A dead opossum lying in a fetal position along a contaminated riverbank in Quito became, for Byron Toledo, both an encounter and a sculpture. That moment, tender and violent at once, is at the heart of The Whole Water of a River at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Brooklyn, an exhibition that follows the Machángara River from its mountain source through the city. Ceramic animals, distilled plant aromas, and sound recordings gathered along the watershed map the river as a living system that connects hills, ravines, plants, people, and the city itself. The project carries unusual stakes: in 2024, an Ecuadorian court ruled that the rights of the Machángara had been violated, a ruling for which Toledo’s own video work served as evidence. We spoke with the artist about walking the river, collaborating across disciplines, and what it means to make art inside an ecosystem fighting to survive.
What does a gallery look like when the artists are in charge? Founded in 2013, Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG) is an artist-run collective with no fixed curatorial line and a non-hierarchical structure shared equally among its eight co-directors. Since 2023, it has become the annual New York home for Cornell University’s MFA thesis exhibition — a partnership built on a simple premise: artist-run spaces value experimentation, innovation, and risk-taking, giving graduate artists the freedom to present work without commercial constraints or curatorial imperatives.
The most subtle acts are often the most cathartic. In times of relentless upheaval and injustice, simple moments can feel Herculean by measure. The current exhibition at Freight and Volume, It Takes A Village, focuses on daily ritual as a gate of entry. Artists Andrea Castillo, Nancy Elsamanoudi, and Baran Shafiey blend nuanced elements with doses of surreality, resulting in invitations into spaces that delightfully offer more questions than answers. Each work is a reckoning with the quietude of in-betweenness. Each artist is a painter working in figuration; yet the similarities end there, and the departures are as varied as one can imagine.
American Abstract Artists turns 90 this year, an unusual achievement for an artist-run group. Its anniversary show, Abstract by Definition: An Index, opened in April at Art Cake in Brooklyn, curated by Saul Ostrow, who brought 88 current members together under a single roof: a curatorial puzzle, an organizational feat, and a long-running argument about what abstraction can be. A companion exhibition at D. Wigmore Fine Art on West 57th Street focuses on the group’s founders and work made between 1936 and 1950 and runs through July. Here, painter Jacob Cartwright, who serves as AAA’s Secretary, reflects on the group’s nomination-only structure, how a show this size actually comes together, and where he wants AAA to go next.
Galleries and museums play a pivotal role in shaping the careers of the artists they represent, often hosting dinners designed to promote artists and connect them with collectors and curators. This treatment, however, is mainly afforded to well-established artists. Arts professional Anna Yi Xie witnessed this phenomenon firsthand while interning at Gagosian in New York City. In 2024, Xie set out to create an alternative to the gallery-hosted dinner, a platform that offers early-career artists the opportunity to show their work and meet influential figures in the art world. After all, the social and professional networks that artists develop can further their careers just as much as showing their work.
Kuu Moments of Circularity On View Through: April 30, 2026 Featuring Jinn Yagi and Mabo Curated by Vida Sabbaghi Empire Stores’ Gallery 55, Brooklyn, NY @cope_nyc @jinnjinny @mabo.works @iwgallery @empirestoresdumbo
Kuu Moments of Circularity brings together artists Jinn Yagi and Mabo from Japan to the US for the first time in a two-person exhibition curated by Vida Sabbaghi. Transforming the popular high-traffic area into a space of contemplation, Sabbaghi embraces the materially rich and expressive works of Mabo and Yagi in an installation that speaks to the richness of the structural beams, slick concrete, and industrial feel of the environment.
Artwork by Jinn Yagi; image courtesy of Luckey Cruz
Artwork by Mabo; image courtesy of Manonce
The images we see in the final presentation result from countless layers of reexamining prior photographs taken by Yagi, from the micro to the macro, delving into philosophical explorations of depth, time, space, and existence. As the textures of paint are built up, a Rorschach aesthetic emerges, inviting the viewer to find meanings through these abstract revelations. With breathtaking views of the river mere steps away, one is apt to remember how exceptional this particular geographical point is, and an opportunity to engage in the multilayered concepts presented by the artists is offered through these works.
The building up in Yagi’s process feels like a seamless dance with Mabo’s scraping away of the metallic surfaces to reveal discoveries beyond its gleaming facade. This push-pull of tension is an alchemical dialogue that opens up lines of inquiry between the viewer and artists. As abstracted images meld and sway, parallels with the woodgrain and metal fixtures they share space with emerge. Similarly to how nature is extracted and transformed into interior landscapes, so too are the materials that the artists incorporate and draw inspiration from. Yagi’s work combines photography and painting onto Juraku-shi, an eco-friendly paper derived from limestone. This dialogue between Mabo and Yagi that Sabbaghi brings together is seamless, sophisticated, and still very accessible to the wide audiences they serve within the bustling environment in which they commune. With Dumbo Open Studios approaching, it’s a welcome stop to weave into the weekend festivities.
