“Greater New York” Shows a Generation’s Resilience at the Edge of Collapse
A poetics of impermanence is also a poetics of transition, of remnants and remainders, carrying fragments of knowledge into whatever comes next. That’s what prevails at the latest edition of MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York” survey on view through August 17. The central feeling? That the world as we know it—and the New York we know—has by now crossed a threshold. Since its launch in 1999, the quinquennial has embraced the mantra “New Art in New York Now,” aiming to serve as a gauge of the state of art in the city. This edition registers that liminal, suspended condition between a world that is gone and one still to come with unusual clarity. Worth noting, the 2026 edition is the first to be curated in-house by a young cohort of MoMA PS1 curators, many of them from the same generation as the artists on view and operating within a similar milieu in the city.
Compared to the Whitney Biennial, which often strains toward narrative or some fixed position—in other words, presenting the fracture rather than the fracturing—”Greater New York” reads our present condition with sharper lucidity. It acknowledges systemic failure without overstating its own agency, displaying instead gestures of resistance, practices of endurance and forms of emotional and material resilience. As one of the curators, Kari Rittenbach, puts it in the catalog, the survey’s artists are not putting a dot at the end of the sentence, but are instead working in relation to “the brokenness and meanness of reality and asking, ‘Is this how we want to continue?’”
Still, as at the Whitney, the prevalence of poor, provisional, often makeshift materials across the show is impossible to ignore, and reads less as a shared formal tendency than as evidence of constraint. This is not Arte Povera revived as an aesthetic choice and philosophical gesture; much as in the Postwar period, it is a choice made out of necessity. The poverty of materials and techniques on view reflects a New York that has become increasingly unaffordable for artists, where production is shaped more by economic limitation than by conceptual intent or technical ambition.
Perhaps also for this reason, most of the works on view adapt, endure and persist, preferring to revisit the past and address the present rather than to break into the speculative terrain of alternative worlds and possibilities of improvement. The imaginative leap is deferred or impossible to envision under current conditions, as promises of technological and societal progress have already proven to be failures. Ideas seem irremediably conditioned by the constraints the present moment imposes on creativity and imagination.
Overall, “Greater New York” gives off Bushwick survival vibes that can certainly signal a creatively regenerating yet exhausted system, but are likely symptomatic of something deeper: a structural fracture driven by the real estate industry and other factors, as a much-discussed essay by Josh Klein recently addressed.
Through the work of 53 artists and collectives who call the New York City area home, the exhibition is deeply informed by the present moment, as defined by technological acceleration, systemic breakdown and political violence, further amplified in a city like New York, positioned as a key nexus of flows of labor, capital and goods within both the American and global system. Many works engage the tensions between visibility, surveillance and performance in a digital world, while others retreat toward tactility, intimate worlds and the personal and familial—opposite but often complementary strategies for processing external crises that frequently project inward.
Eulogies of urban survival
Most often, the result is a general disconnection from the broader societal and historical fabric, as well as from everyday reality itself—a common survival strategy among younger generations that has, at this point, inevitably made its way into art. This widespread digitally induced dissociation is exemplified by Poyen Wang’s digital animation in the basement installation, staging a series of absurd animated vignettes centered on a hapless, nameless marionette figure as it moves through cramped, deteriorating environments (a Taiwanese interior, a construction site, a memory space) delivering fragmented monologues that combine personal recollection, pop lyrics and bureaucratic language. The effect is one of psychological exhaustion and emotional escapism rather than boredom: a portrait of postglobal displacement rendered through a subject trapped between systems, speaking into the void—or into a screen that mirrors the passive experiential drift many of the artists, and probably many visitors, recognize in their own everyday lives.
The digital space has become the primary confidant of contemporary alienation. In Julia Wachtel’s work, image culture operates as a loop of desire and self-confirmation that underlies the growing use of A.I. as a tool of psychological support. Combining appropriated celebrity and digital media imagery with fragments of online search language, her compositions on the first-floor stage a flattened emotional register in which nostalgia, aspiration and anxiety coexist in a disquieting mix that reflects much of the identity and relational confusion of younger generations.
What emerges throughout the floors is a kind of eulogy of urban survival. Clubs and dancehalls—long places of temporary escape for free bodies and spontaneous erotic expression—are evoked in several works, but always with the awareness that they can only ever be a fleeting site of connection, a “one night only” miracle, temporary and dissolving by morning. The confetti and the beer bottles are still on the floor, but once again as remnants of a party already over: a moment of happiness and celebration that slipped past before it could be savored, a feeling shared by an entire generation that came of age on the final stretch of early-1990s prosperity before the historical ruptures of the new millennium.
