorphosis, a 2014 installation at Dar Bellarj in Marrakech.

L'Affranchie, 2023
Ghizlane Sahli
Galerie le sud

Histoires de tripes HT052, 2019
Ghizlane Sahli
Galerie le sud

In recent years, the artist has shifted from a near-monochromatic register to a palette that embraces color, warmth, and celebration. This is evident across her newest work, which she’ll exhibit in "Flowers also grow in Water, where Bodies are born…,” her upcoming December 2026 show at Atelier 21 in Casablanca. “Perhaps this is a response to the chaotic world we are living in today,” she said.

This year, the artist’s monumental piece Fields of Roses (2026) was also installed in the atrium of the new U.S. Consulate in Casablanca.

Mina Abouzahra

B. The Netherlands. Lives and works in Amsterdam and Morocco.

Brick Wall tapestry (One and a half Women), 2026
Mina Abouzahra
Rademakers Gallery

Mina Abouzahra’s motto is: A rug is never just a rug. “In the Amazigh tradition, it represents a document, a record of life, woven with symbols and colors that carry meaning across generations. To reduce it to a commodity is to erase the person who made it,” the Dutch-Moroccan artist said.

Abouzahra’s geometric, minimalist, and playful work unites elements of Dutch contemporary design with Moroccan forms. The artist recently discovered that both her grandmothers had been weavers. “I was stunned my mother had never mentioned it before,” she said. “When she said those words, everything fell into place.”

Roukia no.2, 2024
Mina Abouzahra
Rademakers Gallery

Ghada Samman Chair, 2026
Mina Abouzahra
Rademakers Gallery

In 2023, the artist participated in a year-long residency at a weaving cooperative in Taznakht, Morocco. Her work grew into “The Soul of a Rug,” an immersive exhibition that debuted at the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair Marrakech in 2025. It consisted of a 360-degree virtual reality film that documented the full arc of rug production in Taznakht. The artist also included meaningful objects, including a woven letter, created in the Amazigh bridal tradition, which served as communication between a newly married young woman and her family of origin.

Abouzahra’s approach is political. She feels a deep tension between the intimacy of her handmade work and the brutality of the global market. To counteract those pressures, she collaborates directly with cooperatives and insists on fair compensation and shared authorship.

The artist is currently preparing for a solo exhibition at the Gouda Museum in the Netherlands, opening September 2026. She has started weaving on a Jacquard machine, which allows for both precision and intimacy.

Amira Lamti

B. 1996, Sousse, Tunisia. Lives and works in Sousse.

Amira Lamti’s practice excavates the ritual knowledge of North African women. “Weaving and traditional craft have mostly been transmitted orally; there are no traces to follow,” she said. “It’s a subject that allows you to go toward people and listen to stories, and sometimes it’s really the mystical that takes over.”

The artist trained in photography and video at the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts de Sousse. While she started working primarily with photography, video, installation, and performance, textile has rapidly become one of her media of choice.

Lamti structured her exhibition “Bent el Machta”—or “Daughter of the Machta”—presented at the Yosr Ben Ammar Gallery in Tunis, Tunisia, as part of the 2024 Biennale Jaou, around a figure both intimate and mythic: the machta, or the woman who prepares a bride for the ritual Jelwa ceremony, in which the bride dances in circles while wearing a traditional, heavily embroidered golden garment.

Lamti often prints her own photographs onto traditional Tunisian sefseri, ivory veils woven from silk or fine wool. In her installations, she unites these pieces with archival footage from her family’s VHS cassettes, which documents Outia ceremonies (similar to bridal showers) across generations.

The artist is currently in residence at the Tassarout cultural association in Rabat, making a new body of work that similarly blends textile and photography. At its center are the female Sufi saints of Morocco who, in coastal mythology, protected sailors and fishermen from harm.

Work from “Bent el Machta” will be shown this summer at Les Rencontres d’Arles, the annual summer photography festival in Arles, France.

Amina Saoudi Aït Khay

B. 1955, Casablanca. Lives and works in Akouda, Tunisia.

A former physics and chemistry teacher in Casablanca, Amina Saoudi Aït Khay started making art in 1994. She began painting on silk, then transitioned into weaving: “I felt the need to reclaim the artisanal know-how I had acquired at a very young age behind my mother’s loom,” she said. “She was a great traditional weaver, and she initiated my brother and I to help her out.”

2026 has been a major year for the artist, whose work featured in the Diriyah Contemporary Art Bienniale and is now included in the 61st Venice Biennale.

