The Winner (3*)

Tennis, the most solo of professional sports, has been Connor O'Toole's ladder to date out of working-class Yonkers.  With the support and old-fashioned-but-wise counsel of a generous mentor who disdains flash, it's already earned him a college scholarship and the knowledge that "he was lucky in the ways that mattered most." We meet Connor during the covid 19 pandemic, shortly after he's graduated from New York Law School with $144,000 in student loans and a widowed, diabetic mother who's just lost her job and her health insurance.  

But things are looking up, at least temporarily:  he's been offered summer lodging in a gated beach community for the one-percent off the coast of Massachusetts in return for giving tennis lessons to the owner of the cottage where he will reside.  John Price, a successful Ivy League lawyer, has sweetened the deal by promising to pitch Connor as a tennis pro (he's not) and help him recruit paying clients from people with the same access code. These include Catherine Havemeyer, a divorced "rentier" as horny as she is demanding.  For readers of my generation, she recalls Mrs. Robinson even before it's revealed she has a lovely daughter, Emily, who aspires to become a (bad) novelist and give away all her mother's money after mom pays her overdue $7,000 monthly rent for an off-season apartment in Brooklyn.

Author Teddy Wayne volleys the tennis metaphor to great effect in articulating what has turned Connor, a self-described "pusher," into The Winner with a chip on his shoulder that's about to get a lot bigger.

In this expensive, gentlemanly sport, Conor had developed a vision of himself as a scrappy grinder who had blazed an unheralded path to success. The rich boys he’d squared off against in college, like the suburbanites he’d played in high school from Bronxville and Scarsdale, were soft and entitled, and if victory didn’t come easily, if they saw they couldn’t close out points within four shots, if they thought they were getting screwed by the umpire, or balls skimming the net kept unluckily dropping on their side, or they were simply worn out from three arduous sets against a guy who hustled to return every goddamn shot and they just wanted to go back to the frat house and pound beers, they either waved a subconscious white flag or very consciously tanked the match (while hurling their $250 racquets in disgust at losing to a fucking pusher from Yonkers).

But it doesn't take much more than his first outdoor shower with a view of the ocean for Connor to fall in love with the fictional Cutter's Neck, and he soon decides that sex with either Havemeyer is more remunerative than sleeping with a townie, after she and her friends join him for a midnight swim at a an absent neighbor's infinity pool that puts him under suspicion for robbery. Connor is neither fish nor fowl at this early stage, but as what first seems to be a juicy romp about class and ethics morphs into a tedious master class in self-justification and cover-up, he definitely becomes the latter.  

It's the new American way in the increasingly amoral Trump era.

What They Said: August 2026

“When there are political problems, Morocco opens the doors and tells us to go,” said 24-year-old Ajoub el-Arrot, one of 50,000 migrants who crossed the border into a small Spanish town in less than 48 hours, seeking a better life in Europe.  

“I watch the History Channel like most guys watch Pornhub,” Bill Maher, winner of the 2026 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, said.  (New York Times, August 2)

*  *  *  *  *

“A lot of our churches are turning into beautiful museums,” said Justin Lester,  pastor of San Francisco's Friendship Baptist Church, who created an AI duplicate of himself. “We’re living in the future, whether we like it or not. We can’t afford to sit this one out.”  

“I always said that there is no moral test to be in the Portrait Gallery,” said Kim Sajet, former director of the Smithsonian museum. 

“Some of the themes in Brand New Day [the latest Spiderman film which greatly exceeded box office expectations on opening weekend] that stoke Gen Z include mental health challenges, loneliness and being unseen by the ones you love,” said Greg Durkin, the founder of Enact Insight, an entertainment research firm. (New York Times, August 3)

*  *  *  *  *

“It’s the visible lack of [immigration] control that’s the problem,” said Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a London institute that focuses on integration and identity. “That will resonate with the core audience of the populist parties.”  (New York Times, August 4)

*  *  *  *  *

“It’s a currency where you have no instinct to know what you’re using, and the accounting practices aren’t even there for it,” said Howard Rubin, an economist who advises companies on technology spending. “The A.I. stuff is being treated as an investment right now, but it’s a risky investment in case it has no return.”  

