Curated by FITZ & CO · 9 exhibitions
Chelsea has an abundant offering this week, anchored by the ADAA Gallery Walk on Thursday, May 14, and framed by a broader circuit that moves from the Whitney Museum of American Art through the High Line and into the galleries themselves. The Whitney Biennial sets the institutional tone, offering a timely snapshot of artists grappling with identity, power, technology, and lived experience in America now. Just outside, the High Line extends that conversation into public space with newly commissioned works by Derek Fordjour, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Katherine Bernhardt, and Ximena Garrido-Lecca, where memory, spectacle, ecology, and displacement unfold within the city's fabric. From there, the ADAA Chelsea Gallery Walk brings the focus into sharper relief — Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner, José Dávila's The Simple Act of Positioning at Sean Kelly, Sam Falls's Amongst the Living at 303, and Erwin Wurm's Double Dream at Lehmann Maupin, the last coinciding with the gallery's 30th anniversary — a meaningful parallel moment alongside FITZ & CO, both shaping and responding to the contemporary art landscape over the past three decades.
Whitney Museum of American Art · 82nd Whitney Biennial. 56 artists, duos, and collectives, framed around relationality and 'infrastructures' — kinships across places marked by the reach of US power (Afghanistan, Chile, Iraq, Okinawa, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Vietnam).
High Line Art — The Plinth at 30th Street · A 27-foot sandstone sculpture honoring the Bamiyan Buddhas, two 6th-century colossal statues destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. This towering, 27-foot sandstone sculpture pays homage to the Bamiyan Buddhas and serves as a monument to cultural loss and enduring spirit. The work features hands cast from melted brass artillery shells positioned in mudras symbolizing fearlessness and compassion, addressing themes of memory, healing, and resistance to cultural erasure.
High Line Art — 22nd Street Mural · The mural depicts two Black marching band drum majors performing the drum major backbend, an acrobatic salute where performers bend backward until their shako nearly touches the ground. Fordjour explores themes of pride in historically Black college traditions while examining the tension between performative glamour and backbreaking labor. The vibrant composition with matching red and white uniforms conveys jubilation while also highlighting the physical form and psychological strain of expectation and hypervisibility.
High Line Art — 18th Street Billboard · A vivid still life staged on the High Line's billboard, depicting a packed kitchen counter overflowing with cleaning supplies, fresh produce, flowers, and consumer goods rendered in Bernhardt's signature saturated palette and loose, assertive brushwork unified by a bright pink spray-painted outline. The work hovers between order and chaos, utility and excess — evoking seasonal renewal while reflecting the challenges of maintaining domestic order within a consumption-driven culture.
High Line Art — 23rd Street · A nine-foot bronze sculpture of a corn cob configured as a working water fountain, with water dyed neon yellow as a reference to glyphosate runoff polluting waterways used for drinking, fishing, and recreation. Corn — central to pre-Columbian mythology and considered the origin of humanity by the Aztec and Maya — is reframed here as a site where Indigenous heritage collides with industrial agriculture, GMO monoculture, and chemical contamination.
David Zwirner · Lisa Yuskavage's exhibition presents new paintings whose glowing palettes and staged figures continue her charged approach to narrative and portraiture.
Sean Kelly · This exhibition showcases Jose Dávila's exploration of sculpture through the elemental act of positioning materials in relation to one another. Dávila uses materials like stones, concrete, and industrial elements to create configurations that illustrate the themes of weight, gravity, and balance.
303 Gallery · This exhibition by Sam Falls explores the natural processes of decomposition and uses environmental elements to create site-specific artworks that reflect nature's cycles. It includes paintings and sculptures influenced by the environment and time.
