{"id":1878222,"date":"2026-04-10T16:47:37","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T13:47:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1878222"},"modified":"2026-04-10T16:47:37","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T13:47:37","slug":"the-best-shows-to-see-in-new-york-this-month-are-at-nonprofit-spaces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1878222","title":{"rendered":"The Best Shows to See in New York This Month Are at Nonprofit Spaces"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\tThe bell tolls frequently these days for New York galleries of all sizes, suggesting that something in our art ecosystem is seriously broken. (Josh Kline has a diagnosis for that, as you may have heard.) Amid yet another wave of gallery closures, there is much to mourn. But there is also a ray of hope in the form of nonprofits that have sprung up across New York in the past few years, organizing shows that commercial galleries will not\u2014and perhaps cannot\u2014stage.<\/p>\n
\n\tPerhaps more so than other major art hubs in the US and Europe, New York has a rich tradition of alternative spaces that dates to the 1970s, which saw the formation of gritty organizations like the Kitchen, Artists Space, and White Columns, all of which continue to be vital to the city\u2019s ecosystem. Each still runs against the grain in its own way, albeit with much more money than it had half a century ago.<\/p>\n
\n\tThese organizations all started out scruffy. Most of the new ones today, however, come out of the gate spiffed-up and well-capitalized\u2014for example, the Wang Contemporary, a new Chinatown space launched in February by the designer Alexander Wang and his mother Ying. (Its inaugural presentation was for MSCHF, the collective whose viral creations are regularly shown by Perrotin, one of the world\u2019s biggest galleries.) Seemingly as a riposte to these sleek spaces, artists have struck out on their own, forming their own alternatives with a rougher edge. The painter Lucy Bull, for one, briefly revived her East Village gallery last year.<\/p>\n
\n\tBelow is a look at what\u2019s currently on view in four New York nonprofits, all of which are a 15-minute walk from one another. One is brand-new, and one is newish; a third is closing soon after a brief run, and the fourth has been around for decades and looks to remain that way.<\/p>\n
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Nina Beier at Times<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Times New York\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tOpened in February by patron Francesca Sonara and curator Summer Guthery, Times is the new kid on the block, though it does not aspire to be a permanent presence: its description notes that it has \u201ca planned obsolescence of three years.\u201d For now, at least, Times has some of the daredevil drive that powered some of the city\u2019s alternative spaces from the days of yore, and it has kicked off with an exhibition that has some built-in risk. One misstep could lead to the partial destruction of the art on view.<\/p>\n
\n\tTimes\u2019s entire SoHo space is given over to Nina Beier, who is presenting Old Friends<\/em>, a new installation that lines the worn-down floorboards with evenly spaced ice cream cones. (There is an intended route to walk among them, Guthery told me, though I failed to find it on my own.) All of the Danish artist\u2019s cones are off-brand Cornettos\u2014not the real thing\u2014and they are left to melt, resulting in little spills of plasticky chocolate. Mercifully for Times\u2019s operators, rats and roaches, the bane of every New Yorker\u2019s existence, had not arrived when I visited the show, a couple weeks after it opened.<\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s possible to read Old Friends<\/em> as a subversion of the aesthetics of Minimalism, whose cold sculptures resisted change and, for the most part, fun. But Beier\u2019s installation has a light, humorous touch that suggests she has something less lofty on the mind. I suspect she\u2019s thinking about the same \u201cplanned obsolescence\u201d that guides Times\u2019s programming. Both Times\u2019s operators and the artist herself recognize that what\u2019s here today is often gone tomorrow, and that, they suggest, may not be such a bad thing.<\/p>\n
Through May 9, at 151 Lafayette Street, 4th Floor<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Jakkai Siributr at Canal Projects<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo Izzy Leung\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tBefore cofounding Times, Guthery spearheaded the programming for Canal Projects, whose short, adventurous run is coming to an end after just four years. (Operated by the YS Kim Foundation, the space attributed its closure to the \u201ccosts of maintaining a building with complex and outdated infrastructure.\u201d) Canal Projects\u2019s final outing is a great one for Jakkai Siributr, a Thai artist whose textiles are often made with the participation of others, highlighting social networks and shared histories that might otherwise go invisible.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe centerpiece of this show\u2014which previously appeared in a modified form at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, England\u2014is Broadlands<\/em> (2023), a flow of pink and white garments that are strung with necklaces. Some of those necklaces have let their pearls loose, with stray stones falling onto a tattered carpet beneath. This is all an allusion to something that really did happen to the clothes\u2019 original wearer, Siributr\u2019s late mother. Upon immigrating from Thailand to England as a teenager, she attended a function held by a count at Broadlands, an estate in the British countryside, and nervously played with her necklace until it came apart. Siributr\u2019s piece is a monument to all that her mother experienced.<\/p>\n