“In many ways, Trump represents the epitome of America’s frustrations with Iran,” said Kenneth Pollack, a former C.I.A. analyst and National Security Council official who has studied the country for decades. “He has been both the most desirous of making a deal with Iran, and the one who used the most force against it. He has found that neither got him what he wanted.”

“Twenty is plenty for urban streets, whether you’re on a bike or driving an S.U.V.,” said Ben Furnas, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a safe-streets advocacy group.   (New York Times, August 5)

*  *  *  *  *

“People have been telling us that some of the bears are not spending as much, because they’re trying to lose weight,” said Steve August, a visitor to Provincetown during "Bear Week"--and the Ozempic era. “We have a friend who has a cupcake shop and they are ordering the small cupcakes and not the big cupcakes.”  (New York Times, August 5)

*  *  *  *  *

“Is there some cultural change in the way people are parenting?” asked Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, referring to college graduates who are returning home in greater numbers after graduation. “You see kids today and the degree to which they’re interacting with parents, that’s completely different than the world of 50 years ago, 25 years ago.” 

“I’m afraid that this kind of woman [Martha Stewart, Liza Minnelli, Isabella Rossellini and Marlene Dietrich] doesn’t exist anymore,” the actress Greta Lee said.  “It’s this very strong presence and force that is really unburdened by the considerations of social media and these sort of more earthly concerns of the internet.”  (New York Times, August 9)

*  *  *  *  *

“She’s happy, you can tell,” said Zane Kesey, 65, son of Ken, whose Day-Glo-painted Merry Prankster bus will return to San Francisco for the first time since 1969 for exhibition in Golden Gate Park.  “She’s thrilled to have people talking about her, paying attention to her and all that she meant.”  

“I can tell you as someone who has frequently had Black mayors on my show, it is rare for non-Black American mayors to want to be this vocal in communicating with Black-owned media,” said Roland Martin, a political commentator who hosted Mayor Zohran Mamdani on his YouTube channel more than once.  

“I have been following traffic to Truth Social for years, and I am really struck by the steepness of the plunge [36% fewer monthly visitors this year compared to last year],” said Howard Polskin, who publishes a newsletter which tracks the right-wing news media. “When you think of how much Trump uses Truth Social as a megaphone you would think the numbers would be skyrocketing.”  

“It’s the classic generational reaction: If your boss comes in wearing sneakers, the natural reaction is to do something different,” said Ben Kriz, a men’s fashion writer who has begun wearing loafers to work, like many of his peers. “It’s like what happened with jeans.”  (New York Times, August 11)

*  *  *  *  *

“Now real life isn’t a movie, but given the circumstances, I’m not sure I could ever script a moment like that for a heroic main character,” Hollywood screenwriter Andrew W. Marlow said about the recent use of Air Force One as a decoy for President Trump by the Secret Service on a flight from Ankara to London. “If the threat were that great, it’s hard to imagine the audience rooting for any character who would trade his own safety by treating the remaining civilians onboard as potential sacrificial lambs, especially without their informed consent.”   

“We’re not allowing children to learn that they’re both physically and psychologically tough,” said Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College and the author of the forthcoming book, Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety. “We assume they’re fragile and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said.  (New York Times, August 13)

*  *  *  *  *

“All the single left-wing men in this city are about to line up nightly for dinner in her district until [Alexndria Ocasio-Cortez]  picks one like the suitors in The Odyssey, Asad Dandia, a Brooklyn-based community organizer, wrote on X, after it was revealed the New York City Congressional representative was now single.  (New York Times, August 14)

*  *  *  *  *

“That’s what it is to be a Jew, in some ways,” said Henry Stern, a California state senator who introduced a bill that would include an optional box for Jewish ethnicity on all demographic data forms, from college applications to public assistance programs. “Being really comfortable with tension, and being comfortable with paradoxes, and understanding that we’re a people, we’re a nation, we’re an ethnicity, we are a religion, too. We don’t fit naturally. And that’s why we’re such a pain.”  (New York Times, August 15)

*  *  *  *  *

“The canal stands as one of my proudest battles, no question, but greatness is a strange thing,” an A.I. Teddy Roosevelt responded at the new presidential library in North Dakota's Badlands when asked by President Trump at its opening if the Panama Canal was his greatest achievement. “I measure my greatest work by the lives improved, parks set aside, food and drugs made safe, the square deal given to all, not just to a few.”  

