The DART Board: 05.20.2026
Wednesday, May 20, 6-8pm: Guy Billout | Quiet Catastrophes at Philippe Lebaune
Philippe Labaune Gallery is pleased to present Quiet Catastrophes, a comprehensive solo exhibition celebrating the work of acclaimed illustrator Guy Billout. The exhibition brings together original drawings and editorial works spanning Billout’s career. This collection highlights Billout’s decades- long influence on American and European editorial illustration, while simultaneously showcasing his craftmanship: the ability to use precise geometry, flat gradients, and the ligne claire (clear line) style to create a universe where disaster doesn't strike with a bang, but with a perfectly rendered, humorous and ironic silence.
The serene nature of his art is so distinct that the viewer is immediately drawn into his meticulously crafted universe. Relying heavily on free association, Billout understands the value of trusting the subconscious and embracing the accidental. As Billout himself has noted, his goal is simply "finding a twist, a little detail that would change the reality of that picture," demonstrating a bent for combining a highly structural thought process with a grounded sense of humor.
Philippe Lebaune Gallery, 534 West 24th Street, Ground Floor, New York, NY Info
Last chance, Sunday, May 24: Violette-le-Duc | Drawing Worlds at BGC Gallery
Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) was a visionary French architect who, among other things, devised the structural system of metal straps and rivets that made it possible for Gustav Eiffel’s Statue of Liberty to sport a skin of self-oxidizing copper. His approach to materials was: understand the properties and the form will ensue. Many years later, this idea was popularized by Louis Sullivan, who coined the phrase, “Form Follows Function”—a statement widely considered to be the origins of modern architecture in the Western world.
Oddly, this mastermind has been largely overlooked in the US until his plans for the restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral in the 1850s [above] made it possible for France’s Ministry of Culture to execute the restoration of the Gothic masterpiece, following its near-destruction by fire, in 2019,in record time Violette-Le-Duc never made distinctions between the man-made, the geological and archeological. In later years, he spent his summers in the French Alps observing patterns of glaciation, which he transcribed as delicate ink structural drawings and ecstatic watercolors of the great massifs around the Mont Blanc area [above]. These drawings and paintings are currently on view in the extraordinary exhibition, Viollet-le-Duc Drawing Worlds at Bard Graduate Center. The exhibition presents more than 150 of his drawings from all aspects of his work, offerings insigts into his fertile imagination and industrious methods.
Bard Graduate Center Gallery, 18 West 86th Street, New York, NY Info
Wednesday, May 27, 5-8pm: End of Year Show at Cooper Union
The Cooper Union End of Year Show converts the architecture school’s portion of the historic Foundation Building into a comprehensive gallery, presenting the work of graduating students from the undergraduate and graduate programmes. The 2026 show is expected to offer an intensive look at a school renowned for its rigorous focus on the craft of drawing, spatial inquiry and tectonic precision. Above: 2025 student works in architecture
The exhibition typically spans all studio years alongside a concentrated final thesis display, offering a longitudinal view of how ideas develop through the program. For practitioners, Cooper Union graduates are associated with a particular conceptual discipline and material rigour that sets the school’s output apart within the New York hiring context, and the show provides a focused opportunity to engage with that work directly.
Cooper Union, Foundation Building at 7 East 7th Street and e41 East 7th Street, New York, NY Info
Continuing: Gerhard Richter Landscapes at David Zwirner
Gerhard Richter: Landschaften, which presents Richter’s landscape paintings from the 1960s to the 2000s alongside a selection of his Abstrakte Bilder (Abstract Paintings), is curated in close collaboration with the artist, features loans from significant private and museum collections, as well as works from Richter’s personal collection. In the late 1960s, Richter began to engage the subject of landscape in his Photo Paintingsfollowing a formative visit to the French island of Corsica. Using snapshots from his trip as a compositional basis, he created a series of atmospheric landscapes and seascapes that evoke art-historical precedents while eschewing traditional notions of the aesthetic sublime.
Over the following decades, Richter continued to paint landscapes from photographic sources, manipulating his brushwork into an energetic tangle or a sfumato haze to test the malleable boundary between representation and abstraction. After Richter formalized his Abstract Paintings in 1976, the two series developed in tandem, each informing the underlying pictorial concerns of the other. In some cases, abstractions began as landscapes, only to be overpainted with gestural marks; in others, abstract works conjure landscapes through evocative titles alone.
Displayed in dialogue through a chronological progression of rooms, these two aspects of Richter’s oeuvre together illustrate his investigation into the nature of images and the perception of reality—how it is personally interpreted, mediated by the external world, and visually portrayed through painting
David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street, New York, NY Info
Looking ahead
Saturday, May 30, 11am-1pm: Rooted in Resilience | Plant Sale and Talks
Friends of the High Line's first-of-its-kind plant sale invites you to bring a piece of the High Line’s resilient beauty to your own fire escape, stoop, or backyard! Join these inaugural events—an opportunity to purchase plants propagated directly from the High Line gardens by the very hands that tend them. This is your chance to take home horticultural rarities and unique selections often hard to find in commercial nurseries.
To help you find the perfect match for your space, we’ve organized our sale into four distinct categories. Throughout the event, our Horticulture team will host specialized talks to dive deep into each category, sharing the secrets of our four-season gardens: Plants for Shady Sites; Plants for Wildlife Habitats; Drought- and Climate-Resilient Plants; Rain Garden and Wetland Plants
Click to sign up; free, donation suggested