Tirtzah Bassel, Four Entered the Orchard, detail, 2026, Oil on canvas, 60 × 72 inches.
Wednesday, January 21 from 6-7:30 PM
A.I.R. Gallery
Join artist Tirtzah Bassel in conversation with independent curator, art historian, and editor Aliza Edelman to talk about her solo exhibition, I Put a Spell. Bassel will discuss the evolution of this work, which began with witches but quickly expanded into questions of who is called witch, priest, prophet, or heretic—and why. Together, they will explore how ritual, magic, and ancestral wisdom live in the body, and how painting becomes a site of inquiry, vulnerability, and transformation.
Tirtzah Bassel (b. 1979) is a Brooklyn-based painter investigating how embodiment, myth, and ritual shape who we are and how we move through the world. Her ongoing Canon in Drag series reimagines iconic artworks by subverting canonical authority through gender-flipped and altered narratives. Bassel’s work has been featured in exhibitions at institutions including the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago (2026 forthcoming); SLAG&RX, Paris and New York (2024, 2022); Galerie Thomas Fuchs, Stuttgart (2018); Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn (2018); and BRIC Arts Media Center, Brooklyn (2016). Recent projects include Platform in partnership with David Zwirner Gallery (2022), Natasha Arselan Gallery, London (2022), and Martha’s Contemporary, Austin (2022). Her work has also appeared in group exhibitions at 601Artspace, New York (2023) and FOR-SITE Foundation, San Francisco (2018). Bassel’s practice has been covered in ARTNews, Frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, BBC Radio 4, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, and Le Monde Diplomatique, among others. She holds an MFA from Boston University, and is represented by SLAG&RX– New York – Paris, and Galerie Thomas Fuchs, Stuttgart.
Aliza Rachel Edelman, Ph.D., is an independent curator, art historian, and editor whose research spans the modern Americas and the Middle East, with emphasis on the art of the postwar United States and Brazil, the transnational histories of abstraction and concretism, and theories of gender and sexuality in a global context. Her recent scholarly articles may be found in the following international catalogues and volumes: Judith Godwin: Modern Woman (Berry Campbell Gallery, 2023); Judith Lauand: Desvio Concreto (MASP, 2022); Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts (Bloomsbury, 2022); Purity is a Myth: Materiality in Concrete Art in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay (Getty Research Institute, 2021); and American Women Artists, 1935–1970—Gender, Culture, and Politics (Routledge, 2016). She is the co-chief editor of Woman’s Art Journal, the longest-lived feminist art-historical journal, now in its forty-sixth year of production.