“In the car with my mother as a child, this lady [Shania Twain] taught me to sing. She also taught me that men are trash,” Harry Styles told the crowd at Coachella before introducing her during his 2022 set.  (New York Times, August 16)

*  *  *  *  *

“[New York Harbor has] become a free-for-all,” said Roland Rexha, secretary-treasurer of the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association, an international union. "You have everything from bootleg mariners to jet skis and people in canoes out there cutting in front of the Staten Island Ferry. And they just don’t realize that the ferry is not a car that can just stop on a dime.”  (New York Times, August 17)

*  *  *  *  *

“She just couldn’t believe it that there were these stuffy Washington wives who were denying artistic freedom to musicians,” Rage-Against-the-Machine frontman Thom Morello said of his mother, Mary, who founded Parents for Rock and Rap in 1987. “When I was growing up, there was a lot of Kiss and Alice Cooper being played in the house, and she realized that it was not corrupting my soul.”  (New York Times, August 18)

*  *  *  *  *

"We teachers must remain students — and model what we want to see," writes Matt Dinan, the director of the great books program at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick. We need to recover the passion that drove us to our books, to the lab. We need to embody love of learning for its own sake against the pervasive message that higher education should be vocational, and we need to clarify the basic questions that make our subjects worth studying.  (New York Times, August 19)

*  *  *  *  *

“Memory fades after three generations,” said Thomas Bagger, the German ambassador to Italy. “Even the Holocaust does not resonate as it once did, and nor does the imperative of integration in Europe.” 

“If the next couple of years are dry, the risk to Colorado River water users is extraordinary,” said Jennifer Pitt, who directs the Colorado River Program at the National Audubon Society. “There is no buffer to rely on anymore.”  

“What [Henry] Flagler did with a raw landscape 100 years ago, [developer Stephen] Ross is trying to do with a raw, largely undeveloped business landscape [in West Palm Beach],” said Lester Standiford, a professor at Florida International University.  “I see him engaged in an equal kind of pioneering effort.”

“There has always been this aura here, this magical thinking,” said Leo Braudy, a Los Angeles cultural historian and the author of The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. “Everybody thinks, ‘I’m beautiful,’ or ‘I’m handsome.’ Everybody thinks, ‘If those people can make it in Hollywood, so can I.’”(New York Times, August 23)

*  *  *  *  *

“[The data center issue] absolutely shakes up the snow globe on the partisan coalitions in a part of the world where Republicans have been dominant,” said Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster. “It’s one of the few issues today that does not immediately code as red or blue, left or right.”  

“Every candidate in 2028 will have their own cooked poll factory,” said Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist. “Polls now are not just a way of measuring the horse race. It’s a way for candidates and their allies to influence the horse race.”

“The point of life, I think, is to make the world better for your family, your community, for humanity,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, MD who served as a health policy adviser in the Obama administration and is a critic of the modern wellness industry. “We’re here for a short time, and it’s not all about us.”  (New York Times, August 24)

*  *  *  *  *

"French, in Canada, is not a business matter," writes Stephen Marche.  "Its place in our nation transcends absolutely any market-based consideration. It is not something that gets put on the table."  (New York Times, August 25)

*  *  *  *  *

“Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts, said Dolly Parton. "Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out. Not everything I write is good, but it’s all good for me — like therapy.”  (New York Times, August 26)

*  *  *  *  *

“They are threatening to shut down the Southwest,” Brenda Burman, the general manager of the Central Arizona Project said of a longstanding federal agreement  to ration Colorado River water flow. “It’s not possible to picture it.”

“I guarantee you, if it matters, that I have experienced true love, true heartbreak and everything in between, including no small amount of wreckage,” wrote Tim Curry, who refused to discuss his private life, in his 2025 memoir, Vagabond. “Which, naturally, helps inform who I am. I have loved and been loved and I hope you have, too. But I’m not interested in your romances.”  (New York Times, August 27)

*  *  *  *  *

“Whether it was in a big law firm or on Wall Street, where he and I grew up, or here in politics, you realize there are certain guys out there who think gay guys are weak and you have to disabuse them of that notion,” said Sean Patrick Maloney, a former Democratic congressman from New York, who is gay. “And sometimes that means getting in their face and telling them to go fuck themselves. And Scott [Bessent] can do that with the best of them.” 

