"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
New York City, winter 2025–2026
How long have I been doing this? Taking the train to gallery-dense parts of the city; carrying a little, folded piece of paper in my pocket marked with the shows I most want to see; telling myself, “I should really come back to this one later,” and usually not doing it (but sometimes I actually make it back, and I’m always glad when I do).
As much as I enjoy the galleries of New York, I wish they would show more... defiance, I guess? More expressed and explicit solidarity with the humanistic causes that artists tend to align with—that’d sure be nice. It seems that in times of rising authoritarianism, the gallery world falls back into a measured stillness, a serene, meekly stated self-contentment. I guess not that serene: along with all the other things going poorly in the world, the global art market has been struggling, too. Art establishments are unsure about the future—as we all are—and so there’s a lot of looking back.
I’m also looking back. New York is my home and, in so many of the neighborhoods I know, the story is the same: high rents and ominous new buildings, displacing and diminishing everything else. I get that life goes on and blah blah blah, but it’s sad to see what feels like a sweeping, blunt-edged foreclosure on what might otherwise be possible in this frustrating, bewildering, beautiful city. There is still so much that’s possible.
Mariko Mori @ Sean Kelly
I remember Mori’s early work. Based in performance and photography, it imagined a mass-produced, high-tech overworld as a site and source of youthful vitality: the dye-streaked condition of coming-of-age in a bleary consumerist milieu, with Mori herself posed as a cybernetic anime idol. Her recent work is more calm and ruminative, but it goes somewhere similar: industrial production and high-gloss aesthetics as a path to something transcendent. At the center of this show are human-sized, rock-like sculptures, based in ancient Japanese concepts of sacred geology, made of beguilingly smooth plastic—translucent with a dichroic, iridescent gleam. The exhibit even directly invites meditation by situating two of the stones in a shrine-like installation space, with diaphanous, draped-fabric walls occasionally animated by whirring electric fans. There was a time when such materials and surfaces—such glassy, shimmering colors—felt fresh and new, and they kind of still do, but now there’s also a layer of death to it: the noxious, lingering odors of processed petroleum; the choking excesses of an order in decay, plodding on past the sell-by date. Sometimes an object—a thing—can sit between death and life, serving as a sort of bridge to the eternal beyond, but sometimes the thing is dead. Just plain dead.
Before this particular gallery was here, this large storefront space—in Hell’s Kitchen, right near the ungracious snarl of the West Side Highway—was home to Exit Art, a proudly countercultural, up-from-the-bottom fine-arts non-profit. Exit Art liked to fit in as much as they could, chopping the big rooms into narrow passageways lined with image, sculpture, video, and text—often expressly political, much of it participatory. Now, the Sean Kelly gallery likes to space everything out, and this can help to impart a reverential respect for the artwork (just look at how much room it has to be itself), but it’s also—let’s be real—a well-heeled gallery flaunting its high-rent vastness. In a place like Manhattan, where every inch is fought over, underutilized floorspace is how you really show off.
Alex Katz @ Gladstone (21st Street)
Even in his youth, Katz’s works had something of an old man’s fancy to them. That’s not a bad thing at all, it’s just that his paintings have long since had the breezy, gentle disposition that elderly artists often find near the ends of their long lives. The recent paintings in this exhibit continue Katz’s longtime project, of capturing personal visions on the frayed edges of single, fleeting moments. They show a sun-dappled, anonymously suburban street—actually the Maine road that Katz has lived on every summer for almost seven decades—bright and bent, as if it’s just entered your field of vision. These works are stark and lovely, painted as tall as a (modest) house and rendered in bright orange, like a warning label. The exhibit also includes a video by Matthew Barney (part of his “Drawing Restraint” series), showing Katz himself at work: his frail, 98-year-old body precariously—but determinedly—climbing ladders to reach the upper sections of these towering canvases. It makes an obvious but necessary point: after a certain time, any sort of creative act is a miracle. Maybe it always is.