Saoudi Aït Khay initially followed tradition, then decided to weave without a cartoon, or weaving blueprint. “I adopted an approach based on improvisation, which is quite unconventional,” she said.

The results are tapestries that often look like abstracted landscapes: They’re large, with warm tones, built from irregular forms, which the artist describes as “an organic living body.”

Saoudi Aït Khay was invisible to the larger cultural scene for many years. The Tunisian art world of the 1970s and ’80s viewed her tapestries as neither functional craft nor recognizable art. Over time, her works’ “in-betweenness” became their value, especially as the international art community took an interest in textile art and Tunisian contemporary art rooted in tradition. The artist’s work became part of the collections of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Barjeel Art Foundation, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Tunisia.

Saoudi Aït Khay produces only two or three tapestries a year, and over 20 years, her oeuvre has grown to around 30 works.

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10 Artist-Run Galleries Around the World You Should Know https://ift.tt/12rRvVi

Running a gallery is a tricky enough task. Add to that an active art practice, and you have what might seem like a recipe for creative overload.

Yet around the world, artist-run galleries have been flourishing for years. Their programming and client relationships are often strengthened by the unique experience of having someone at the helm who’s navigated the art world system from an artist’s perspective.

Whether platforming overlooked talent in underserved neighborhoods in Thailand or building a tight-knit community of repeat visitors around an annual summer show on a Greek island—or simply navigating experimental formats in major art cities like Berlin and New York—we’ve selected 10 artist-run galleries with vastly different approaches to operating a space.

Taken together, they’re united in their commitment to providing a level of care and support to artists that they themselves often haven’t experienced in their careers.

Escat Gallery

Based in Barcelona

Founded by: Pau Escat

Before launching his namesake gallery, artist Pau Escat got his start running the pandemic-era creative space Casa Studio Granados alongside his artist wife, Alicia Gimeno. When that project evolved into a more formal operation in 2024, Escat quickly established himself as a solid presence in Barcelona’s gallery scene.

Now spanning three distinct locations, Escat Gallery includes a main space in Trafalgar, southwest Spain, an experimental offshoot in Sarrià (in Barcelona), and Lab Studio, a private research residency in Mahón, Menorca. There, one artist is invited each year for a slower and more concentrated engagement with their practice. Previous residents have included German painter Moritz Berg and, most recently, the Argentine abstract artist Tete Alurralde.

Aurora, 2025
Tete Alurralde
Escat Gallery

This long-term approach to care and development traces back to Escat’s own artistic background, yet the founder and director balances care with the commercial reality of running a gallery.

“There are moments where pragmatic decisions have to be made—often precisely those that my earlier ‘artist self’ would have questioned,” he told Artsy. “I don’t think that tension needs to be resolved. If anything, it’s important that it remains active. Escat exists, in part, within that negotiation.”

The Charoen AArt

Based in Bangkok

Founded by: Bryce Watanasoponwong

Occupying a former home on Charoen Krung Road—the first modern roadway in Thailand— in Bang Kho Laem, The Charoen AArt is embedded in one of Bangkok’s oldest neighborhoods, in a part of the city where access to art remains uneven.

For founder and street photographer Bryce Watanasoponwong, the distance from Bangkok’s thriving gallery circuit is a feature, not a flaw. “Getting here takes time, and the building carries its own history, so the journey and the house become part of how people encounter the work,” he told Artsy.

Lens of Emotion, 2024
Bryce Watanasoponwong
The Charoen AArt

That ethos extends to the programming. Shows like Illya Skubak’s “STRATUM,” which used discarded urban materials and fragments to speak to survival and resilience without relying on familiar images of Thai identity, typifies Watanasoponwong’s approach. “I do it because I care about what it carries, and how it might quietly reach someone standing in front of it,” he said.

Since opening its doors in 2024, the audience that gathers there is small but dedicated—one that “grows gradually, one visit, one conversation, and one moment of recognition at a time.”

Queens Park Railway Club

Based in Glasgow

Founded by: Patrick Jameson and Ellis Luxemburg

Occupying the former ticket office and waiting rooms of the active Queens Park train platform in Glasgow for more than a decade, Queens Park Railway Club (QPRC) is as unorthodox a gallery as they come.

Co-founders Patrick Jameson and Ellis Luxemburg both emerged from the city’s artist-run gallery scene—Jameson through the artist-led exhibition space Glasgow Project Room, Luxemburg through Haunt, an open-air space down an alleyway in Trongate.