“Bring on Picasso, bring on Matisse,” Yayoi Kusama wrote in her autobiography. “Bring on anybody! I would stand up to them all with a single polka dot. That was the way I saw it. I was betting everything on this and raising my revolutionary banner against all of history.”(New York Times, August 28)

*  *  *  *  *

“Next they’ll be calling Canada geese ‘Donald ducks,’” said David Hedley, the fourth-generation owner of Hedley Boatyard in Olcott on the shores of Lake Ontario.

“By centering Galliano,” said David Ingber, the senior director for Jewish life and senior director of the Bronfman Center at 92NY and the founding rabbi of the Romemu synagogue, “the Met has put the Jewish community in a no-win position. Either we are blamed for being overly sensitive and not allowing him to be honored or we are complicit. The question is not whether they can do this, but whether they should have.”  

“The logo of the Beverly Hills Hotel is in his handwriting, but [architect Paul Williams] couldn’t walk into the front door there,” said LeRonn P. Brooks, who leads the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute. “He even kept his hands in his pockets when walking through construction sites, because he knew some construction workers wouldn’t want to shake his hand.” 

 “[Renee Richards' playing] didn’t destroy women’s tennis and it didn’t lead to a generation of guys at a later time who couldn’t quite make it in the N.B.A. suddenly playing as women,” Keith Olbermann told a biographer of a trans pioneer and ophthalmologist whom he consulted. “Boy, [people] made an awful big deal out of something that really did take care of itself.”  (New York Times, August 30)

AIM Higher @ The Bronx Museum

It probably seems churlish to complain about the operations of a free museum in an outer borough--particularly one with an interesting track record--but here goes anyway: three trips were required to see the Seventh AIM Biennial at the Bronx Museum which exhibits the work of New York City-based artists who were awarded fellowships by the institution.  On two attempted Sunday visits this summer, I arrived only to discover a taped sign on the entrance door saying the museum was closed, information that hadn't been conveyed on the website's "Visit" page or the hours recording.

"First Impressions" by Ricki Dwyer (2021)

Of course, that's not the fault of the artists, and I must say the ratio of hits to misses was higher in this fairly small show than it was at either the Whitney Biennial or Greater New York. Papier-mâché sculptures by Piero Penizzotto (whose "Council of las Tías" was hanging out in Queens)

"Big Brother Obii Knows Best (Ft. Freddy & Shawn)"  (partial, 2025)

. . . looked as if they were waiting to board the Bx 1 just outside on the Grand Concourse where construction on the museum's new exterior continues (Futura 2000 painted the "Aerosol Aesthetic" behind them).

"Beso a La Cámara" by Bryan Fernandez (2025)

For a minute, I thought the pile of discarded razors in a window corner might have been a janitorial oversight

. . . but they turned out to be part of an installation by Asia Stewart that simply conveys how the military industrial complex--first identified by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former general and Republican--has frayed our democracy and diminished patriotism among people who don't support war or policies that enrich a few while killing many.

Stewart calls both her installation and video "the money is in the blades." Indeed!

DeepPond Kim employs an ancient form of Korean metalwork called Chilbo (similar to cloisonné), to deter viewers from drawing any conclusions about the race or ethnicity of the individual she is depicting in this strikingly latticed bust which really pops against the main gallery's orange walls.

Veil (2022)

Sangmin Lee recycles printer paper and other material back into a tree of sorts.

"Nostalgia without memory VI (In Collapse)" by  (2022-ongoing)

It appears as if it's blossoming during a nuclear winter.

(close-up)

Several other artists in the main gallery make metaphorical use of water. Nazli Efe adapts an ancient (and hazardous) practice of dropping molten lead into liquid to divine the future; in this work she substitutes wax, sand and gauze to create a three-dimensional Rorschach test that might be mistaken for chunky vomit.

 

"Open Weave No. 3" (2024)

Using cherry blossom branches, Motohiro Takeda recreated an abandoned boat he noticed when he returned to Japan for his grandfather's memorial service. It floats in a kind of purgatory between life and death, between hope for the future and environmental catastrophe. 

