The Brooklyn Rail

Greater New York 2026, an overview of early-career New York-based artists, is a refreshing and exciting survey of contemporary art. This is the sixth edition of the exhibition—it is organized every five years—and for the first time the show is a collaborative effort, overseen by MoMA PS1’s full curatorial team, who selected fifty-three artists and collectives working across mediums. Rather than imposing any single conceptual framework, the curators allow the exhibition’s key themes—the effects of accelerating technological change, political violence, and system breakdown—to rise to the surface. While the subject matter is heavy at times, there is catharsis in confronting it. The artists use a variety of strategies including critique, commemoration, experimentation with their own taxonomies, spirituality, and community-based production to navigate challenging times and offer hope for the future.

Several sculptures address the malfunctions of late-stage capitalism through depictions of currency. Marc Kokopeli’s bizarre video sculpture Problem_01 (2026) features South Park’s Kenny as a seventeenth-century Dutch tax collector holding a coin scale and delivering a satiric monologue on cultural and monetary values. Although the significance that underlies the use of Kenny’s image isn’t clear, Kokopeli evokes a long history of speculative cycles going back to the “tulip mania” of the Dutch Golden Age, suggesting a sobering parallel to the operation of contemporary markets. Coins are also featured in Kristin Walsh’s monumental hand-polished metal sculpture, Indicator no. 9 (2026), composed of aluminum sheeting and pipes. The hulking construction resembles the industrial imagery of the 1927 silent sci-fi Metropolis. The movie is set in a dystopian two-tiered society in which wealthy tycoons in skyscrapers oppress the subterranean workers who operate the machinery. It remains as relevant today as it was a century ago. At the base of the sculpture is a bucket of pennies, which turns periodically. The penny, which was recently decommissioned because the copper used to make it exceeded the monetary value of the coin, is a reminder that economic systems are constantly in flux.

Palestinian Queens-based artist Dean Majd and Taiwanese filmmaker Poyen Wang take the political violence and surveillance perpetrated by ICE as the subject of their works. Majd photographs Palestinian life, both in the West Bank and in New York City. His most famous image is a portrait of Columbia University student and activist Mahmoud Khalil after he was reunited with his wife and newborn following his release from ICE custody. Referencing depictions of the Holy Family in Renaissance and Baroque painting, Madj’s photograph commemorates the Khalils’ strength in their struggle against state oppression. Wang’s animated two-channel video installation Night Stroll (2024–25) is a more sinister depiction of the effects of a police state. The film, set in an oppressive cell containing construction debris and a bunk bed, features an adolescent with a fractured identity. As night falls, the environment becomes increasingly menacing and a monologue featuring questions drawn from DHS immigration forms contrasts memories of a childhood home with the film’s degrading surroundings.

Other artists examine the limits of conventional systems by developing their own forms of classification or by exploring the mystical. Akira Ikezoe’s charming painting Chart of Darkness (2025) consists of a grid of everyday icons. The vertical axes delineate categories of items (musical instruments, animal bones, food) while the horizontal axes depict shapes (circle, spiral, cross, triangle). The whole forms a whimsical hieroglyphic that the viewer can decipher. The most tranquil work in Greater New York, Chang Yuchen’s Coral Dictionary (36 Sentences) (2019– ), features hundreds of fragments of coral that Yuchen collected from beaches in Malaysia. Creating a collection reminiscent of a nineteenth-century cabinet of curiosities, she preserved and catalogued each piece, documenting them in carefully observed graphite drawings. Each form then becomes the basis for a language that is shaped and deployed with great care, with meaning assigned to each individual shape. In a counterpoint to Yuchen’s construction of an archive, Jamaican artist Nickola Pottinger’s sculptures arise from shredded family documents, which she grinds up into paper pulp. Using family objects such as toys and furniture as armatures for the sculptures, she creates commanding mythical creatures. Referencing Caribbean folklore, these statues represent protective spirits that mediate between the earthly and spiritual realms.

Greater New York 2026 also includes several community-centered works produced outside the commercial gallery system. The Cevallos Brothers’ colorful, hand-drawn posters are inspired by retro typography that the artists first encountered while working and traveling in Central and South America in the 1960s. For decades they have produced posters to promote businesses along Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens, and they continue to expand their clients and audience through Instagram. The collective Red Canary Song, an affiliation of migrant massage workers and sex workers, created the interactive installation Touch the Heart (2026), an elaborate dim sum spread made up of four tables featuring printed informational materials for migrants, along with food sculptures constructed from found and handmade objects relating to bodily care. The tables function as commemorative altars and community gathering places to grieve those lost in mass shootings at Asian spas.

Artist-driven experimental curating that surprises and provokes has become increasingly rare as the New York art scene yokes itself ever more thoroughly to the dynamics of the market. PS1, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year, thankfully continues to offer a distinctive experience, as wandering through the former school’s different rooms encourages discovery and leads to authentic encounters with new ideas. Greater New York 2026 brings attention to work that the public wouldn’t otherwise easily encounter, confirming the enduring vitality of this city’s creative energy.