In a dedicated intermediary room on the first floor—a liminal, separate space before entering the main exhibition—Mekko Harjo’s installation transforms the remains of a nightlife space into a charged political metaphor. Drawing from Indigenous urban experience, the work reframes the dancefloor as a site of collective formation shaped by histories of forced relocation. The installation accumulates traces of a performance that repeats under compulsion, suggesting both community and consumption, a cultural ritual always on the verge of disappearance and erasure.
The ritual of prosaic resilience is further evoked upstairs by Kenneth Tam’s I’m Staying Hopeful and Strong, an unfiltered take on the precarious lives of New York taxi drivers affected by the medallion crisis. Once seen by immigrant communities as a path to stability, the system collapsed under the predatory rise of ride-sharing platforms like Uber and Lyft, which transformed the customs and rhythms of urban movement worldwide. The video follows two brothers as they perform choreographed gestures—a box dance, duets with folding chairs—while reciting complaints intercut with affirmations to keep going. “Life goes on,” says one.
A similarly subdued lyricism that celebrates community resilience against the odds of sociopolitical dynamics emerges in Cinthya Santos Briones’s photographs of migrant communities across New York, the U.S. Southwest and the U.S.-Mexico border. Intimate domestic scenes and emptied interiors trace the erosion of sanctuary spaces once shielded from immigration enforcement, foregrounding the precarious persistence of lives shaped by displacement and survival.
More poetry of the vernacular and the power of improvised communities appears in Piero Penizzotto’s In the Council of las Tías (2026), staging what the artist calls “fragile moments of togetherness,” where informal sidewalk gatherings collapse public and private space.
With a double appearance across New York’s key biennial exhibitions, Taina Cruz Tenerger’s figures evoke a Hopper-like solitude—a narrative of urban coming of age filtered through internet culture, as they are immersed in their own psychological worlds, marked by introspection and estrangement inside suburban interiors, their emotional lives shaped as much by digital narratives and idols as by lived experience.
With her wall photo constellation, Farah Al Qasimi similarly turns inward, framing domestic spaces as sites where identity is both constructed and loosened. Her photographs capture, pair and dialectically connect geographically and culturally distant communities through subtle visual continuities, revealing the underlying networks of migration, labor and cultural exchange that bind them.
The systematic failure of the civil infrastructure
In the incapacity to find larger systems of meaning and belief to carry us toward the future, several artists in the show return repeatedly to the collapse of the civil infrastructures that once articulated shared ideologies and values. In a room on the top floor, Louis Osmosis’s sculptures assembled from discarded materials and surrounded by confetti become a parody of the authority of public monuments, embracing chaos over a coherence that feels impossible after the fall of all grand narratives, reflecting instead a fractured public sphere populated not by collective stories but by niche obsessions and improvised identities.
Kristin Walsh’s Indicator no. 9 (2026) literalizes this breakdown through exposed mechanisms—gears, cables and circulating pennies—revealing the absurd disjunction between material reality and economic abstraction. The work underscores how value persists as structure even when it no longer makes sense, pointing to the hidden economies embedded in everyday objects and sustained by invisible labor, resources and energy.
Many artists are similarly attuned to the contradictions between material production and the systems that assign value to different commodities, spaces and even people. The struggle of postindustrial and post-capitalist boom life is also in the work of Hay Carrier, but with a vibrantly kaleidoscopic large painting completed before her passing last year—an imaginative, subconscious piece that evokes the untamed, primordial beauty of a flourishing landscape.
By contrast, the ruins and failures of urban infrastructure are directly confronted in Janiva Ellis’s Lens Error, exposing the implied violence of the systems that determine circulation and control. The main cable of the Brooklyn Bridge extends from the top left quadrant of the canvas, dominating the composition. Drawing on a nostalgic history of imagery celebrating the city’s engineering wonders across art and popular culture, the painting turns that promise of forward progress into smoky obfuscation and collective hallucination. As the title suggests, the fogginess—along with the faint figures—may be a mistake, the result of glare or delusion, as much as the collective hallucination underpinning a notion of progress based on technological predominance and possession.
The same tension between yesterday’s technological utopia and today’s infrastructural dystopia is evoked by Sophie Friedman Pappas’s instructional drawings, which address gentrification and urban violence through the imaginative repurposing of vacant Financial District offices into industrial kilns. Rendered in 18th-century vedute and capricci styles, the works hover between utopian proposal and latent destruction.