The Chelsea gallery district—the part all the way to the west of Manhattan, made cool and windy off the Hudson River currents—was once a place of warehouses and auto-repair shops. I remember when it was still being established as an arts district, and some gallery storefronts had been converted from auto shops so quickly that there were still oil-stained ramps on the ground and steel hooks hanging from the ceiling. I used to think that, okay, here’s a place where gentrification has happened: from service stations and cab dispatches to high-end galleries and fancy apartments, that process has run its course. But no, not even close; now, in the wake of the High Line and Hudson Yards, many of the galleries have been forced out, making way for luxury houseware shops and, literally, some of the most expensive residences on the planet. I used to think, also, that if the city became so captivated by extreme wealth that even the Chelsea galleries were no longer welcome, then that would mean it was time to leave. I’m still here, though, whatever that means.
Cancel This Show! @ The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center
Like I was saying before: it’s frustrating, how hard it’s been to find visual art actually grappling with the politics of the moment. I know the art is out there, but what about the exhibits? So, it was refreshing to see a show about visual art as a form of social critique, but I don’t think anyone knows what kind of critique we need right now, exactly. Works like Zoe Beloff’s “Report on the Angel of History” (2025)—a written reflection on Paul Klee’s 1920 monoprint “Angelus Novus” (a smallish work of art with endless literary and sociopolitical relevance)—and selections from Yevgeniy Fiks’s 2012 “Stalin’s Atom Bomb a.k.a. Homosexuality” series (printed quotations showing clear links between McCarthy-era anti-communist panic and homophobia) feel somewhat at odds with direct protest graphics by the likes of Josh MacPhee and Dread Scott. In a collaborative comic strip by Noah Fischer, CM Campbell, and Jesse Lambert, the three cartoonists discuss the grim state of affairs in authoritarian America, and the complex chain of circumstances that led us here; they don’t come to any conclusions of what to do, though. But then, in immediate drawings by agitprop cartoon stalwarts Seth Tobocman and Molly Crabapple, we’re taken back to the moment of protest. Crabapple’s 2021 “Summer of George Floyd” watercolors amiably capture scenes of ecstatically collective purpose and forward-going movement, as so many New Yorkers joined up to fight against racism and police violence. Remember that? It wasn’t so long ago.
The memory is cloudy, but I recall a student film I saw back when: a young woman is feeling frustrated because the women she dates all have wishy-washy liberal politics, and she just wants to meet someone with a more radical leftist sensibility. In the feminist collective bookstore Bluestockings—at its original Allen Street location—she hits it off with a lady over their shared love of anti-colonialist literature. They bond while painting anti-racist protest signs at venerable punk venue and DIY community space ABC No Rio, a few blocks east, and they might’ve shared some reasonably priced Mexican food, too. It captured a moment, I think. There are still elements of street-level art and radicalism on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, of course, but many are being squeezed out. The Clemente—a former school building, host to a lovely mélange of theaters, classrooms, and art spaces—is across the street from the most-recent—and it’s looking like final—Bluestockings location; they lost their lease due (at least partly) to the new landlords not approving of how amenable the shop was to homeless people in the neighborhood. The ABC No Rio building is about a half-block away, still standing but not in active use, threatened by nearby luxury apartments and chain restaurants (does it go without saying that many of the reasonably priced Mexican spots are also gone?). But the neighborhood remains a complex place, and they say that ABC No Rio will even be returning to their building soon. We’ll see.
Jay DeFeo @ Paula Cooper
When considering how mournful and reflective so many recent art exhibits have been, this show was the first to come to mind—DeFeo’s work always had that quality, even in her youth (a bit like Alex Katz, but on the darker end of the spectrum). These works—paintings from the 1980s—start as purely abstract but, given space, they feel like evidence gathered: some specific time and place, emerging like a factory floor that can only be seen once the sparks have stopped flying and the people have gone home. They suggest machines succumbing to an organic lifecycle—hard, industrial edges, giving way to youthful bursts of light and orange-red cat’s-tongue flames. These feel like works right on the (blurry) line between ending and beginning, at an extended moment of regeneration—nature claims everything, eventually.