"Nights In April (Ark)" by Motohiro Takeda (2025) +
"Shatter Me Upon the Waterfall's Edge" by Cyle Warner (2025)

("Nights" detail) 

Cyle Warner, inspired by a Vermont waterfall, fluidly weaves together fabrics that once belonged to his Trinidadian mother and grandmother to connect his family culture and his appreciation for American pastorality.

("Shatter" detail)

I didn't know what to make of this multimedia installation by Juyon Lee (and reading her artist statement was no help, but she wasn't alone in that regard; few of AIM's artists are as articulate as their work)

"Parabolic Traces (Between Hands and Sunsets)" (2025)

. . . but its unusual construction and neon-lit components were visually arresting.

(partial)

(detail)

Ceramicist Katie Chin is the exception.  When AIM opened, she told Forbes magazine “I don't believe in individual artistic genius. There's a collective, shared knowledge pool that you can pull information from, and it comes through in my work. Research and reading is really important to my practice.”  Industrial sabotage inspired this weird but compelling sculpture.  Indiana railroad workers shortened their shovels in 1899 to protest inadequate pay.

"Short Pay, Short Shovels" (2026)

In "The Gaze" (2024) Skip Brea uses digital animation to make his oil painting--and art history--come alive. Can you spot the falling leaf?

Delvin Lugo explores how members of the queer community create their own families and homes, often depicting moments of non-sexual intimacy, while Leekyung Kang links ancient spirituality (Nut, the Egyptian goddess of the sky) with the discoveries of modern science (the universe's dark matter) across the millennia in a large painting that resembles a contemporary brain scan.

"Country to City/Town to City" by Delvin Lugo (2024) +
"A map of invisible dimensions - Nut's" by Leekyung Kang (2025)

The son of two Dominican tailors, Lugo often paints on vintage linens, like this tablecloth, giving his subjects an embossed texture echoing the "otherness" that binds them.

"Country to City/Town to City" (partial, 2024)

If I were an art dealer hunting for new talent to represent, Cuban-born Erick Alejandro Hernandez would be my guy.  A poem by his father inspired this haunting work, which translates to "window (no one can assure us the places we've lived have been given the right names)."

"Ventana (nadie puede asegurarnos que han puesto los nombres ciertos a los lugares donde hemos vivido") by (2025)

A literal representation of compartmentalization, I haven't been able to get it out my head.

It's as if an exile is dreaming of what he has been forced to leave behind.

And kudos to Duneska Michel, the Bronx Museum Educator!  She describes her workshops for the 55+ crowd like this:

Drawing from family photographs, personal collections, and lived experiences, participants investigated how histories are preserved, interpreted, and transmitted across generations. Central to the workshop was an examination of the archive itself. which is traditionally understood as an institutional repository of materials deemed culturally valuable. Participants were invited to expand this definition by recognizing their own photographs, memories, family histories, and everyday experiences as worthy of preservation. Through this process, the archive became not only a site for safeguarding collective histories but also a space for affirming the significance of personal narratives.

Somehow it never occurred to me to transform all those family photos I digitized into collage material.

I sincerely hope the museum's communications team steps up its game by the time the new building opens in 2027.

More Bronx Museum:

Martin Wong (2016)
Pre-Digital Moments in (My) Time (2019)
Plaster Casting in the Bronx (2023)

Iggy: Open Up & Bleed (3*)

If you want to understand one of rock's greatest survivor stories, you'd do just as well to listen to "Nude and Rude," Iggy Pop's 1993 greatest hits collection as to wade through Paul Trynka's 300+ page biography of James Osterberg, Jr.  Even better, go see the 79-year-old "Godfather of Punk" in live performance before the coffin lid--a stage prop at Coachella earlier this year--closes on him for good.

Paul Trynka, a British music writer, thoroughly documents Osterberg's life until he hit 60, about the age Iggy was finally getting overdue recognition of his influence on music. Unfortunately, he makes the same mistake that Will Hermes did with Lou Reed:  all fact and little psychological insight ends up mostly exposing the guy as an asshole whose talent, while considerable and unique, doesn't quite redeem his overweening ambition.  

