In celebration of the Chinese Year of the Dragon, the Katonah Museum of Art presents Rising Dragon: Contemporary Chinese Photography, an exhibition of work created by Chinese artists in China since 2000, the last Year of the Dragon. Curated by Miles Barth, many of the 80 works in Rising Dragon have never been seen in the United States.

Rising Dragon offers an overview of the photographic work that is being done in China today. "I see it as organized chaos," says Barth.

Anyone following the long career of New Yorker Matthew Blackwell is familiar with the artist’s political and social paintings cast with farmers, fools, clowns, coaches, red bohemians, bears, donkeys, goats, friends, heros, girls, ass kickers, mystics, v-8 engines, Greek gods, Rastas, cats, friends, Jesus, saints, and sinners. A recent exhibit at Edward Thorp in New York, "Tour and Trance," revisited some of those characters in 23 paintings that reaffirm Blackwell as a Brechtian absurdist let loose with a paintbrush, in the spirit of Bay Area painter Joan Brown.

Andrea Belag:  Matisse and Philip Guston were my primary influences as a young artist. I went to the NYSS to study with Philip Guston but he was not open to working with female students. After leaving school, I wanted to expunge his influence and I looked closely at the work of Eva Hesse and other post-minimalists and I saw the expressive potential of abstraction. My first series of abstract paintings were painted with red and white enamel paint and I used a grid to control the illusionistic space.