Detail of Photo by Fang Daqi

Author: Chloe Alto

Published Thursday, July 9,2026

Read entire article HERE

An Artist Survived Today–the phrase hangs on a black flag in stark sans-serif font at Westbeth Gallery. Created by Ekene Ijeoma, the work once billowed above a street before relocating indoors, where it remains fully legible to passing New Yorkers through the gallery’s glass facade. The statement could read as observational, a Darwinian reminder that only the fittest, slickest, and most commercially savvy artists have won today’s fight for survival. Or perhaps it operates as a bereft and neutral fact that to be a working artist is to accept the title’s instability and lack of support systems as a permanent condition. In either case, the phrase implicates the viewer: an artist survived today–what will you do about it?

Perhaps nothing. An artist survived today, and somehow the gallery stands unperturbed, indifferent, never not full with art. While the labor required to produce an exhibition- time, energy, resources, wage work- is implicitly understood, the systems sustaining this labor often obfuscate. Curated by Phil Cai, Working Conditions presents several artists whose survival is predicated on one set of conditions: to work as an artist, one must also work elsewhere. The exhibition brings together five artists whose multi-hyphenate careers include roles as a JPMorgan product manager, a conservation technician, and an internal Operational Director at Residency Unlimited. This very organization brings the show’s artists together.

Automated doors make way for several tables fitted with metal chairs, and a station for free corporate gut-healthy sodas sits against a wall. The show resembles a functioning coworking space; I recall a patron asking if the gallery was open or an office. A heavy three-sided desk is the first spatial clue that something is misaligned. Embedded into Catherine Chen’s Brute Gamification (2025) sit three-by-three grids of notepads densely penned with what resemble office doodles, a step back revealing them as endless rounds of tic-tac-toe. The adjacent Office Pantry Sign (2026) reads “Please take only 1, or there will be none for your fellow employees,” a malleable aluminum cast from Chen’s office. Test you to test me (2026) is an oblique line within the pseudo-office landscape, created with precariously stacked palm-sized paper cards against slanting stainless steel, a single string pulling it upwards. The stack is sedimentary, created in layers of Manila folders cut in the shape of iPhones, and at the bottom, fossilized fragments of a Chase Freedom card.

Photography is a choice medium for three of the artists in Working Conditions. On one end of the main room, Ekene Ijeoma’s Tree Hustler (2026) is presented in photographs along with a work jacket and several saplings arranged on the floor. The elements presented in Working Conditions are the product of a two-day performance where the artist used a wearable coat with 40 pockets to sell 160 trees around New York. Following the cancellation of a $1.5 billion urban forestry grant, Ijeoma began the Black Forest initiative and raised funds to plant over 40,000 trees across the U.S., Africa, and the Diaspora over 12 years. The numbers 4/40 and 12 reference 40 Acres and a Mule and 12 Years a Slave, framing the work as a form of reparations.

Rehan Miskci is a Photography and Digital Imaging Manager at the Woodman Family Foundation, and directly reproduces her workplace’s technical conditions in her personal studio. A drawn curtain reveals a room of Miskci’s hidden technicolor gradients, streaks, and smears at large scale. These polychromatic experiments compress time, space, and light in filmic Digital C-prints. Jiangshengyu Nova Pan is a conservation technician at the Baltimore Museum of Art and a moving image artist. Pan’s short film Soft Push (2026) is set at the Baltimore Museum of Art, its locale collapsing the artist’s labor and artistic production in the depiction of a routine sculpture-brush off.