Wednesday, October 28, 6:00–8:00pm: In A Dream You Saw A Way To Survive and You Were Filled With Joy

Celebrate the spirit of activism and remembrance as the New York City AIDS Memorial marks a monumental ten-year milestone with this pop-up exhibition. Co-organized by Keith Fox and Stephen Truax in collaboration with David Kordansky Gallery, the show takes its title from Jenny Holzer’s striking text etched into the granite of the Greenwich Village memorial as it honors the more than 100,000 New Yorkers lost to the epidemic. It is both a look back at a decade of vital preservation and a bold step forward; proceeds from artwork sales will directly fund the Memorial’s future, ensuring that educational outreach, community programming, and the commissioning of urgent new public art and performances continue to empower generations to come.

Through October 31 at David Kordansky Gallery, 520 West 20th Street, New York, NY Info

Thursday, October 29: Gerard Mossé | Light Rising, Watercolors at Jill Newhouse

In the shimmering space of contemporary watercolor, there are artists who manipulate paint, and then there are those who seem to trap the very essence of day and night on paper. Gerard Mossé belongs firmly to the latter camp. In his latest works, he transforms pigment, water, and paper into something alchemical, creating surfaces that appear to glow from a source deeply embedded within the materials themselves.  While these small-scale paintings remain deeply tethered to the physical behavior of watercolor, their radiant, built-up surfaces quickly push past material boundaries. What he offers viewers here is an expansive moment of stillness—one where light and color expand effortlessly, untamed by the physical limitations of a small sheet of paper.

Jill Newhouse Gallery, 4 East 81^st Street, New York, NY Info

Thursday, October 29,  7-8:30pm: Liz Curtin | An Archeology of Small Wonders at The Master Gallery 

After teaching Mixed Media in NYC for nearly four decades, Liz Curtin recently opened her studio for her own practice. Now on view at one of NYCs hidden gems is a collection of her abstractions made from materials she rescued from the city’s floors. She writes, 

Today, my happiest moments are out…foraging for what others have overlooked. I search out “lost” objects that most people dismiss as garbage, gems that litter gutters, hide beneath cars, linger in abandoned doorways, or appear on garbage collection days….This is my archeology, the act of taking what is discarded, and through attention, touch and thought, turning it into something alive with meaning. My love of natural elements, ephemera, odd vintage items and rusted objects has only deepened over time, evolving into a finely tuned practice of transformation.

The Master Gallery at 310 Riverside Drive, entrance on 103rd Street, New York, NY Info

Friday, October 30, 2026, from 6:00-8:00pm: Jakub Tomáš | Five String Serenade

In his second NYC appearance Czech artist Jakub Tomáš continues to upend traditional figurative painting by routing it through an analog, tactile form of theater. His large canvases begin life as deceptively crude, small-scale maquettes—provisional tableaus crafted from reassembled magazine snippets and internet debris.

Arranged and lit like miniature dioramas, these fragile card-and-paper constructions are then translated by the artist into lushly painted, visually perplexing oil paintings. The resulting compositions pulse with a distinctly Central European edge, drawing from Czech puppetry, stop-motion animation, and the grotesque Carnival mask-wearing of folk revelers.

Tomáš's figures exist in a state of beautifully orchestrated spatial friction. Bodies halt abruptly in geometric, Cubist angles; ancient Hellenistic stone heads rest next to flat, mocking masks informed by James Ensor; and limbs jut out awkwardly creating labyrinthine perspective shifts that conjure thoughts of a masterfully constructed theater. 

Asya Geisberg Gallery, 45 White Street, New York, NY Info

Continuing: Charles Burchfield: Elemental at the Whitney

Seventy years after hosting his landmark 1956 retrospective, the Whitney Museum of American Art opens its vaults to present Charles Burchfield: Elemental, a focused look at an American visionary who captured the pulse of the landscape. Spanning more than four decades, this gathering of rare watercolors vibrates with a raw intensity where changing seasons converge into a state of mind.

These works reveal his keen attention to wildflowers and woodlands, insects and songbirds, weather in all its temperaments and the changing seasons. He found artistic inspiration and a sense of spiritual renewal in the countryside around his childhood home in Salem, Ohio, as well as in Gardenville, New York, where he lived for over forty years. Frequently painting outdoors, Burchfield used a dry-brush technique, in which only a small amount of water is applied to the paintbrush, to create watercolors with saturated color and jagged lines suggestive of nature’s dynamic energy.  Drawn from the Whitney’s collection, the watercolors on view include early landscapes, meditations on the sky, and monumental “reconstructions.” Taken together, these paintings capture the places he found sacred and reflect his lifelong reverence for the elemental forces and cycles of the natural world. 

Through Spring 2027 at the Whitney Museum of American Art (99 Gansevoort Street, New York Info

News from the Home Office

With Election Day coming up fast, the creative community knows exactly where to find its own particular center. The annual AI-AP book launch—famously known as The PARTY—returns on Thursday, November 12, 2026, transforming the historic Angel Orensanz Foundation into an electric showcase of visual storytelling. 

This isn’t just an industry gathering; it’s a centrifuge all its own where emerging illustrators and photographers rub elbows with their idols, and with seasoned art directors, and where the hard-bound realities of American Photography 42 and American Illustration 45 make their official debut. Over at American Illustration 45, Phoebe Flynn Rich's creative direction brings us a luxurious 384-page volume anchored by a hand-turned spinning wheel cover by Katherine Streeter. Right alongside it, American Photography 42 captures a striking cross-section of editorial and fine-art grit designed by Mike Schnaidt and Erin Hollaway Palmer. For anyone with an appetite for the experimental and the year's absolute best imagery, it's the ultimate night to meet, mix, and mingle on the edge of visual culture. 

Click to register. Click to pre-order discount copies of AI45 and AP42