What is the state of New York’s art scene today? It’s a question that has reverberated across the city over the last few weeks, as Josh Kline’s essay “New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art” for October has inspired conversations about how hard it is to make ambitious, exciting new work here.
MoMA PS1’s quinquennial “Greater New York” showcases what’s still possible, in spite of various nightmarish economic and political circumstances. The sixth edition of the event, which remains on view through August 17th and celebrates the institution’s 50th anniversary, proposes specific throughlines. “Attuned to New York City as a nexus of flows and exchanges—of goods, labor, and capital—many of the artists trace how these factors converge to shape everyday experiences,” the press materials state. The expansive curatorial team chose to highlight both intimate, tactile works and larger spectacles. A performance program runs concurrently with the show.
Below are five standout artists from the show, whose practices speak to this multiplicity of artmaking in New York today. They use materials both radical and traditional, from teeth and dead coral to paint and mass media images that worm their way into the collective consciousness. For all New York’s pleasures and problems, these artists prove that vital energy still courses through the city, ready to be metabolized out into memorable new work.
Chang Yuchen
B. 1989, Shanxi Province, China.
For seven years, Chang Yuchen has collected coral fragments and transformed their shapes into a vast semiotic system. The resulting project—Coral Dictionary (2019–present)—exemplifies the single-minded obsession that’s typical of her art practice.
Across delicate graphite drawings, charts, and accordion booklets shown both on walls and in vitrines, the artist elaborates on her expansive lexicon and “translates” each form into English, Mandarin, and Malay. The project bridges gaps between languages, between word and image, and between organic forms and the gallery space.
Chang’s work makes use of the Kamus Sari, “a trilingual dictionary whose example sentences still reflect the political dimensions of life in 1970s Malaysia” according to the press materials. She pairs its sentences, such as “That ship disappeared from sight,” “That body isn’t alive,” and “Take good care till total recovery, in order to prevent relapse,” with coral forms that become signs for each individual word and punctuation mark. The dried corals serve as ghosts of marine life past, no longer living, but speaking through the artist.
Alongside her art practice, Chang teaches in the Dance MFA program at Bennington College. During a 2024 artist fellowship with the New York Public Library, she compiled “Body Dictionary,” an experimental curriculum which, according to the library, linked the “somatic and semantic.”
Akira Ikezoe
B. 1979, Kochi, Japan.
Akira Ikezoe’s paintings are impressive catalogues of visual information. Chart of Darkness (2025), for example, has more in common with an Excel spreadsheet than with a gestural abstract work. The painting features a broad table of icons against a bright yellow background. Each row features objects of similar shapes: A row of pairs, for example, presents the twins from The Shining, butterfly wings, ears, and mittens. Each column presents a category, like food: in one you’ll find an ice cream cone, pizza slice, and churro (a pair of plated sushi rolls is at the intersection of both). Warmth and humor infuse the composition, which evokes the aesthetics of emojis.
In a second painting, Frog Stories Around Windmill (2025), Ikezoe diagrams a network of frogs that live and labor across a flat visual field, like a group of Sims across different frames. Ikezoe’s dual contributions to the exhibition suggest a keen interest in digital aesthetics and the power of visual symbology to communicate across language barriers.
Ikezoe’s work is also included in the 2026 Whitney Biennial and was featured in the 2025 Sharjah Biennial.
Nickola Pottinger
B. 1986, Kingston, Jamaica.
Nickola Pottinger creates totems from a blend of family relics—quite literally. She grinds printed matter, including old book reports and shredded documents, with her mother’s handheld cake mixer, then sculpts the pulp into human and animal forms. The artist embeds these figures with pigment, toys, family heirlooms, and bone. She began collecting teeth as a teenager on visits to her mother’s dental lab, and anonymous ivories feature in the artist’s sculpture Genkle Jesus meek and mild II (2026). The work also counts frankincense, mushroom spores, hair, heliconia, and doily cloth among its materials. The pulpy piece stands on two fungus-like feet, with mushroom horns extending from its head and a feathery brown tail extending behind. The creature has a mouth full of real teeth and two large hands, one extended to the viewer. It looks born from a cauldron, an apt metaphor, perhaps, for an artist’s studio.
The catalogue states that Pottinger’s interests include nurturing and devotion, themes that have emerged since she became a mother and began to contend with the recent wreckage of Hurricane Melissa on the coast of Jamaica, her home country. These sculptures of mythic new beings offer hope and tenderness in the face of all we can’t control.
Julia Wachtel
B. 1956, New York, NY
Julia Wachtel presents what’s perhaps the funniest work in “Greater New York”: the five-panel painting McSwift (2024). A photograph of Taylor Swift on her Eras tour appears to stutter across the first two panels. We see the pop star from behind, her shimmering, fringed dress rippling, her booted feet firmly planted, one hand pointing to the sky in a choreographed gesture while the other, ostensibly, holds the mic. The next panel features a waving Ronald McDonald, and the next two return to Swift’s stage, this half with no pop star to animate it. Ronald becomes a commercial break, a literal clown interrupting a mass entertainment. The quiet of the empty stage, and the darkness in front of it, seem like a reprieve, until you remember that there’s a vast audience out there, hungry and worshipful. The work raises some philosophical questions: Is a painting a stage? Is the painter more similar to a clown or a pop star? And is it her job to entertain? Regardless, she does.
Wachtel rose to prominence as a member of the Pictures Generation, a loose consortium of artists whose great subject was the proliferation of images across pop culture and media and advertising in particular. In 2026, when AI can create infinite images and mash-ups via a simple prompt, this work feels as relevant as ever.
Farah Al Qasimi
B. 1991, Abu Dhabi.
Farah Al Qasimi’s photographs span two walls on the second floor of “Greater New York.” One features wallpaper patterned with a photographed red curtain, a theatrical backdrop to the artist’s bright compositions. Another captures a stone countertop with a wooden cutting board, a sliced watermelon on top of it. The fleshy pink face of the halved fruit gapes at the viewer, while a bright yellow jug of corn oil and a pot of flowers hover in the background.
The scene suggests an everyday riff on art historical still lifes, with an oven range off to the side. Al Qasimi’s vibrant palette extends to other works, which feature a parrot perched on an outstretched hand and a girl lying on her bed in jeans and a headscarf, next to her cat. Elsewhere, the artist captures the interiors of cars, replete with Gatorade bottles, a devotional car ornament, or a flower on the dash. All these images, in fact, come from Al Qasimi’s larger project of documenting the Arab community from Dearborn, Michigan (where the population is half Arab), and the United Arab Emirates, where she grew up. Together, they create a sense of exuberant multiplicity. If patterns occasionally clash, the scenes are only richer for it.