The invisible labor behind these urban cathedrals of capital and real estate value is meanwhile revealed by Marie Angeletti’s chance encounters with workers in the city. Screened in a dedicated room, Men at Work (2026) compiles dozens of photographs of men working construction on the streets of New York and various European cities, taken over a ten-year period, initially without a specific purpose in mind. Invited to pause, they smile, flirt, joke and pose for the camera, as Angeletti takes pictures that both register and acknowledge their human presence.
A similar tension between the rhythms of life and the bureaucratic infrastructure of power that contains them unfolds in Marc Kokopeli’s video cartoon characters as they face the problems of adult life, delivering impassioned monologues on gaming, economic systems and the business of taxation—past, present and future. From an entrepreneurial 17th-century Dutch tax collector to a contemporary Midtown accountant, Kokopeli’s characters point to the long durée of booms and busts and to how economic dynamics eventually shape our entire existential trajectory from the moment we become aware of money and are bound to it for survival.
Tom Thayer’s Counterdoses for the Home moves further into the absurdity of conventions established by capitalism, positivism and rationalism, opposing a more open acceptance of the chaotic nature of existence. His “scenographic plays” are dystopian dioramas, unstable environments that evoke a suspended, almost dreamlike state between order and dissonance, yet still allow for that more irrational imaginative escape that enables one to envision something beyond established systems.
The climax comes in Akira Ikezoe’s taxonomic mapping of power and labor, where systems of order are both constructed and quietly undone. When Ikezoe arrived in New York with limited English, he began communicating through objects and images, developing an elaborate taxonomic system as a personal language grounded in shared visual codes that could bypass cultural and linguistic barriers. Chart of Darkness (2025), one of his latest works on view, organizes visual forms—a ball, a triangle, a radiation symbol—across categories such as musical instruments, food and games, creating a grid structured along horizontal and vertical axes that appears to promise coherence and universality.
Yet that coherence never fully stabilizes. The system is revealed as contingent and conventional, its logic slipping as categories overlap and meanings proliferate, suggesting that even the most carefully constructed systems of knowledge cannot fully contain the entropic nature of the life they seek to organize.
The fragility of historical records
The great narratives have already dissolved, revealing themselves as conventional ideological and political constructions. A tension between images and words, between document and fiction, runs through the show as artists interrogate the capacity of images to still document and carry history—or any notion of reality—despite their manipulability.
In one room, Dean Majd’s photographic installation juxtaposes scenes from the West Bank and New York in a continuous dialectic, collapsing the distance between the intimate and the political, the safe and the dangerous, showing how everyday life is inseparable from conflict and how macrohistorical turns and dramatic events affect communities even far removed in space and time.
Opposite are Esteban Jefferson’s articulated canvases, in which the artist approaches history through a speculative counter-monumentality. Responding to Daniel Chester French’s Four Continents (1903-07), his paintings reframe the allegorical figures of empire, shifting attention from their monumental authority to the social and colonial violence embedded within them. By alternating between oil and graphite, Jefferson destabilizes the hierarchy of image and context, exposing the ideological structures underpinning these historical representations.
The fragility of erased histories is further addressed by the Metoac Indigenous Collective, whose work draws on wampum traditions historically used to record treaties and oral histories. In Ouwatüonk (2025), a human and a whale appear initially equal in scale, but as the narrative unfolds, the whale diminishes while the human becomes hollow—a quiet warning about extraction and disconnection from the natural world. The presence of loose beads for future wampum underscores an ongoing commitment to cultural continuity despite material scarcity.
Cici Wu’s installation similarly stages memory as unstable and fragmentary. Through projections, archival material and delicate paper structures, she translates the unfinished film White Dust from Mongolia into a spatial environment where image dissolves into light and data, and narrative remains suspended.
Tiffany Sia extends this inquiry into infrastructural and geopolitical space with her video American Theatres of Suspension, mapping “lumpy” territories—zones where jurisdiction detaches from geography to follow resources and control. Her focus is the Ashokan Reservoir, a restricted yet essential water source for New York City, whose history and present condition reveal the hidden systems and fragile dependencies that sustain urban life.
As further suggested by an uncanny installation by Women’s History Museum, if most of the artists have relinquished any ambition to imagine an alternative future, they have instead explored possible uchronia—alternative versions of the official history we have been told—that allow for the acknowledgment of microhistories and perspectives that have been erased, manipulated or suppressed. Exploring a time that did not happen becomes a way to admit that official narrations may have been manipulated, opening up the possibility of rewriting history through hypothetical divergence, a tool for measuring the present against what could have been and often revealing latent violence or suppressed alternatives.