Thanks to his early gigs with the Stooges, recounted in stupefying detail, Osterberg--voted most likely to succeed in junior high school (!)--learned that bad behavior got him more attention than good.  Trynka compares the difference between his off-stage charm and intellect, and his occasionally bloody live performances to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but that still leaves readers wondering what makes the guy tick.    

Osterberg did give Trynka permission to interview his shrink who, by the end of the book, walks back his diagnosis of possible bipolarity, mostly because Iggy can dial up the manic energy for his shows and then revert to normal in between performances. Exhibitionism or BDE (big dick energy) may also have contributed to Iggy's "Real Wild Child" stage persona; despite repeated flashing of what Trynka describes as his "impressive" penis, he was never arrested, unlike Jim Morrison who may have given him the idea (Iggy:  Open Up and Bleed helpfully provides a photograph taken by Factory denizen Gerard Malanga, cropped below the waist for the cover of Nude and Rude so that the album could be sold in Middle America retail chains).

Osterberg's ego, addictions and womanizing (he liked 'em younger than legal in some cases, at a time when that mattered less) aren't particularly unusual in show business, but his relationship with his collaborators, always strained by the end, suggests that his childhood competitiveness left him more resistant than many of his peers to sharing the spotlight.  Trynka's book picks up some badly needed steam when the Thin White Duke throws him a career preserver in the mid-70s and whisks him off to Berlin where they record The Idiot and Lust for Life, the twinned fonts of his best solo work as far as I'm concerned although Trynka goes a little overboard in his estimation:  

Not since van Gogh and Gauguin spent nine weeks together at the Yellow House in Arles had two artists of such stature, with such distinct styles, cooperated so closely, with such influential and fulfilling results. But where the two painters' creative winning streak had culminated in madness and breakdown, Bowie and Iggy's great, innovative work together would prove a healing process for two severely damaged individuals.

The unexplained healing--Trynka tells, rather than shows--lasts longer for Bowie than Iggy and the two eventually lose touch.  I'm guessing that had as much to do with Bowie's stabilizing marriage to Iman and fatherhood as Iggy's bruised ego and obsessive touring but Bowie remains the bigger man (and talent) to the end.  “I think there was a moment where Jim decided that he couldn’t do a fucking article without my name being mentioned – and I don’t think that’s a very comfortable feeling,” Bowie said.

Trynka also leaves it to the reader to fill in the blank about what motivated Bowie to champion Iggy in the first place. I would venture that Iggy was id to Bowie's super-ego, all-American primal instinct vs. a completely cerebral approach to music-making steeped in the traditions of British music hall and mime.  Bowie evolved to the very end; Iggy doesn't seem to have changed at all, at least on stage, where he clearly feels most like himself given what Bowie identified as his obsessive need to tour.  I also suspect that Iggy's athleticism held an aesthetic appeal for rock's greatest chameleon (what is it about these Michigan jock rockers anyway?  Like Alice Cooper, who doesn't get enough credit for the influence of his early work IMHO, Iggy took up golf, something I can't imagine Bowie ever doing).

Since publication of Trynka's prematurely definitive biography in 2007, I've downloaded some of Iggy's subsequent work, mostly for the pleasure of hearing his distinctive baritone and the occasional atavistic lyric, although nothing can compete with "I've never had it in the ear before" from Lust for Life, my introduction to his work.  Chiffon even included "New Atlantis," a paean to his adopted home ("Somewhere south of Alabama and north of Cuba there lies a beautiful whore of a city") and the threat it faces from global warming, on his 2023 year-end list.  

Who woulda thunk that Iggy Pop and Keith Richards, the two 60s rockers with reputations for the hardest living, would still be around more than a half-century later, long after the possibility of staying pretty had expired?  Just for fun, I queried AI to determine if online prediction markets were taking bets on who would last longer only to learn that even Polymarket and Kalshi have some scruples.  Death bets are forbidden even though your options for bankruptcy are unlimited.

Greater New York

"Greater New York" at MoMA PS1 surveys the work of artists currently living and working in the area.  Like the Whitney Biennial, it can be hit or miss.

