Moma PS1's 2026 Greater New York: Our Critics Offer Their Thoughts

New York's most closely watched local survey has returned with a distinctly uneasy pulse. MoMA PS1's sixth Greater New York, the museum's quinquennial exhibition for artists who live and work in the city's five boroughs, opens during MoMA PS1's 50th anniversary year and brings together about 53 artists. It is also the first edition since the Covid-delayed 2021 show, and this time the museum kept the project in-house, relying entirely on its own curatorial staff.

The result is an exhibition that reads New York through vulnerability: weakened infrastructure, unstable labor, and the informal networks people build when official systems fail. That framing is visible in Salaheldin Elcharfa's I'M STAYING HOPEFUL AND STRONG (For Bilal and Salah), a film about the taxi medallion crisis and the crushing debt that has shadowed many yellow-cab drivers. The work's title carries a note of endurance, but the crisis it addresses remains severe, with medallion values collapsing after the rise of ride-sharing apps.

Elsewhere, the show leans into material fragility. Louis Osmosis assembles sculptures from castoff objects - old cash registers, disused signage, mannequin parts, used boxers, ribbons, and more - and pairs them with an installation of confetti scattered across the floor, each piece marked by a chalk number. The effect is deliberately provisional, a counterpoint to the polished permanence of corporate monuments elsewhere in the city.

That tension between instability and care runs through Mekko Harjo's I have eaten and made friends (The Devouring Hill), which transforms a gallery into a Bushwick bar, and through Red Canary Song, the Flushing-based grassroots organization focused on Asian and migrant sex workers and the decriminalization of sex work. Together, the works suggest a city held together less by grandeur than by improvisation, mutual aid, and the stubborn effort to remain visible.

Greater New York has always been a barometer of the city's artistic mood. This edition makes a sharper claim: in New York, precarity is not an exception to the story. It is part of the city's structure, and part of the art made within it.

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