As the catalog accompanying this quinquennial notes, to expect artists to convey reality in a moment when reality is so slippery is a very big ask. Yet it is precisely this dissolution of any stable narrative or experiential ground—especially once mediated by impersonal technological systems—that forces many artists, in a countermovement, to return to the intimacy of materiality and tactility.
Hill Montgomery’s explorations of color and form reconnect abstraction to the physical and layered nature of embodied experience in her soft sculptures constructed on handmade looms, where she merges personal lyricism, humor and political commentary. Integrating imagery that arises intuitively from contemporary news and pop culture into a more tangible sensorial realm, her sculptures also attempt to anchor that imagery to the strength of matriarchal threads as they hang from found and collected objects, some salvaged from her grandmother’s farm in Alabama, where she spent childhood summers.
This attempt to reconnect with a more primordial, spontaneous relation to matter and earth continues in the next room with Nickola Pottinger’s visceral sculptures, made from discarded and archival materials. Evoking the process of geological sedimentation in contemporary familial histories and microstories, the artist grinds and incorporates family archives—diaries, documents, schoolwork—into a pulpy base, building forms that incorporate personal relics and casts of her own body. The result is a series of archetypally resonant hybrid figures that suggest both protection and vulnerability, linking gestures of care to motherhood while hinting at the ecological devastation and identitarian destruction along the Jamaican coast.
A similar archaeological approach appears in Maria Elena Pombo’s Tejiendo el guayabo (2018-26), which traces migration through material processes directly linked to the circulation of the local ecosystem, itself disrupted by dynamics of exploitation. Using water samples collected from Venezuelans across more than 20 countries, dyed with avocado pits sourced in Brooklyn, she grows algae threads that are then woven into suspended compositions. Each panel marks a year of displacement, embedding biography within the organic transformation of materials as natural alchemy continues its course, indifferent to human disruptions.
A related impulse toward material and cosmological reconnection shapes the work of Oglála Lakȟóta artist Kite, whose practice bridges Indigenous ancestral knowledge systems and emergent technologies. Her futuristic-looking tapestries and spiritually evocative installations are among the most compelling in the exhibition, sustaining a rare continuity between past and present while gesturing—more convincingly than most—toward a more harmonious future.
In A Quilling for Time-Laying (2026), deer hide and quillwork geometries intersect with semi-conductive threads, translating and making manifest a long-negated yet persistent connection between bodies, species and frequencies that holds the potential for both survival and renewal. In Handdreamer’s Role in the Re-Forming of the Mouth Eyes (2026), dream fragments are encoded into patterns that function simultaneously as visual composition and musical score. A mirror placed on the floor operates as a portal, suggesting not a leap into a speculative future but rather a return to a symbiotic relation between human and nature.
As Michael Meade suggests, “Endings and beginnings are mythical moments par excellence, they are the extremities of existence and the bookends of cosmology”—a line we encountered just days before this visit, which serendipitously offered a lens through which to read the exhibition’s overall tone: elegiac more than melancholic, neither fully progressive nor reactionary, but marked by a lucid awareness of ongoing collapse.
If the melancholy pervading the Whitney Biennial felt closer to a sensitivity to transience and incompleteness—to the impossibility of fully grasping meaning, and therefore a state of suspension—the elegiac tone shaping “Greater New York” more often carries a sense of mourning and remembrance, at times even consolation. It suggests, at the very least, a direction: from loss to reflection to, sometimes, acceptance.
Many works become a manifestation, in the etymological sense, of a moment of “apocalypsis”—of unveiling, of lifting the veil on systems that no longer hold—because a key act of showing something can also become the condition for showing something else. The works gathered here expose those fractures with clarity, tracing the material, psychological and infrastructural consequences of a world out of balance. As Meade suggests, it is specifically when the raw energies of life become uncovered and trouble in the world intensifies, that there is also a greater possibility that hidden meanings might be revealed and new ways of proceeding might be discovered.
“When everything goes out of balance and seems about to fall apart, the issue is not the actual end of the world, as much as what to do when it seems about to end,” he suggests. “Greater New York” unfolds within that suspended yet evolving threshold, showing artists engaged in a form of contemporary mythopoesis, drafting provisional scripts from what remains available in a city long defined by its forward-looking energy but now visibly shaped and constrained by the very capitalist forces that produced it. Still, it is exactly when those structures begin to show their fractures, when their limits become legible, that space opens—however narrow—for possible reconfigurations. In a city where material conditions have narrowed the field of possibility, even imagination appears conditioned. Yet what “Greater New York” makes clear is that what persists, at least, is a culture of endurance: inventive, lucid and resourceful, still operating within the limits of a system that has yet to fully give way, while an entire generation—and the city itself—gestates whatever comes next.
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