One Blue Bead Sargent’s Daughters 370 Broadway, New York, NY Closes April 18, 2026 Featuring: Wendy Red Star @sargentsdaughters
Wendy Red Star’s One Blue Bead took shape as a powerful exhibition at Sargent’s Daughters. Centering stories, archives, ancestral knowledge, and lived experiences of tribal members of the Apsáalooke Nation, the artist retraced the colonized language, white-washed histories, and manipulative valuations used by the Dutch when the land was “purchased” from members of the Munsee tribe in exchange for beads in 1626. With no real record of said transaction, Red Star set out to explore the historical exchanges of beads through many forms, including trade routes, markets and values, production, and the aesthetics of beads as objects.
This thoughtful investigation included enlarged, scaled-up versions of beads on the floor, as well as walls lined with stunning watercolor studies of beads. Upon entering the gallery, visitors were welcome to take the interactive newspaper that contained important historical context and information, such as the valuations of beads and routes they would have been traded along. This exhibition contemplated and challenged institutionalized colonization in an engaging way, while reflecting on place and the many aspects of Manhattan that remain at the center of it all.
Listening All Night to the Rain On View Through: April 25, 2026 Lisson Featuring John Akomfrah 508 W 24th St. New York, NY @lisson_gallery
Listening All Night to the Rain, featuring a multi-channel installation by John Akomfrah,is a captivating experience, drawing together powerful footage of social uprisings across the globe, highlighting freedom and independence movements, including the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya; Nigeria’s fight for nationhood;the Congo’s fight for independence from Belgium; and the 1947 Partition of India.The United States is also centered on an examination of action around civil rights, women’s liberation, and non-violent protest, particularly through the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).The culling together of this footage is interwoven with natural habitats, lush and green, stormy and watery, dynamic and meditative. Voices narrate, and a range of vibrant sounds craft elevated ways of connecting to the content in visceral ways that expand beyond the visual and auditory, into an elevated state of consciousness. The lived experiences on screen are heartened, and in a sense, prescient. The experience is just as much about listening as it is about watching. More importantly, it is about feeling. In the dark environment, the expansive projections envelop visitors on all walls of the viewing room. Through this capsule, we are transported, transfixed, and hopefully, transformed. It is a melding of archival footage, set in a cinematic setting that resonates deeply with its audience through the audio and visual components that depict the many emotions and experiences that have been defined and forever changed through human actions and interactions. Liberation and devastation are connected through geopolitical decisions that can feel distant, yet so immediate. With the title inspired by Su Dongpo’s poetry, a millennium later, we are asked to reckon with how and what has changed in all these years since. As we continue to fight back against the age-old war machine and colonial limbs of the wicked empire, we must study past movements to organize, exercise rights, and continue to build upon the hard and brave work started by our predecessors. This is a must-see that should be on everyone’s list.
About the writer: Yasmeen Abdallah is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator, and educator examining history, contemporary culture, materiality, allegory, and space. She has been an artist/lecturer at institutions including New Museum, Pratt Institute, Sarah Lawrence College, Residency Unlimited, BRIC, Kean University, Parsons, Columbia University, Children’s Museum of NYC, El Barrio Artspace, Fairleigh Dickinson, and University of Massachusetts. She holds Bachelor’s degrees in Anthropology (focus in Historical Archaeology) and in Studio Art with honors, with a Minor in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies from the University of Massachusetts; and received an MFA in Fine Arts, with distinction, from Pratt Institute. Exhibitions include Art in Odd Places; the Boiler; Bronx Art Space; Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center; Cornell University; Ed Varie; Elizabeth Foundation; NARS Foundation; Open Source; Pratt Institute; PS122 Gallery; Spring Break Art Show; University of Massachusetts; and Westbeth. Publications include Anthropology of Consciousness; Ante Art; Art Observed; Bust Magazine; Emergency Index; Hyperallergic; Papergirl Brooklyn; Free City Radio; Radio Alhara; Tussle Magazine; the Urban Activist; and Transborder Art. Her work is in public, private, and traveling collections in the U.S. and abroad. @86cherrycherry
As Cultural Affairs Director at Two Trees and the Walentas Family Foundation in DUMBO, Ariel Willmott plays a central role in the neighborhood’s cultural life — overseeing initiatives including DUMBO Open Studios, Smack Mellon, the Sharpe Residency, and Two Trees’ studio subsidy program. Ahead of DUMBO Open Studios weekend, we spoke with her.
The space in Smack Mellon’s back gallery welcomes you as Kate Teale’s exhibition, Vanishing Points, fills the room, bringing the history of Dumbo into the space. Teale expands space itself through her studies of edge, architecture, and place. The work is a seamless connection of drawings adhered to the walls using Tyvek, making the illusion of space and the real blur into one. The gallery is transformed into a combination of several places, and as visitors turn, they adjust to each new location, finding details offering hints of the places Teale wants us to wander into.
