Bushwick Gallery continues to push artistic boundaries with its dynamic exhibitions, offering thought-provoking explorations of contemporary themes. From introspective studies of love and loss to reimaginings of the natural world, each show brings together diverse artists who challenge perception, material, and narrative. These exhibitions invite audiences to engage deeply, sparking conversations that extend beyond the gallery walls. Whether through bold abstraction, intimate photography, or immersive installations, Bushwick Gallery remains a hub for innovation and storytelling in the heart of Brooklyn’s art scene.
Where the City Breathes: Urban Narratives at Bushwick Gallery /official press release
By Christoper Falco
In a metropolis that pulses with contradiction, Bushwick Gallery’s upcoming exhibition, Urban Narratives: The City as Canvas, offers an unfiltered meditation on city life—not just as seen, but as felt. Curated by multimedia artist and poet Fern Messa Joson, this dynamic group exhibition runs from April 3 to April 10, transforming the gallery into a visual archive of the rhythms, ruptures, and resilience of urban existence.
Stories in Concrete and Color
Graffiti, photography, video loops, mixed media—this is an exhibition that refuses containment. The selected works reflect the city’s daily choreography: chance encounters, collapsed timelines, sacred routines, and spontaneous reinventions. Joson’s curatorial lens, grounded in urban ethnography and poetic inquiry, gathers artists who aren’t simply depicting the city—they’re in conversation with it. Their work pulses with urgency, wit, nostalgia, and resistance.
Beth Shaw’s Found Constructions lead this dialogue with quiet force. Her grid-based photographic compositions unearth beauty in the forgotten—peeling paint, rusted screws, zip ties, all arranged with the instinct of a poet and the precision of a documentarian. In Biochem Jamboree, vivid scraps of urban texture hum with chromatic intensity, inviting viewers to reconsider the overlooked as luminous.
Emotional Cartographies: Mapping the Interior City
Gina Keatley’s Rhapsody in Graphite takes a subtler path. Through layered paper, restrained gestures, and her signature palette, Keatley abstracts the emotional architecture of New York. Her two-panel work vibrates with duality—movement and pause, grit and grace—evoking the fragmentation of thought and the sedimentation of memory in urban life. It’s not the skyline—it’s what’s beneath it.
Levi Japhet’s oil painting Dos panas en Second Ave. is smaller in scale but heavy with presence. Two figures drift through a blurred nightscape, held in the soft disorientation of memory. It’s a love letter to queer friendship, cast in a tone that is both humorous and tender. Japhet’s practice draws deeply from lived experience, threading memory and identity through every layered stroke.
Deborah Splain, working through fingertip digital painting, presents Speeding—a frenetic, swirling visual echo of city life at full tilt. Built through recursive layers of touch and revision, the piece asks what we lose in our rush, and what happens if we choose to feel the blur.
Kimberly Rodriguez’s photographs offer a quiet counterpoint—stillness within chaos. Her series of archival pigment prints, including By the Bridge and The Person in the Window, frame New York’s transit system not as a backdrop, but as a deeply human stage. A lone commuter beneath an arched ceiling, reflections caught mid-journey, the stark geometry of a daily scroll—Rodriguez renders these fleeting moments with empathy and cinematic grace. Her lens finds poetry not in spectacle, but in presence.
The Street as Script and Stage
Animation, too, has its moment. In Love Letters for the Subway, artist Mary Hawkins animates the alphabet of the MTA, one loop per line. Each letter carries architectural cues, graffiti tags, pigeons, and sidewalk rhythms—an alphabet of the everyday rendered with lyricism and wit. Her work is less about transportation and more about translation—of experience into line, of motion into love.
For Michael O’Malley, the city is a sign to be reinterpreted. Down Broadway, a mixed media piece painted over a salvaged street sign, transforms municipal directive into metaphysical inquiry. The words “Broadway Closed to Traffic” remain, but are now haunted by a floating blue figure and a flurry of neon marks. It’s a vibrant meditation on survival, transformation, and emotional navigation in a city that never stays still.
Cities Remember: History in the Frame
Memory and erasure converge in City Landscape Conversion and Embodied Memories by Siqi Song. Created with soil, ash, and photo-collage, this large-scale work reflects the demolition of Song’s childhood home in Beijing. As ash overlays history and nature claws back from concrete, Song renders a tactile landscape of loss, resilience, and the Anthropocene.
Photographer Noam Oster captures a quieter kind of tension in Gas Leak on 30th, a black-and-white image of firefighters paused outside a storefront. The scene is unsensational, but dense with narrative: a moment of civic labor, frozen in grayscale, speaking volumes about presence, attention, and unseen danger. Oster’s work sits gently between portraiture and poetry.
Rhythms and Ruptures: Across the Grid
From the minimalist lyricism of Vinnie Patella’s Interconnected—a bicycle rider framed by shadows and steel—to the explosive ambiguity of Ibrahim Khalil Awan’s Metro, artists in Urban Narratives span the spectrum from quiet observation to abstract revelation. Awan’s piece, in particular, uses water, color, and symbolic rhythm to evoke a mental subway map—one of subconscious detours and dreamlike intervals.
