The bell tolls frequently these days for New York galleries of all sizes, suggesting that something in our art ecosystem is seriously broken. (Josh Kline has a diagnosis for that, as you may have heard.) Amid yet another wave of gallery closures, there is much to mourn. But there is also a ray of hope in the form of nonprofits that have sprung up across New York in the past few years, organizing shows that commercial galleries will not—and perhaps cannot—stage.
Perhaps more so than other major art hubs in the US and Europe, New York has a rich tradition of alternative spaces that dates to the 1970s, which saw the formation of gritty organizations like the Kitchen, Artists Space, and White Columns, all of which continue to be vital to the city’s ecosystem. Each still runs against the grain in its own way, albeit with much more money than it had half a century ago.
These organizations all started out scruffy. Most of the new ones today, however, come out of the gate spiffed-up and well-capitalized—for example, the Wang Contemporary, a new Chinatown space launched in February by the designer Alexander Wang and his mother Ying. (Its inaugural presentation was for MSCHF, the collective whose viral creations are regularly shown by Perrotin, one of the world’s biggest galleries.) Seemingly as a riposte to these sleek spaces, artists have struck out on their own, forming their own alternatives with a rougher edge. The painter Lucy Bull, for one, briefly revived her East Village gallery last year.
Below is a look at what’s currently on view in four New York nonprofits, all of which are a 15-minute walk from one another. One is brand-new, and one is newish; a third is closing soon after a brief run, and the fourth has been around for decades and looks to remain that way.
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Nina Beier at Times
Image Credit: Courtesy Times New York Opened in February by patron Francesca Sonara and curator Summer Guthery, Times is the new kid on the block, though it does not aspire to be a permanent presence: its description notes that it has “a planned obsolescence of three years.” For now, at least, Times has some of the daredevil drive that powered some of the city’s alternative spaces from the days of yore, and it has kicked off with an exhibition that has some built-in risk. One misstep could lead to the partial destruction of the art on view.
Times’s entire SoHo space is given over to Nina Beier, who is presenting Old Friends, a new installation that lines the worn-down floorboards with evenly spaced ice cream cones. (There is an intended route to walk among them, Guthery told me, though I failed to find it on my own.) All of the Danish artist’s cones are off-brand Cornettos—not the real thing—and they are left to melt, resulting in little spills of plasticky chocolate. Mercifully for Times’s operators, rats and roaches, the bane of every New Yorker’s existence, had not arrived when I visited the show, a couple weeks after it opened.
It’s possible to read Old Friends as a subversion of the aesthetics of Minimalism, whose cold sculptures resisted change and, for the most part, fun. But Beier’s installation has a light, humorous touch that suggests she has something less lofty on the mind. I suspect she’s thinking about the same “planned obsolescence” that guides Times’s programming. Both Times’s operators and the artist herself recognize that what’s here today is often gone tomorrow, and that, they suggest, may not be such a bad thing.
Through May 9, at 151 Lafayette Street, 4th Floor
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Jakkai Siributr at Canal Projects
Image Credit: Photo Izzy Leung Before cofounding Times, Guthery spearheaded the programming for Canal Projects, whose short, adventurous run is coming to an end after just four years. (Operated by the YS Kim Foundation, the space attributed its closure to the “costs of maintaining a building with complex and outdated infrastructure.”) Canal Projects’s final outing is a great one for Jakkai Siributr, a Thai artist whose textiles are often made with the participation of others, highlighting social networks and shared histories that might otherwise go invisible.
The centerpiece of this show—which previously appeared in a modified form at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, England—is Broadlands (2023), a flow of pink and white garments that are strung with necklaces. Some of those necklaces have let their pearls loose, with stray stones falling onto a tattered carpet beneath. This is all an allusion to something that really did happen to the clothes’ original wearer, Siributr’s late mother. Upon immigrating from Thailand to England as a teenager, she attended a function held by a count at Broadlands, an estate in the British countryside, and nervously played with her necklace until it came apart. Siributr’s piece is a monument to all that her mother experienced.