Burning palms, 2024
Patrick Jameson
Queens Park Railway Club

City of the future, 2005
Sam Ainsley
Queens Park Railway Club

“That experience and the skills you develop doing that are very much manifested in what we do now,” Jameson told Artsy. The duo has leaned into QPRC’s very public location: a memorable Rob Kennedy exhibition in 2013 that transformed the gallery into a live radio station, with music and spoken word poetry broadcast on the platform during rush hour.

Though once “a wee bit off the beaten track for the Glasgow gallery circuit,” the area has since filled with artists and gallerists, turning the QPRC into one thread in a larger communal tapestry in the city’s art scene.

Rancho Kaya

Based in Mykonos

Founded by: Alexander Mignot and Tzima Dimitra Tsitampani

“At the end of the day, Rancho Kaya is not a gallery; it’s our home,” explained Alexander Mignot, the artist and painter behind the Mykonos-based nonprofit art initiative. His words aren’t hyperbole. Mignot and his wife, Tzima Dimitra Tsitampani—an architect who helped design the space—spent four years constructing Rancho Kaya before opening it as an experimental model in artistic community-building.

Once per summer, Mignot’s studio becomes the site of a sprawling group show drawing an invite-only crowd of repeat visitors and international artists—a deliberate counterpoint to the transient, party-centric atmosphere that overtakes Mykonos, Greece, each summer.

La Soledad del Mar, 2023
Alexander Mignot
Rancho Kaya

Hermanas, 2024
Ivan Daniel Cova
Rancho Kaya

It’s a novel concept that favors something far more domestic. The invited artists become houseguests, having breakfast together, cooking in the kitchen, and spending time with Mignot’s family as they work on the show. Previous exhibitions have included works by Venezuelan street artist Harif Guzman and American painter Magnus Sodamin.

“The relationships we built with the artists become friendships, not business,” Mignot said. “We don’t see [Rancho Kaya] as just a house, but as a sculpture that changes and transforms over time with every artist who comes through it.”

Chilli Gallery

Based in London

Founded by: Aubrey Higgin

In London’s Chalk Farm neighborhood, Chilli Gallery stands out. Occupying a former Japanese restaurant just steps from an underground station, it’s defined by a DIY spirit and a collaborative approach to programming, informed by the active artistic practices of founder Aubrey Higgin and assistant director Max Rumbol.

“Artists are more willing to give us a chance as a gallery, knowing that we have been in their shoes and have a deep interest in their work beyond the business side of things,” Rumbol told Artsy. “It’s more just a bunch of artists working together on a vision for the overall show, putting that front and center.”

Chilli features a tiled kitchen-turned-exhibition space in the basement, plus a ground-floor room with street-facing windows. The gallery draws a genuinely mixed crowd that isn’t afraid to give refreshingly honest feedback.

“Hearing a non-art audience give their ‘unfiltered’ take—good or bad—is one of the best parts,” Rumbol said. “Their perspectives are often way more refreshing than what you hear in the usual art circles.”

Dotted Line LA

Based in Los Angeles

Founded by: Margaux Rocher

Opened this past February in Inglewood’s Beacon Arts Building—a longtime creative hub for local artists—Dotted Line LA is the project of French sculptor and painter Margaux Rocher, whose ties to the neighborhood led her to the gallery’s assistant curator, Jacob Barr. With Dotted Line LA, Rocher aims to create a space that explores the full artistic process, moving beyond showing only the finished work.

In practice, this has meant that artists like Dena Novak—who was in the inaugural exhibition—are free to teach an impasto painting course that deepens participants’ understanding of her technique.

Of Course, Still Here #5, 2026
Zengyi Zhao
Dotted Line LA

“As the space finds its footing, we’ll keep following the artists’ lead,” Rocher told Artsy. “They know what they want to transmit; our role is to create the conditions for that to happen.”

This exploratory approach to running the space has also been a boon for Rocher’s own interdisciplinary practice: “Being a person who brings art and people together has opened my eyes to a 360-degree view of the world of art and exhibitions,” she said. “I experience art from every angle: writing, curating, shaping space, programming, and the dialogue with artists. All of it feeds back to its source: artmaking.”

BBA Gallery

Based in Berlin

Founded by: Renata Kudlacek and Vishal Shah

“Building BBA over the last decade hasn’t been a linear path; it has been a 10-year experiment,” noted Renata Kudlacek, the gallery’s co-founder. Kudlacek launched the gallery with Vishal Shah, a fellow artist and Royal College of Art alumnus, in 2015. The duo describes the gallery’s mission as “art over background,” prioritizing the urgency of a message over market logic.