Putting aside the property valuation of it all, I appreciate the airy bigness of the major Chelsea gallery sites. The Paula Cooper space on the southern side of 21st Street is probably my favorite, with its wood-ribbed ceiling and lofty skylights. It’s a bit paradoxical, but as much as these galleries are (rightly) associated with wealth, they’re also free attractions, available to the public in the heart of a city where you usually have to pay to do anything. These open, quiet, carefully lit spaces are legitimately pleasant to be in, and it’ll be sad if they get torn down, or barred to all but an elite few.
Fernand Léger @ Skarstedt
Léger (1881–1955) is one of those “classic” 20th-century artists; his use of fragmented, geometric forms, primary colors, and glyphic imagery finds resonant parallels in global art movements like Cubism, Constructivism, De Stijl, and even Pop Art. I used to feel so frustrated with his paintings, at what felt like an absentminded lack of craft. Like, the paint seems to have been haphazardly slathered on, the curves and angles so imprecise—where’s the care? Couldn’t he have tried harder? Now, as I dodge AI chatbots on my computer, and urgent new fears arise of how machines can leech beauty and meaning from the world, I totally appreciate the marks of an errant, human hand—exactly the kind of thing that machines struggle to replicate. The uneasiness of the applied paint speaks to an industrial-age social unease, one that hasn’t gone away, not at all. Also on-view: the classic 1924 film Ballet Mécanique (co-directed with Dudley Murphy, and the only film Léger ever completed), which splits fascination with terror at the particular, operational minutiae of motorized, mechanized devices. He knew what he was doing.
I have to admit it: as much as I complain about money in this city, part of the fun of going to Upper East Side galleries is getting to walk around in some spacious, old-money Manhattan townhouse—a place that would otherwise be the tastefully detailed home of a 3rd-generation banking-family scion, or something. The spiral staircases, ornate cast-iron windows, brick fireplaces, built-in bookshelves... these spaces seem to resist the roar of the developer’s bulldozer, because wealthy people (still) like spending time in them. I guess I do, too.
Anthony McCall @ Light Industry
McCall is best known for his projector-based installations, in which beams of light—slowly and carefully crawling out from the projector’s bulb into dark, misty rooms—manifest glowing, sculptural forms out of thin air. The two early works in this show, which were on view for just one, wintry day, use projected, 35mm slides, and they don’t perform that specific trick of inventing volumetric depth, but they still draw from the simple, naturally holy qualities of warm light in a dark room. They fill up the space, in a way that demands your attention (or, my attention, at least). The slides contain images, but they’re images at the barest edge of legibility, with the projectors set to their mechanical limits, shifting through the little pictures as fast as they can. In “Slit Scan” (1972), a basic street-scene remains obscured behind bands of dull, pure color; in “Miniature in Black and White” (also 1972), the images feel so brief and scant that you don’t really know what you saw. Ultimately, it’s up to you to create the pictures in your mind, as if they were a flush but fuzzy memory. These works are also a reminder that, in a sense, all vision is a second-order effect of light itself, and who knows where light itself ever came from—that’s part of what keeps it holy.
At one point, this spacious Brooklyn building seemed to have reached the end of a textbook gentrification arc. Once a site of factories and warehouses, in 2006 it became home to 3rd Ward, a multifaceted studio/workshop/exhibition space that seemed a perfect encapsulation of the Bushwick neighborhood as creative epicenter—like, I remember a reception for an abstract painting show where the crowd was drunk off white wine, giving a rowdy (but appreciative) response to the two guys banging on xylophones while dressed as zoo animals. 3rd Ward dramatically flamed-out in 2013, and the site became the offices of a video-tech startup. Quite a journey, but time only moves forward, and the building is now home again to art studios and exhibition spaces (like Light Industry, an experimental-film venue which relocated here from their longtime Greenpoint storefront). As I walk through the neighborhood, it seems—for good or bad—not too different from the 3rd Ward days, with the rusting old railway tracks and heavily graffitied warehouses, import wholesalers with broken signs, the fortune-cookie factory over on Moore Street. There did used to be more art galleries around here, though.