Many of Siributr’s works appear fragile, a reflection of the vulnerability of many of his subjects. “Outworn,” a parade of textiles that runs the length of this vast SoHo space, derives from a project begun in 2019 in which Siributr worked with Shan refugees at a camp along the border between Thailand and Myanmar. In some cases, the refugees themselves stitched messages and images into these textiles, one of which features Myanmar’s flag. But instead of a star in its center, there’s a question mark, along with the words “LESS STATE,” seemingly a reference to the failure of any nation to support these refugees’ tenuous existence.
Through May 23, at 351 Canal Street
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Michael Joo at Space ZeroOne
Image Credit: Photo Genevieve Hanson Opened last November in Tribeca, Space ZeroOne is glossier and more moneyed than the average nonprofit in New York—its founder is the Seoul-based Hanwha Foundation of Culture, which is also partnering on a forthcoming Centre Pompidou outpost in the Korean capital. (The foundation’s namesake is a Korean conglomerate that made more than $40 billion in revenue last year, according to Forbes. Among the chaebol’s operations are two defense manufacturing firms with alleged ties to the Israeli military, something the Hanwha Foundation has denied.) The funds, at least, have gone to a good place, if its current Michael Joo survey is proof.
Ironically, or maybe fittingly, the show is also about corporatization and consumerism—specifically, the ways that industrial-made products are designed to make us forget the humans who use them. Take Stacked, a sculpture in which stacks of pink urinal cakes sheathed in plastic are set between bathroom dividers that act as shelving units. Conceived in 1993 and revisited anew for this show, Joo’s sculpture has a name that recalls the one Donald Judd gave to his sleek sculptures—and a strong scent that might make the Minimalists, or just about anyone else, cringe.
Curated by Christopher Y. Lew, this beguiling show also includes sculptures that trouble the line between organic and inorganic, with a list of materials that runs the gamut from synthetic sweat and tears to real urine and beef bouillon cubes. Concatenations (1991/2026), for example, is a vast installation in which aluminum baking trays play host to a panoply of items, from lingzhi mushrooms to the floor pattern for a bathroom’s tiling. That the installation looks a little like a dysfunctional laboratory is exactly the point. Joo, whose work will soon appear in the Venice Biennale, is contending with humanity’s incessant desire to impose scientific categories onto nature, which doesn’t always lead to positive results.
Through April 18, at 371 Broadway
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Ceija Stojka at the Drawing Center
Image Credit: Photo ©Célia Pernot/Artwork © 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Bildrecht, Vienna/Collection of Antoine de Galbert, Paris Though it began in the ’70s as a scrappy alternative space, the Drawing Center today mounts highly polished exhibitions that are about as good as, if not better than, what appears within the walls of major museums. This essential Ceija Stojka survey is the latest of those shows. Curated with razor-sharp precision by Lynne Cooke, the show aspires to canonize this self-taught Romany painter, who remains under-known in the US. It’s likely to succeed in that goal—and to make institutions like the Museum of Modern Art jealous they didn’t get there first. If there was a better show that opened this past winter in New York, I didn’t see it.
Having already written two memoirs about her internment in concentration camps during World War II, Stojka picked up a brush in 1989, then used her art in the following two and a half decades to further describe the horrors she faced during the wartime years. Initially working on modestly sized paper from the confines of her Vienna apartment’s kitchen, Stojka painted unflinching images of women being herded into claustrophobic shacks and desolate showers. These works burn swastikas and barbed wire into retina, in one case almost literally: a 1995 painting features a gigantic eye whose whites contain skulls and a chimney cloaked in Nazi regalia.
Before she died in 2013, Stojka also created a number of luminous landscapes filled with sunflowers and poppies. Cooke’s electrifying exhibition places Stojka’s vividly colored vistas in the same galleries as paintings of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, where the artist was herself imprisoned. The contrast between these two registers is chilling, a reminder that some Germans found beauty in the same countryside where the dispossessed encountered violence daily. Looking at these beautiful images of rural Germany, it is simply not possible to unsee all the horrors Stojka witnessed firsthand.
Through June 7, at 35 Wooster Street
