In our cultural moment, many large-scale curatorial projects are orchestrated more around moods than position. Themes are out, temperature-checking is in. In this curating-in-the-gerund mode, happening, resisting, critiquing, strategizing, and so on can unfold without being anchored in a clear sense of where, why, and how a show sites itself. Earlier this year, pieces by Àngels Miralda (on the death of the independent curator) and Josh Kline (in his compulsively discussed October essay on New York real estate and the wane of experimentation) depicted a creative milieu in which to curate is principally to marshal resources in the service of self-perpetuation.
In New York, Kline’s piece prompted collective questioning of what the city can offer artists and cultural workers who do not already benefit from a concentration of capital. How does New York sustain artistic practices in the present, if it does? And how do New York institutions relate to conditions in which precarity tempers experimentation more than nourishes it? Any exhibition devoted to New York must be fractured and disjointed in some measure, but this “Greater New York” warrants a close read.
MoMA PS1 is situated in one of the most culturally diverse areas of the city, and this year’s offering aligns with the concerns of diasporic New York. For its fifty-year anniversary, the edition was curated by the PS1 team without an external curator. It has many beautiful moments, and care has clearly been taken in staging aesthetic affinities between works; likewise with the many transnational, diasporic, and immigrant perspectives on offer, which makes for a capaciousness that feels refreshing in 2026 America. That all being said, the show’s engagement with the material conditions that shape contemporary New York often feel restrained. Though “Greater New York” has always taken stock as much as taken a stance, this edition remains oblique in its representation of “the layered, lived textures of New York City.”
The show wrestles with what it means to give voice to a city. Voices emerge from dolls and toys, historical portraits of the city strive to capture it, striking photography installations by Dean Majd (centering Palestinian communities) and Farah Al Qasimi (shot in the Gulf region and the US) sensitively engage positions that are heavily censored in its political climate. But relatively little seems to speak directly to the city’s most difficult contemporary dynamics, and its prevailing politics. Perhaps this is the show’s “resistance and adaptation in the face of increased surveillance” talking. But resistance and adaptation have a habit of canceling each other out. Their combination suggests the emergence of a third state: a freeze, suspended between fighting and fleeing.
Many of the show’s most compelling works are tense, engulfed by situations their characters aren’t afforded the means to articulate. Poyen Wang’s affecting video Night Stroll (2024–25) works with numerous voices, layered onto the work’s doll-ish protagonist as if it were using a voice changer to stay undetected. Its onscreen character is cramped in a dingy boiler room–like space suggestive of a construction site; its narration—seemingly concerning censorship and immigration—reflects an existential estrangement. “You realize this is not your language”. . . “sounds devoid of syllables”. . . “What is the definition of a clean body?”
Elsewhere, nods to working-class communities can feel performative rather than diagnostic. In Marie Angeletti’s Men at Work (2026), a “digital slideshow” features construction men asked to smile and pose at their worksites in the middle of the day. Angeletti’s installation is bookended by multipart works that reflect on capitalist forces—one through anti-labor industrialist Henry Clay Frick (Sophie Friedman-Pappas), another with animated, cartoon-like tax accountant characters (Marc Kokopeli). The issue here is not the piece itself, which might have implied a different reading in another setting, but the work’s misalignment with the context. In this setting, Men at Work’s blue-collar workers feel strangely disenfranchised, forced to grin and bear it for their audience. Is class alienation allowed here? No matter, just smile and keep walking.
My Coarsening (2023), one piece in Vijay Masharani’s suite of memorable video works, finds the artist peering anxiously into a subway tunnel out of which the next train never arrives. In another, one scene tilts up to a cloudless sky while upbeat music plays in the background. Over several minutes, full-screen snapshots of drawings—many are nudes in a tidy and collegiate style—flash onto the dulcet scene, perfectly timed with a dog’s bark. These ruptures are almost hallucinatory. Once the drawings disappear to show the clear sky again, small clusters of flickering colored light linger at the center of the screen—digital artifacts, a migraine aura? With uncanny humor, we’re shown something trying to reach us, but only able to get through as an aberration.
More conceptual work also bears this motif of dislocated voice. Coco Klockner’s Glottoplasty (2026) successfully seizes on the complexities of personal, identifying speech. The work combines digital beats with acoustic-seeming samples coded as everyday sounds. Drawing from oral archives of trans communities and Foley sounds that the artist “feminized” through distortion and modulation, the piece suggests the tensions between self-realization and bureaucratic demarcation. It is accompanied by untitled (doll) (2023), marking Glottoplasty’s mundane plastic containers as literal and figurative voice boxes for a distributed subject. Gendered recognition and political speech are shown here to be vulnerable technologies.
This “Greater New York” often seems conflicted in its stance towards the ethical dramas of the city, occasionally reining in the very issues it contends with. It feels most honest where it bypasses ready resolutions of social antagonism and addresses the anxieties that grip political life in the present.
