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“Greater New York” Shows a Generation’s Resilience at the Edge of Collapse

In MoMA PS1’s quinquennial, artists navigate systemic collapse through survival and resilience, but without reactive future speculation.

A poetics of impermanence is also a poetics of transition, of remnants and remainders, carrying fragments of knowledge into whatever comes next. That’s what prevails at the latest edition of MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York” survey on view through August 17. The central feeling? That the world as we know it—and the New York we know—has by now crossed a threshold. Since its launch in 1999, the quinquennial has embraced the mantra “New Art in New York Now,” aiming to serve as a gauge of the state of art in the city. This edition registers that liminal, suspended condition between a world that is gone and one still to come with unusual clarity. Worth noting, the 2026 edition is the first to be curated in-house by a young cohort of MoMA PS1 curators, many of them from the same generation as the artists on view and operating within a similar milieu in the city.

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Compared to the Whitney Biennial, which often strains toward narrative or some fixed position—in other words, presenting the fracture rather than the fracturing—”Greater New York” reads our present condition with sharper lucidity. It acknowledges systemic failure without overstating its own agency, displaying instead gestures of resistance, practices of endurance and forms of emotional and material resilience. As one of the curators, Kari Rittenbach, puts it in the catalog, the survey’s artists are not putting a dot at the end of the sentence, but are instead working in relation to “the brokenness and meanness of reality and asking, ‘Is this how we want to continue?'”

Still, as at the Whitney, the prevalence of poor, provisional, often makeshift materials across the show is impossible to ignore, and reads less as a shared formal tendency than as evidence of constraint. This is not Arte Povera revived as an aesthetic choice and philosophical gesture; much as in the Postwar period, it is a choice made out of necessity. The poverty of materials and techniques on view reflects a New York that has become increasingly unaffordable for artists, where production is shaped more by economic limitation than by conceptual intent or technical ambition.

Perhaps also for this reason, most of the works on view adapt, endure and persist, preferring to revisit the past and address the present rather than to break into the speculative terrain of alternative worlds and possibilities of improvement. The imaginative leap is deferred or impossible to envision under current conditions, as promises of technological and societal progress have already proven to be failures. Ideas seem irremediably conditioned by the constraints the present moment imposes on creativity and imagination.

Overall, “Greater New York” gives off Bushwick survival vibes that can certainly signal a creatively regenerating yet exhausted system, but are likely symptomatic of something deeper: a structural fracture driven by the real estate industry and other factors, as a much-discussed essay by Josh Klein recently addressed.

Through the work of 53 artists and collectives who call the New York City area home, the exhibition is deeply informed by the present moment, as defined by technological acceleration, systemic breakdown and political violence, further amplified in a city like New York, positioned as a key nexus of flows of labor, capital and goods within both the American and global system. Many works engage the tensions between visibility, surveillance and performance in a digital world, while others retreat toward tactility, intimate worlds and the personal and familial—opposite but often complementary strategies for processing external crises that frequently project inward.

Eulogies of urban survival

Most often, the result is a general disconnection from the broader societal and historical fabric, as well as from everyday reality itself—a common survival strategy among younger generations that has, at this point, inevitably made its way into art. This widespread digitally induced dissociation is exemplified by Poyen Wang’s digital animation in the basement installation, staging a series of absurd animated vignettes centered on a hapless, nameless marionette figure as it moves through cramped, deteriorating environments (a Taiwanese interior, a construction site, a memory space) delivering fragmented monologues that combine personal recollection, pop lyrics and bureaucratic language. The effect is one of psychological exhaustion and emotional escapism rather than boredom: a portrait of postglobal displacement rendered through a subject trapped between systems, speaking into the void—or into a screen that mirrors the passive experiential drift many of the artists, and probably many visitors, recognize in their own everyday lives.

The digital space has become the primary confidant of contemporary alienation. In Julia Wachtel’s work, image culture operates as a loop of desire and self-confirmation that underlies the growing use of A.I. as a tool of psychological support. Combining appropriated celebrity and digital media imagery with fragments of online search language, her compositions on the first-floor stage a flattened emotional register in which nostalgia, aspiration and anxiety coexist in a disquieting mix that reflects much of the identity and relational confusion of younger generations.

What emerges throughout the floors is a kind of eulogy of urban survival. Clubs and dancehalls—long places of temporary escape for free bodies and spontaneous erotic expression—are evoked in several works, but always with the awareness that they can only ever be a fleeting site of connection, a “one night only” miracle, temporary and........

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