5 Standout Artists At Moma PS1's“Greater New York” Artsy

(MENAFN- USA Art News) MoMA PS1's“Greater New York” Finds Its Pulse in Translation, Systems, and Material Memory

At MoMA PS1, the sixth edition of“Greater New York” is less interested in declaring a single direction for contemporary art than in showing how artists are building meaning from fragments. On view through August 17, the exhibition also marks the institution's 50th anniversary, giving the survey an added layer of institutional reflection as it looks outward at the city's current art scene.

Among the most compelling contributions is Chang Yuchen's Coral Dictionary (2019–present), a project that has grown over seven years from collected coral fragments into an expansive semiotic system. Presented through graphite drawings, charts, and accordion booklets installed on walls and in vitrines, the work translates coral forms into English, Mandarin, and Malay. Chang's method is both precise and poetic: the corals become signs, while language becomes a site of slippage and exchange. The project also draws on Kamus Sari, a trilingual dictionary whose example sentences, according to the exhibition materials, still reflect the political dimensions of life in 1970s Malaysia. Chang, who teaches in the Dance MFA program at Bennington College, extended this inquiry during a 2024 artist fellowship at the New York Public Library, where she developed Body Dictionary, an experimental curriculum linking the somatic and semantic.

Akira Ikezoe's paintings push a different kind of translation. In Chart of Darkness (2025), the Japanese artist Akira Ikezoe (b. 1979) organizes icons across a bright yellow field in a structure that recalls an Excel spreadsheet more than an abstract canvas. The work's rows and columns create a system of visual classification, with references ranging from The Shining to food and footwear. Frog Stories Around Windmill (2025) extends that logic into a diagram of frogs moving through a flat visual field, giving the painting the feel of a digital ecosystem. Ikezoe's work, which also appears in the 2026 Whitney Biennial and the 2025 Sharjah Biennial, suggests how contemporary image-making can borrow from interfaces, emojis, and data without losing warmth or wit.

Nickola Pottinger's sculptures bring the exhibition back to the body, family history, and the tactile residue of lived experience. The Jamaican artist Nickola Pottinger (b. 1986) grinds printed matter - including old book reports and shredded documents - with her mother's handheld cake mixer, then shapes the pulp into figures that absorb pigment, toys, heirlooms, and bone. In Genkle Jesus meek and mild II (2026), she adds frankincense, mushroom spores, hair, heliconia, doily cloth, and teeth collected from her mother's dental lab. The result is a creature that feels at once devotional and uncanny, as if assembled from memory, ritual, and the remains of domestic life.

Taken together, these works show why“Greater New York” remains a useful barometer for the city's art world. The exhibition is not simply tracking trends; it is revealing how artists are using language, systems, and material experimentation to think through translation, memory, and belief.

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