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By Juan Butten
There are days when New York chews you up and spits you out, and others when it simply pushes you into a concrete courtyard in Queens to remind you why you’re still here. That happened to me today, precisely today, in the final breath of the exhibition. I crossed the river with the rumble of the subway still buzzing in my ears and walked into the old public school building that houses MoMA PS1. I wanted a close-up look at the closing of “Greater New York 2026: Extended Partial View”—that raw, beautiful X-ray of what it means to create in this untamable city.
Walking through the high-ceilinged hallways and worn floors of PS1 always feels a bit like trespassing in a temple of nostalgia, but today the vibe was different. The show, which also celebrates the museum’s 50th anniversary, isn’t just a random stacking of trendy artworks; it’s a perfect choreography of space. This is where you truly notice the masterful hand of the entire MoMA PS1 curatorial team, led by Connie Butler and Ruba Katrib, alongside Jody Graf, Elena Ketelsen González, Kari Rittenbach, and Sheldon Gooch. Organizing a group show of this scale and making every room feel like an intimate, fluid, and coherent dialogue is a stroke of pure genius.
They achieved the impossible: weaving together pieces from artists as diverse as Taína Cruz, Kameron Neal, and Sophie Friedman-Pappas into a narrative that refuses to let you go. These aren’t works designed to match a penthouse couch; they are cries of resistance against mass surveillance, visual chronicles of economic precarity, of the gentrification snapping at our heels, and of that stubborn urban adaptation that only those of us who live here truly understand.
The curation perfectly captured that constant clash between optimism and anxiety that the asphalt inflicts on you. I stepped out onto Jackson Avenue under the afternoon sun, my eyes full of questions and my chest heavy with New York. Tomorrow they will dismantle the galleries, but the flawless emotional labyrinth these curators built stays with me forever. It’s worth every damn second.
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