\n\tMany of Siributr\u2019s works appear fragile, a reflection of the vulnerability of many of his subjects. \u201cOutworn,\u201d a parade of textiles that runs the length of this vast SoHo space, derives from a project begun in 2019 in which Siributr worked with Shan refugees at a camp along the border between Thailand and Myanmar. In some cases, the refugees themselves stitched messages and images into these textiles, one of which features Myanmar\u2019s flag. But instead of a star in its center, there\u2019s a question mark, along with the words \u201cLESS STATE,\u201d seemingly a reference to the failure of any nation to support these refugees\u2019 tenuous existence.<\/p>\n
Through May 23, at 351 Canal Street<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Michael Joo at Space ZeroOne<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo Genevieve Hanson\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tOpened last November in Tribeca, Space ZeroOne is glossier and more moneyed than the average nonprofit in New York\u2014its founder is the Seoul-based Hanwha Foundation of Culture, which is also partnering on a forthcoming Centre Pompidou outpost in the Korean capital. (The foundation\u2019s namesake is a Korean conglomerate that made more than $40 billion in revenue last year, according to Forbes<\/em>. Among the chaebol<\/em>\u2019s operations are two defense manufacturing firms with alleged ties to the Israeli military, something the Hanwha Foundation has denied.) The funds, at least, have gone to a good place, if its current Michael Joo survey is proof.<\/p>\n
\n\tIronically, or maybe fittingly, the show is also about corporatization and consumerism\u2014specifically, the ways that industrial-made products are designed to make us forget the humans who use them. Take Stacked<\/em>, a sculpture in which stacks of pink urinal cakes sheathed in plastic are set between bathroom dividers that act as shelving units. Conceived in 1993 and revisited anew for this show, Joo\u2019s sculpture has a name that recalls the one Donald Judd gave to his sleek sculptures\u2014and a strong scent that might make the Minimalists, or just about anyone else, cringe.<\/p>\n
\n\tCurated by Christopher Y. Lew, this beguiling show also includes sculptures that trouble the line between organic and inorganic, with a list of materials that runs the gamut from synthetic sweat and tears to real urine and beef bouillon cubes. Concatenations<\/em> (1991\/2026), for example, is a vast installation in which aluminum baking trays play host to a panoply of items, from lingzhi<\/em> mushrooms to the floor pattern for a bathroom\u2019s tiling. That the installation looks a little like a dysfunctional laboratory is exactly the point. Joo, whose work will soon appear in the Venice Biennale, is contending with humanity\u2019s incessant desire to impose scientific categories onto nature, which doesn\u2019t always lead to positive results.<\/p>\n
Through April 18, at 371 Broadway<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Ceija Stojka at the Drawing Center<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo \u00a9C\u00e9lia Pernot\/Artwork \u00a9 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Bildrecht, Vienna\/Collection of Antoine de Galbert, Paris\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThough it began in the \u201970s as a scrappy alternative space, the Drawing Center today mounts highly polished exhibitions that are about as good as, if not better than, what appears within the walls of major museums. This essential Ceija Stojka survey is the latest of those shows. Curated with razor-sharp precision by Lynne Cooke, the show aspires to canonize this self-taught Romany painter, who remains under-known in the US. It\u2019s likely to succeed in that goal\u2014and to make institutions like the Museum of Modern Art jealous they didn\u2019t get there first. If there was a better show that opened this past winter in New York, I didn\u2019t see it.<\/p>\n
\n\tHaving already written two memoirs about her internment in concentration camps during World War II, Stojka picked up a brush in 1989, then used her art in the following two and a half decades to further describe the horrors she faced during the wartime years. Initially working on modestly sized paper from the confines of her Vienna apartment\u2019s kitchen, Stojka painted unflinching images of women being herded into claustrophobic shacks and desolate showers. These works burn swastikas and barbed wire into retina, in one case almost literally: a 1995 painting features a gigantic eye whose whites contain skulls and a chimney cloaked in Nazi regalia.<\/p>\n
\n\tBefore she died in 2013, Stojka also created a number of luminous landscapes filled with sunflowers and poppies. Cooke\u2019s electrifying exhibition places Stojka\u2019s vividly colored vistas in the same galleries as paintings of Auschwitz and Ravensbr\u00fcck, where the artist was herself imprisoned. The contrast between these two registers is chilling, a reminder that some Germans found beauty in the same countryside where the dispossessed encountered violence daily. Looking at these beautiful images of rural Germany, it is simply not possible to unsee all the horrors Stojka witnessed firsthand.<\/p>\n
Through June 7, at 35 Wooster Street<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Install1121325.jpeg?w=1024″] The bell tolls frequently these days for New York galleries of all sizes, suggesting that something in our art ecosystem is seriously broken. (Josh Kline has a diagnosis for that, as you may have heard.) Amid yet another wave of gallery closures, there is much to mourn. But there is also a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1878222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1878222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878222\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1878222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1878222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1878222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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