Vaginal Davis @ PS1
According to this show, Davis had her first art exhibit at age eight—a series of sculptures inspired by the Oz books, at a municipal library—and she’s been creating ever since. As a first-generation L.A. punk, her bands helped bring some much-needed campy, queer energy to a punk culture beset by an unfortunately regressive, macho streak, and she’s also published photocopied zines, hosted club nights, directed short films, written blogs, curated art shows in her apartment, presented at academic conferences, etc. Amid the noise, and the expected (but certainly welcome) punk-rock provocations, what really stands out are her delicate, miniature portrait paintings. Made out of shamelessly mixed media (make-up, traditional art materials, household chemicals), and depicting known women—filmmaker Maya Deren, punk drummer Carla DuPlantier (Davis’s cool cousin), and the ancient Greek goddess Hecate among them—these pieces share a whispery stillness with classical icon painting. There’s a purity to these works, a felt sense of real intentionality, like they could never be any more or less than what they are. A fragile, human soul, inside all the hazy distortion—isn’t that what punk is all about? There’s something else that stands out, in a sad way: seeing the ephemera from the queer/art/academic milieu of the early ’90s, where Davis spoke alongside the likes of Douglas Crimp and Dennis Cooper, and realizing that this scene now feels, somehow, more subversive and challenging than it did 30-plus years ago.
No neighborhood has challenged and undermined my street-by-street understanding of New York as much as Long Island City in Queens, where PS1 has been situated—in a former elementary-school building—since 1971. I got so used to the sunny and low-slung landscape, to the way you could sit in PS1’s courtyard on a Sunday afternoon and look out at the empty sky, with the lot next-door home to a small, single-story union headquarters and nothing else. Then, in what felt like a matter of months (I guess it was actually years, but still), everything flipped—I remember hearing talk of how Long Island City was, foot-by-foot, site to the most concentrated real-estate development activity anywhere on Earth. The lot next-door now holds a shiny, bulky new building, making some immodest appeals to wealth, with a golfing gym and a luxury apartment complex with a corny name. The view from the courtyard is now of glittering, mirror-walled towers—a bladed, vertiginous assault on the knowledge of this space as it once rested in my own mind, on what I used to see from the ground. It just feels so different now, you know? I still like going to PS1 on Sundays, but it’s not the same.
Karen Kilimnik @ Gladstone (64th Street)
Kilimnik’s work feels honest—I think that even if you hate it, you can admit that. This exhibit is kind of a miniature career retrospective, and you can appreciate how consistent her work has been over the years. Whether you read it as in-the-know insouciance, savvy post-pop cultural remixing, or blink-blink naïveté, her work always feels like the dream of a precocious seventh-grader, high on fizzy drinks and paging moonily through their favorite movie-magazine splash-pages. You can see it in messy installations of worn-out pop-culture detritus (“Switzerland, the Pink Panther & Peter Sellers & Boris & Natasha & Gelsey Kirkland in Siberia,” 1991), photos of Kilimnik’s young self marked-up to look kinda like celebrities (“Me as Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet Before Horse Race,” 1988; “Me as Isabelle Adjani in Ishtar, Part I,” 1988), an interpretive re-edit of her favorite movie (“Heathers,” 19921993) and, of course, her daubed and doe-eyed paintings (“Me Waiting for My Drug Dealer Boyfriend...Park Avenue...oops...forgot - the Village, 1967,” 1999; “Little Red Riding Hood Vampire,” 2001), often presented in brassy, gilded frames. Eternal youth can be a curse because, eventually, a youthful disposition grows irreconcilable with the weight of accumulated experience—you can see that happening in these works as well. Kilimnik is now in her seventies, but she still lives with a child version of herself alongside her—I don’t need her art to confirm that, because that’s how it is for the rest of us, too.