Central to this mission is the BBA Prizes, open calls for art and photography inspired in part by the duo’s own experience as working artists. “We know how rare it is to be discovered and how even fewer artists can actually sustain a living from their work,” Kudlacek told Artsy. “Our goal is to break the painful barriers of the market and give talented, passionate artists the nurture and visibility they need to reach a turning point in their careers.” Previous recipients of the prize have included photographers Luca Ortis, Pierre-Yves Cruaud, and, in 2025, Taiwanese artist Chung-Kun Wang.

Field -2023, 2023
Chung-Kun Wang
BBA Gallery

Operating amid Berlin’s tumultuous cultural climate has only sharpened their conviction. “It is a constant challenge to find sponsors in this climate,” Kudlacek said. “When the local government stops prioritizing culture, the smaller, independent spaces and emerging artists suffer first.”

Stanek Gallery

Based in Philadelphia and Miami

Founded by: Katherine Stanek

Founded partly in response to the closure of local Philly stronghold Rosenfeld Gallery in 2016, Stanek Gallery was built not on a traditional model, but on a diagnosis of what the city’s art scene was missing.

“Opening a gallery using a traditional structure did not make sense to me,” founder and figurative sculptor Katherine Stanek told Artsy. “There was already plenty of that in the city, and much of it was falling short.”

A decade on, the gallery’s success has exceeded her expectations. “Stanek Gallery is not what I originally imagined,” she said. “It’s stronger, more responsive, and ultimately more impactful.”

Room Full of Mirrors, ca. 2010
James Brantley
Stanek Gallery

Central to its survival during the pandemic, for instance, was the Master Artist Series, launched to provide a platform for underrepresented artists whose community influence had outpaced their market recognition—including printmaker John Dowell and painter James Brantley.

The program was inspired, in part, by Stanek’s own experience: “As an artist who studied with several of the Master Artists in the program, I was directly influenced by their example. The goal was to share those stories so other artists could benefit in the same way I did, while also reminding collectors of the importance, influence, and quality of these artists’ work.”

Uncool Gallery

Based in New York City

Founded by: Carolina Paz

This Was When It Started, 2025
Paige Mostowy
Uncool Gallery

When Uncool Gallery opened in 2024, it began as a genuine experiment in collective ownership: its founding board of over 10 artists shaped the gallery’s vision, positioning, and partnerships. But it has since dissolved as the costs and overhead of maintaining this structure proved too much to bear.

This rocky beginning proved instructive for the gallery’s founder and director, Carolina Paz: “Uncool Gallery is a living thing,” she told Artsy. “The format is adaptable and has changed from its inception, but the level of commitment and collaboration remains the same.”

The philosophy echoes the Brazilian artist’s other venture, Uncool Artist, a grassroots network of resources and opportunities for artists worldwide. As part of its quarterly Solo Show Open Call program, Uncool Gallery has provided a $1,000 stipend and given a two-week solo show to young talent, including a recent show of works by architect and artist Campbell Brod for spring 2026.

Directing both ventures has strengthened Paz’s own practice. “Helping artists bring projects into form and supporting that process seriously feeds my own work. The two things strengthen each other,” she said.

ILY2

Based in Portland, Oregon

Founded by: Allie Furlotti

Portland’s ILY2 began as a direct response to local artists’ needs. When the gallery opened in 2020, its founder, Allie Furlotti, handed the keys to whoever needed space, paid the rent, and let them run it however they wanted.

“As a young artist, she experienced the barriers to grants and funding, and she wanted to break down that bureaucracy in her own way,” senior director Jeanine Jablonski told Artsy.

Now with spaces in Portland and New York, ILY2 is built on a philosophy of long-term care that meets each artist where their specific needs are, which, as Jablonski noted, “sometimes isn’t relevant to the work they are making, but is always relevant to how they thrive.”

Untitled, 1978
Bonnie Lucas
ILY2

Some Favorite Things, 2018
Bonnie Lucas
ILY2

In practice, this has meant going to the fourth-floor walk-up studio of Bonnie Lucas, a 75-year-old New York artist, to help clear out old works she couldn’t move herself, so she could make large-scale pieces again for the first time in years.

“We go above and beyond because we genuinely want the people we work with to have a better experience than we’ve had,” Furlotti told Artsy. With Lucas set for her first institutional show at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2027, the ILY2 approach has paid off.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/Ajb0mpr