Kim Shui made a splash with her latest fall/winter collection at NYFW 2026, unveiling 41 looks aboard a moving yacht on Pier 17. Influenced by Mongolia’s migratory history, the ready-to-wear line derived inspiration from the nomadic tribes that carried craftsmanship and customs across unknown lands, equating the female form with the sweeping power of Genghis Khan.

Nearly five decades after Haring and Basquiat prowled downtown New York, the East Village scene still looms large over the art industry, echoing tales of a bygone era and the places that defined it. From Club 57 to Paradise Garage, many of these iconic haunts have since succumbed to rising rents and the pitfalls of gentrification, disappearing among the neighborhood’s ever-changing facades. Yet their legacies, entangled with the artists’, live on both in spirit and in influence, becoming symbols of a city caught between past and present.

Instead, I spin fantasies, Naima Green’s solo show at the International Center of Photography, greets viewers with an image both contradictory and captivating: a faceless figure hotboxing a car with rings of smoke surrounding their baby bump. Featuring a selection of recent landscapes, self-portraits, and still lifes, the exhibit examines the complexities of pregnancy through a mix of modern and historical printing techniques, including albumen and lumen, as well as a site-specific vinyl installation.

“Painting saved my life,” Ross Pino declared, describing the experience of picking up a brush in 2018 as both mind-opening and therapeutic. It helped the artist reconnect with his inner child, he explained, pushing him to recall formative memories he had lost or even buried. “I realized it was everything I had been missing, so I continued doing it.”

Over the last nine years, artist Gisela McDaniel’s work has been driven by a core question: how can we hold each other’s stories? Her interview-based practice is rooted in collaboration, informed by her connection to her CHamoru ancestry. Tracing her maternal lineage to the island of Guam, or Guåhan, McDaniel attributes her cultural knowledge to her family—particularly her mother, a sociologist.

In Sitting Ducks, Elena Redmond’s debut solo show at DIMIN, the painter asks her audience to reconsider the art of self-portraiture. Her nude subjects exist somewhere between imagined and real, rendered faceless or abstract to act as mirrors of our deepest desires and fears.

Coralina Rodriguez Meyer considers herself a Quipucamayoc artist—a word originating in the Quechuan languages of the Andes to refer to those in charge of deciphering quipus, a system of knotted strings used for archiving and accounting purposes. She is, in essence, a cultural record-keeper, inspired by a desire to understand her own roots and unpack layers of generational trauma.

“I have two memories of being alive before I was a magician,” says artist Jeanette Andrews. “I have no conception of being a person before becoming a magician.” At four years old, Andrews’s parents gifted her a magic kit for Christmas. Taken by the theatricality of a Siegfried & Roy television special, she performed for the first time in front of her preschool class a few months later.

For Emma Hapner, the color pink brings back sweet memories of girlhood – of shimmering unicorns, scented lip gloss, and elaborate frilly accessories. The figurative painter primarily works in oil, and her semi-realistic art appeals to the kind of people who dotted their i’s with tiny hearts in middle school, myself included. Since she specializes in self-portraits, Hapner is her own leading lady, loading canvas upon canvas with vibrant iterations of her likeness. Fully accepting her femininity was a gradual process, though.

Morrison Gong’s artistic practice explores the body and its carnal pleasures, using nude portraiture to challenge traditional ideas of intimacy, reciprocity, and sexuality. With a background in experimental filmmaking, the analog photographer arranges interior or exterior scenes centered on nature and domesticity. As part of IMPULSE’s Migration in Dialogue conversation series, Gong discusses subverting gender norms, their experience immigrating to the United States from China, and applying for an O-1 visa as a queer photographer.

As I step inside Chellis Baird’s studio, I’m immediately entranced by all the soft textures — samples of silk, lace, and other fabrics cover the space’s visible surfaces, beckoning to be touched. The mixed-media artist focuses her practice on tactility, and she’s well aware of her craft’s woman-centric history. Instead of shunning its link with domestic work, she chooses to embrace these complexities.

When she captured her iconic Self-Portrait/Cutting in 1993, Catherine Opie was longing for a life that felt out of reach. Depicting the photographer with her bare back facing the camera, the visceral image centers on a childlike scene of a house and two skirt-clad stick figures holding hands, carved into her skin with her own blood. Then in her early thirties, Catherine had already found a community in Los Angeles – the lesbian leather-culture circles that appear throughout her pictures from that decade – but a deeper yearning for another type of family led her to turn the lens on herself, a statement she intended as both personal and political.

Iiu Susiraja balances an umbrella above her head, tilting it slightly to reveal a set of suspended sausage links. She’s barefoot, wearing a blue bathing suit, and stands against a plaid background, beside a few fish stretched out on a candelabra. As is typical of her intriguing images, the Finnish photographer locks eyes intensely with the viewer, inviting us inside a visual universe that, though seemingly bizarre, continues to suck us in.

Patric McCoy initially resisted labeling himself a photographer — at least in the traditional sense. Coming from a creative family, the Chicago native inherited an artistic sensibility from his father, a painter, a designer, and a photographer, as well as from his grandmother, who documented her travels throughout the 20s. Still, he didn’t want to be the type of person who paid excessive attention to the craft’s technical aspects. Photography’s potential for facilitating new connections fascinated him the most, not so much the possibility of mastering the medium.

For her New York solo show Origin Story, multimedia artist Janet Loren Hill has transformed KAPOW's intimate Tribeca space into a wonderland of multicolored surrealism. Still, as the series's signature binocular shape signals, there's much more to this exhibition than meets the eye. Interweaving fantasy and satire, Origin Story grapples with the concept of identity and, in the process, asks the audience to ponder: what lengths will we go to defend the myths we sell to others, and to ourselves?

Any survey of the 20th century’s most memorable images would be lacking without a mention of Richard Avedon, often praised as a pioneer of fashion photography and an icon in his own right. Capturing everything from Old Hollywood stars like Audrey Hepburn or Marilyn Monroe to his father’s struggle with cancer, he blurred the boundaries between genres and helped shape visual culture as we know it in the process.

Like most angsty teenagers in search of broader horizons, when photographer Julia Gorton made the decision to move from Delaware to New York City in 1976, she was lured by the exciting subcultures she read about in Rock Scene, Interview, and other publications lining the shelves of her local library. Her then-boyfriend, musician Rick Brown, had already settled in the city a year prior, so she lived vicariously through his postcards while finishing high school.

Throughout the span of her prolific, decades-long career, photographer Mary Ellen Mark made it her mission to document people on the margins of society — those whom she referred to as the “unfamous.” From homeless teens on the streets of Seattle to circus performers in India, she displayed unwavering compassion for every subject she met and inevitably kept in touch with most of them, a practice she maintained until her death in 2015.

The artist Sophia Giovannitti’s boyfriend welds a white bed frame into a sculpture, as she sits alongside him in an alleyway, embodying the role of the author and viewer; muse and artist. She is nearing the culmination of her six-hour performance piece, titled A Machine, when we meet during the off-site opening of her newest solo show with DUPLEX Art, Study 4: Collateral.

For almost six days a week, Steve Keene spends eight hours behind a chain-link fence—a secluded spot he refers to as a “cage.” Alternating loose brush strokes between dozens, sometimes hundreds, of plywood panels, the multimedia artist moves through his dedicated workspace with machine-like efficiency, starting and finishing each painting in the set simultaneously.