An installation called "Touch The Heart" assembled by Red Canary Song, a Queens-based organization that advocates on behalf of a group marginalized by both their ethnicity and profession, made the strongest impression by far. In 2021, a mass shooter murdered eight people of Chinese and Korean descent at an Atlanta spa and massage parlor where he had paid for sex. Using a pseudonym, Ellen honored the female victims by reproducing their visages on cutting boards.  Flowers over their mouths conferred public anonymity at the same time it symbolized both beauty and powerlessness.

Ellen also framed her portraits in gold glitter.  

"8Lives" (2022)

Another unique work uses Chinese food as a metaphor to explore quality of life issues among massage parlor sex workers.

"Dim Sum Constellations" by Yin Q and Chong Gu (2026)

I won't ever forget the braised chicken feet the first time I ate dim sum.  These even more inedible tools of the pleasure trade are almost as memorable.

Table Ill: Body Care, Desire, & Labor

Yin Q, one of the artists, co-directs Red Canary Song, 

Despite their name, the Women's History Museum art collective reverts to what I might call "damaged window dressing."

"Chez les heureux du monde" (2026)

But its visual impact is undeniable.

(detail)

"Problem 1" and "Problem 2," video sculptures by Marc Kokopeli, spoof America's history of financial booms and busts using the premise that it's Tax Day in South Park.  In "Problem 2" Cartman, surrounded by piggy banks, uses an actual spiel recorded by a CPA for You Tube.  Kokopeli calls his Instagram account "King of Venmo."

.   

 

This shiny, hollow sculpture by Kristin Walsh comments on the prohibition against melting pennies down to extract the copper used in their production, just 2.5% (the rest is zinc) since 1982.  

When the United States Mint ended their production last year, the copper content of penny was still worth one or two cents more than its circulating value.

"Indicator no. 9" (2026)

I thought of John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres as soon as I saw these sculptures by Piero Penizzotto.  In fact, Ahearn mentored Penizzotto although the latter prefers capturing "fragile moments of togetherness" to plaster casting.

"The Council of las Tías (Mary, Milagros, Cynthia, Nereyda)" (2026)

Context is everything.  Posters like these--hand painted by the Cevallos brothers, now in their 80s-- have been advertising events and establishments along Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights for decades.

Now they're adhered to a museum wall celebrating Latino community and culture in New York City. 

Taína Cruz drew on the walls of the Whitney, too.

"If and when they come shell be ready" (2026)

Her paintings evoke modern urban fairy tales.

"Charm Written in Steam and Light"  (2025)

"Uptown Twilight Sauté" (2025)

Even at this distance, I could recognize the work of another Biennial artist, he of the manifestoes.

"Chart of Darkness" by Akira Ikezoe (2025)

Kenneth Tam recruited taxi drivers who had overpaid for their medallions to participate in "I'M STAYING HOPEFUL AND STRONG (For Bilal and Salah)."  The video emphasizes their resilience in the face of predatory lenders and the disruptive rise of ride share services. 

Not yet 30, photographer Dean Majd, raised in Queens, is having a moment facilitated, in part, by Israel's genocidal response to October 7. His work has appeared on the cover of New York magazine (Habibi City, Swana Edition) and he shot Mayor Zohran Mamdani for Vogue.  His photos documening Palestinian life among his relatives in the West Bank and his cultural and political peers in New York cover two walls.

Masculinity has always been one of his central themes.  One could argue that performative masculinity is at the root of many societal problems.

"Birthmark" (2024)

Timely paintings by Esteban Jefferson share the same space with a more explicitly political orientation, although the the vibe of this monumental-like work is ambiguous:  are these immigrants pledging, beseeching or celebrating?

"The Immigrants" (2026)

Farah Al Qasimi, who earned her M.F.A. from Yale, mostly explores personal spaces in both domestic and international Arab culture through photography, video and performance.  I'm guessing she's commenting on oil wealth in this glossy image of Gulf States home decor.

"Snake on a Horse (UAE)" (2025)

Folk artist Dean Millien uses aluminum foil to depict animals more commonly found in Bushwick households.  Developmentally disabled, he didn't attend an Ivy League school and barely earns a living wage from the sale of his art.  

"The Cats and the Rats" (2026)

Hopefully, his belated embrace by MoMA PS1--now in his 50s, he's been creating since the age of three-- can finally help change that.

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His sculptures may not be beyond the financial reach of the 49 million Americans who keep cats as pets.

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