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What do you do after work? You meet a friend, walk in the park, go to the gym, cook something, fall briefly into a hobby, pretend the evening belongs to you. But what happens when after work there is only more work, and then another shift, another invoice, another favour, another unpaid opportunity disguised as a “break”?
In the contemporary city, exhaustion has become not an exception but a medium. One can be employed and still unhoused, visible and still economically invisible, invited into institutions and still unable to afford the materials that make participation possible. I kept thinking of Tiffany Sedaris, after whose death her family reportedly found, among other things, boxes of glass shards: to some, the devastating remains of a precarious life; to others, a valuable artistic material, a strange treasury. That cruel double vision, where ruin and resource occupy the same object, is also the emotional weather of the Greater New York 2026 exhibition at MoMA PS1.
In the contemporary city, exhaustion has become not an exception but a medium. One can be employed and still unhoused, visible and still economically invisible, invited into institutions and still unable to afford the materials that make participation possible.
The Myth of Greater New York
New York City has always been a masterpiece of cognitive dissonance. It is a place that promises everything while simultaneously making it nearly impossible to have anything. To live here as an artist is to participate in a grand, collective delusion — a devotion to a city that is, as many have noted, “casually hostile” to your very existence. It is within this friction between the myth of the metropolis and the grit of the gig economy that the exhibition at MoMA PS1 resides. Celebrating the museum’s 50th anniversary, this sixth iteration of the quinquennial survey is less a victory lap and more a survival manual — a sprawling, site-specific inventory of what it means to inhabit a city that is constantly trying to price you out of its own narrative.
Walking through the corridors of the former schoolhouse in Long Island City, one doesn’t encounter a unified “New York Style”. Instead, one finds a series of strategies for adaptation and resistance. The exhibition, curated for the first time by the full MoMA PS1 team, feels like a fever dream of the contemporary urban condition. It is an exploration of “system breakdown” — not as a distant apocalypse, but as a daily chore.
New York City has always been a masterpiece of cognitive dissonance. It is a place that promises everything while simultaneously making it nearly impossible to have anything. To live here as an artist is to participate in a grand, collective delusion — a devotion to a city that is, as many have noted, “casually hostile” to your very existence.
The tone is set early by a mural by the Cevallos Brothers: a vibrant, comic-strip-style depiction of the New York skyline, complete with a Venus de Milo bust and a film camera. But parked directly in front of it is Fields Harrington’s Unfree Free Time (Bike Rental) (2026), a weathered e-bike and bike rack laden with delivery bags and stickers. It is perhaps the most honest monument in the city. In a town where institutional breakthroughs rarely translate into financial stability, the e-bike is the true symbol of the “Greater New Yorker”. It represents the artist who is also a courier, the painter who is also a florist, the sculptor who spends their mornings in the service sector before heading to the studio. Here, the soft power of art is inextricably linked to the hard labour of the streets. This tension — between the prestige of the MoMA brand and the precarity of the artist’s life — is the exhibition’s most honest subtext.
Surveillance and Resistance
Surveillance, a key theme of this year’s survey, manifests not just in literal cameras but in the way the works seem to watch the viewer. In the age of the algorithmic gaze, artists like Kameron Neal and Mary Helena Clark explore how technology has moved from a tool to an environment. There is a sense of being tracked, of one’s identity being parsed into data points. Yet, there is also resistance. The “strategies of resistance” mentioned by the curators in the exhibition’s press release emerge through a return to the haptic, the handmade, and the folk. We see this in the resurgence of craft and ethnic elements – a mannequin draped in a gown made of newspapers, pigeons perched on a crumbling lath-and-plaster wall. This is the “melting pot” — not as a marketing slogan, but as a site of friction. The presence of the Metoac Indigenous Collective and artists like Taína Cruz and André Magaña brings a necessary haunting to the museum. Their work suggests that the “Greater” in “Greater New York” must include the histories that have been paved over by Jackson Avenue’s asphalt.
The exhibition’s irony is its last line of defence. Take Julia Wachtel’s painting common questions (2025), oil and acrylic on canvas, where a press image of Janis Joplin sits beside a photograph of Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, online search queries, and the deliberately banal image of a unicorn. The work stages pop culture as a strange emotional landfill: nostalgia, aspiration, desire, and anxiety flattened into the same disposable visual grammar. Its inclusion of Perry now carries an unintended charge. In April 2026, Ruby Rose publicly accused Perry of sexual assault related to an alleged 2010 incident in Melbourne; Australian police have confirmed an investigation into a historical sexual assault, while Perry’s representative has denied the allegations as “categorically false.” Against this context, Wachtel’s piece feels less like a closed commentary on celebrity culture than a live circuit, exposing how devotion, innocence, spectacle, and violence can suddenly collapse into one another. It also points to a more uncomfortable cultural blind spot: the difficulty of recognising abuse when the alleged perpetrator does not fit the familiar image of power, threat, or masculinity.