This narrow Upper East Side building is known as the “Edward Durell Stone house.” Stone was a prominent architect, and in 1956—upon moving in—he totally remodeled the façade, with plate-glass windows shrouded by an imposing, sheer, geometrically patterned concrete grill. It recalls the work of Frank Lloyd Wright (who Stone was friendly with), Islamic ornament, Art Deco, and even some of the psychedelia that would start showing-up in the next decade. Standing outside of it now, it seems to be moving simultaneously forward and backward: monumentally progressive, while belonging squarely to the middle of the last century. It’s nice to imagine a time when this form might’ve felt almost entirely like the future, with barely a hint of the past; I’m sure many of the neighbors thought it was an eyesore, though—some probably still do. Also, it’s a very appropriate place to put a contemporary art gallery, but it’s almost like the gallery is hiding—if you were just walking by, you’d have no idea that there was an open-to-the-public exhibition space inside. But, now you know.
Ana Mendieta @ Marian Goodman
This is the gallery’s inaugural exhibit of Mendieta’s work, but it feels weirdly funereal for an inauguration. Her work does that, though. Mendieta was concerned with the human body (the female body, especially) as an elemental actor within great, confluent chains of natural events; in her photos and films, we see burial rituals on dusty hillsides, sodden fields moving with human breath, the forms of unseen bodies in muddy earth. In the sculpture “Ñañigo Burial” (1976), flickering, wax-dripping black candles make a cruciform figural cipher on the gallery floor, as like a tape-line marking a murder. (Is it gauche to point-out that the gallery isn’t too far from the site of Mendieta’s tragic, controversial, early death, 40 years ago? Because it feels unavoidable.) It seems there are things innately tragic—and beautiful—about being in any kind of body at all.
So, I guess Tribeca is the hot, new (well, new-ish) Manhattan gallery neighborhood...? Just south of Canal Street, near Broadway, where many outfits that were exiled from Chelsea have found new digs. It’s odd, because art stuff tends to flourish where rents are low, and Tribeca is an expensive place, but I won’t pretend to understand the screwy antics of the commercial real-estate market. I do love these formerly industrial buildings, with their high ceilings and cast-iron façades; the sad part, of course, is that while galleries can find homes in the neighborhood, artists can’t. They used to, though, and there was a time (peaking around the early ’80s, they say) when downtown Manhattan was almost unspeakably cool, with those once-industrial Tribeca lofts as the perfect settings for performance-art parties and avant-garde film screenings and suchlike. That’s what I always think of when I’m in the neighborhood, despite the fact that I never experienced all that. Actually, it’s probably because I never experienced it.
Robert Rauschenberg @ Museum of the City of New York
Rauschenberg is famous for his shifty, darkly energetic assemblages: combining archival images, news photos, advertisements, scraps of fabric, bits of furniture, splashes of paint, whatever. He’s strongly associated with Pop Art, and he often used found mass-market imagery as source material, but he also used a lot of his own photographs—taken largely in New York City, where he spent much of his life. So, look, I’m not saying I have Rauschenberg’s eye (I definitely don’t) but, personally, there’s something I really get about these photos, maybe because they capture contradictory states of being that are just so New York: crumbling brick tenements against glinting, glass-walled skyscrapers; soft, human bodies against icy metal and concrete; disheveled homeless men sleeping outside of corporate headquarters (a Manhattan classic, that one). It goes even deeper: moments of intimacy glimpsed from a public street, strands of light caught between strange, looming shadows. One of the worst things about the city being bought-up is how neighborhoods feel like they’re being smoothed-over and reduced; in a place of such vast complexity, there are powerful people who want to erase the life-giving contradictions that keep this place going, supplanting them with a simple, static relationship: some at the top, many at the bottom. But these are streets that anyone can walk down.
The Museum of the City of New York, right across from Central Park’s classic Conservatory Garden, feels like an opulent, pre-war Fifth Avenue mansion, because that’s exactly what it is, but it was built with public funds to serve an edifying, public purpose. Today, much of its programming sees New York as a place defined by cultural diversity and creativity, a city at its best when it hums on the ground. And what can I say except: good. We need more of that kind of thing.
Whatever happens to New York, I won’t forget about the art that’s been made here, or the artists who’ve lived here. They’ve granted us their visions and, momentarily, we can borrow their eyes. In that way, at least, I’ll keep seeing this city the way artists have seen it.