Across Vijay Masharani’s video works, what is striking is how quickly they invite identification from an entirely different life and geography. At one point, an image of trees and a partially obscured figure unexpectedly reminded me of the homestead where I grew up, surrounded by an isolating fence of evergreens. This is perhaps the quiet force of the work: it allows narrative to emerge from something that almost resists narration. The circling gaze, the fragmented movement, and the sense of watching someone watch himself turn ordinary life into a structure of surveillance, but not in a simple one-way sense. It suggests a softer, stranger panopticon, where even the observer is caught inside the mechanism. In that loop, the guard and the prisoner begin to resemble each other.
The logic of obsession, projection, and survival is most evident in the performance program, which acts as the exhibition’s heartbeat. Sophie Becker’s comedic ventriloquism and Rezarta Seferi’s stand-up are not merely diversions; they are survival mechanisms. Comedians and ventriloquists are, after all, experts in the art of the “double voice” — speaking for themselves while simultaneously speaking for a system that often refuses to listen. When Seferi performs e pluribus ur mom, she navigates the linguistic and social debris of the city, turning the spectacle of the self into a participatory act of defiance.
Marie Angeletti’s Hail Mary (2026), a live feed from the MoMA PS1 attic, is compelling precisely because it seems to be waiting for something that may never happen. Perhaps a visitor or a worker will enter the space, perhaps a bird, a lizard, a small unidentified creature, or only a speck of dust crossing the camera’s field of vision. Yet this almost total absence becomes the work’s real subject. The piece turns waiting into a form of projection: we begin to mystify emptiness, to search for narrative in a room that offers almost nothing back. In this sense, the attic becomes less a hidden architectural space than a psychological one, a place where the viewer’s own desire for event, apparition, or meaning starts performing in place of the image itself.
After the Future
There is a distinct post-event energy in many of the installations, as if Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” had returned not as triumph but as an after-party: the lights still flickering, the cables exposed, the floor sticky, and everyone quietly realising that the future never arrived. Nowhere is this “after-party” energy more visceral than in Mekko Harjo’s multimedia installation: I have eaten and made friends (The Devouring Hill) (2026).
Harjo, an artist whose work sits at the intersection of urban Indigenous experience and the ephemeral sanctuary of the nightlife, has essentially framed out the dancefloor of the Bossa Nova Civic Club – a legendary Bushwick venue – within the museum’s walls. But this isn’t a celebratory reconstruction. It is a haunting. The structure, raw and skeletal, hosts residues of performances and gatherings that seem to have happened just before you arrived. Strewn confetti, empty cans, and a microphone standing under a cold, blue-and-magenta light create a stage for a ghost. Harjo draws on the Dhegiha story of the Devouring Hill — a trickster rabbit tale where a hill lures beings in with the promise of warmth and life, only to consume them from within. It is a devastatingly accurate metaphor for New York itself: a city that invites the marginalised to its dancefloors only to digest their labour, their youth, and their culture.
There is a distinct post-event energy in many of the installations, as if Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” had returned not as triumph but as an after-party: the lights still flickering, the cables exposed, the floor sticky, and everyone quietly realising that the future never arrived.
Dean Millien’s The Cats and the Rats (2026) shifts the attention toward survival as improvisation. At first, the aluminium-foil creatures feel almost playful: a small city of shimmering animals, made with the glamour of something conjured from nothing. But the work quickly becomes stranger and more moving. These animals are not only urban pests or childhood companions; they are improvised familiars, survival figures, little spirits made from domestic waste. Their silver surfaces suggest both poverty and magic, trash and treasure, as if the city’s discarded material had briefly learned how to look back at us.
A different kind of urban residue appears in André Magaña’s 5 OH55FODMBs – A Typical Amount Used for One QSR (2026), where failed commercial display becomes accidental abstraction. These weather-damaged Samsung outdoor screens, once designed to sell food quickly and efficiently, now glow like wounded Rothkos for the age of climate collapse. Their browned and blurred surfaces are beautiful in the most uncomfortable way: not because they transcend their function, but because their malfunction reveals the environmental conditions their function tried to ignore. Advertising becomes atmosphere, and atmosphere becomes damage.
If Magaña’s screens expose the failure of the image as commerce, Win McCarthy’s Angelus Novus (2026), The Id Rider at the Dawn of History (2026), and Philosophy of Mind (2026) push this failure into the nervous system of the city itself. Surveillance mirrors, phone parts, wires, bottles, bricks, and other urban fragments are assembled into something between sculpture, prosthesis, and broken apparatus. The result is not quite a ruin and not quite a machine. It is more like a portrait of perception under pressure, where every object seems to have been asked to become an eye, a witness, or a damaged organ of attention.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s Escape Orbit (2026) stretches across a darkened corridor like a speculative archive, but its small textual fragments also read like strange fortune-cookie notes: bits of advice, premonition, and failed revelation. Videos, diagrams, moving images, and slips of paper appear as clues in a story that never fully resolves itself. Phrases such as “[exhales heavily]” or “The unity of understanding comes not from a single signal but from…” seem to approach truth, then stop just before delivering it. The work is powerful precisely because it does not pretend that knowledge can arrive whole. Instead, it leaves us inside an unfinished system of signs, where meaning is almost grasped, almost spoken, but withheld because perhaps we ourselves do not yet know the answer.
Community Under Construction
It is also striking how many artists in the exhibition still return to the difficult, almost naïve question of community: can it really exist in a metropolis this large, this expensive, this structurally isolating? Kenneth Tam’s I’M STAYING HOPEFUL AND STRONG (For Bilal and Salah) (2026) approaches community through shared movement and exhaustion, following two taxi-driving brothers whose precarious labour is briefly interrupted by exercises, affirmations, and choreographed attempts at release. Dean Majd’s installation Birthmark (2022–ongoing), bringing together photographs of Palestinian life in the West Bank and New York City, shows community as something stretched across distance, family, diaspora, mourning, and political urgency, where private life is never separate from history. Meanwhile, Piero Penizzotto’s The Council of las Tías (2026) offers a more intimate and tender answer: four women seated in beach chairs, talking, remembering, transmitting knowledge through the everyday ritual of conversation. Together, these works suggest that community in New York may not appear as a stable collective body, but as a temporary shelter: a circle of chairs, a dance exercise, a family photograph, a shared story, a fragile moment of recognition before the city pulls everyone apart again.
This question of community also opens onto Covey Gong’s Jie and Shi (both 2026), where belonging is no longer imagined through intimacy alone, but through signs, replicas, and global circulation. Lifted from the entrance signage of Window of the World, a theme park in Shenzhen filled with replicas of international landmarks, the two Chinese characters together signify “the world”. In the exhibition space, they appear monumental yet strangely provisional, held within scaffold-like structures that make language look both powerful and exposed. Gong’s work suggests that the metropolis is not only a place where communities gather, but also where images of community, nation, and worldliness are staged, translated, sold, and mobilised. The city becomes a theme park of belonging: seductive, unstable, and always partly under construction.
Survival as an Endurance Competition
As I later moved through the courtyard, imagining Georgica Pettus’s Truck, a play about an endurance competition at a car dealership that will be shown on 27 June, I realised that the entire exhibition is, in a way, an endurance competition. To be an artist in “Greater New York” is to keep your hand on the truck the longest, hoping that the prize is worth the exhaustion.
MoMA PS1 at 50 is not looking back with nostalgia. It is looking around with a sharp, critical eye. It acknowledges that the vessel of the museum is often all that stands between the artist and the hostile city. The survey succeeds because it doesn’t try to polish the grit. It embraces the exhaustion, the improvisation, the debris, and the strange beauty of survival itself.
MoMA PS1 at 50 is not looking back with nostalgia. It is looking around with a sharp, critical eye. It acknowledges that the vessel of the museum is often all that stands between the artist and the hostile city. The survey succeeds because it doesn’t try to polish the grit. It embraces the exhaustion, the improvisation, the debris, and the strange beauty of survival itself.
New York City is a machine that demands a specific kind of fuel: the relentless, often unreciprocated devotion of its artists. In the end, Greater New York 2026 is a reminder that even in a city of surveillance and spectacle, the most radical act is to remain touched by the reality of others. Whether it is through the comedic ventriloquism of our daily survival or the sonic collectivity of our shared dreams, we are all still here, staring into the mirror of the city, checking to see if our image is still alive. And for now, at PS1, the answer is a resounding, albeit weary, yes.
The author’s mobility is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture
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