Margaret Schneider (Scared Cicada) brings radical tenderness with These Crushing Defeats, a mixed-media canvas constructed atop a found breakup collage. Bright, chaotic, and utterly sincere, the work transforms pain into devotion, layering ancestral grief, identity, and spiritual recovery into a singular, luminous object.
A Curatorial Pulse
For guest curator Fern Messa Joson, this exhibition is more than a collection—it’s a living document. “Urban Narratives is an exploration of how artists preserve the past and imagine the future of urban existence,” Joson writes. “It postulates between tradition and transgression, revealing the misfortune, monotony, and magic of city life.”
Joson’s curatorial voice—rooted in poetry, pedagogy, and urban ethnography—offers not a prescription, but a provocation. What does it mean to live in a city that’s always unfinishing itself? How do we carry the ghosts of neighborhoods, train lines, graffiti tags, and chance encounters? What, exactly, is a city—but a story we’re still writing?
Urban Narratives: The City as Canvas invites viewers to see New York not as backdrop, but as collaborator. Through image, texture, rhythm, and sound, these artists chart the ever-shifting terrain of urban life—its joys, fractures, and the grace that flickers between.
Featured Artists – Urban Narratives: The City as Canvas
Beth Shaw (Conceptual Photographer) – Biochem Jamboree transforms fragments of urban decay into formal compositions of rhythm and color. Drawing from rusted metal, peeling paint, and street detritus, Shaw’s nine-image photographic grid elevates overlooked city textures into a poetic visual taxonomy. Each panel invites reverence for the mundane and a reawakening of visual attention.
Gina Keatley (Abstract Expressionist) – Rhapsody in Graphite explores the psychological layers of urban life through textured surfaces and gestural restraint. Paper fragments, bone-white voids, and graphite marks converge in a two-panel composition that evokes balance, fragmentation, and emotional excavation. Keatley’s palette of mandarin orange, black, and white reflects the city’s pulse—subtle, yet assertive.
Levi Japhet (Narrative Painter & Filmmaker) – Dos panas en Second Ave. is a small-format oil painting that captures the hazy intimacy of a shared night in the city. Based on a real-life moment, Japhet’s work blurs the lines between memory and fiction, friendship and solitude. The result is a dreamlike portrait of queer presence in urban space—gentle, surreal, and unresolved.
Deborah Splain (Multidisciplinary Artist) – Speeding interprets the sensory overload of urban living through digital fingerprint painting. Layers of vivid strokes—rendered with touch on a tablet—create a swirling field of motion, light, and architecture. Splain’s recursive process mirrors the recursive nature of city life: always moving, always becoming.
Mary Hawkins (Animator & Visual Storyteller) – Love Letters for the Subway is a kinetic typographic series of animated loops—each representing an MTA subway line. Drawn by hand while riding the trains, the series embeds architectural motifs and rider encounters into each character, forming a dynamic love letter to New York’s subterranean world.
Michael O’Malley (Mixed Media Artist) – Down Broadway reclaims a decommissioned street sign as a site of visual and emotional expression. With neon spray, rhythmic patterning, and a central floating figure, O’Malley transforms a utilitarian object into a meditation on identity, survival, and personal navigation in a rapidly changing Bushwick.
Siqi Song (Environmental Mixed Media Artist) – City Landscape Conversion and Embodied Memories uses soil, ash, and photographic collage to construct a visual archive of environmental displacement. Inspired by the demolition of her childhood home in Beijing, Song’s work explores ecological grief, memory sedimentation, and the Anthropocene through richly textured layers.
Noam Oster (Analog Photographer) – Gas Leak on 30th captures a quiet moment of civic alertness in black-and-white gelatin silver print. Firefighters stand mid-motion outside a storefront—no drama, just tension. Oster’s practice is rooted in careful observation, asking viewers to notice the soft ruptures and emotional weight embedded in the everyday.
Vinnie Patella (Urban Photographer) – Interconnected is a photographic meditation on fragility and structure. A lone figure walks a bicycle past a shuttered gate, across which the shadow of a bare tree stretches—a fleeting alignment of human, nature, and infrastructure. Patella’s work turns overlooked city corners into quiet moments of resonance.
Margaret Schneider aka Scared Cicada (Mixed Media Artist & Writer) – These Crushing Defeats is an acrylic-and-collage palimpsest built atop a discarded breakup artwork. Layering hearts, wings, stars, and text, Schneider creates a ritual object of healing and reclamation. Their practice blends queer spirituality, ancestral memory, and ecstatic vulnerability.
Alex Z. Wang (Atmospheric Draftsman & Painter) – West Side Story renders the Manhattan skyline in dense charcoal haze, transforming architecture into emotional weather. Influenced by dance and opera, Wang’s gestural composition captures the threshold between stillness and motion—suspended energy hovering between skyline and soul.
Saejoon Oh (Documentary Photographer & Dramaturg) – Undergoing a Coup presents a stark, black-and-white image of a Seoul street suspended in eerie stillness. Taken in the wake of political unrest, Oh’s photograph captures the moment the city seems to stop breathing. His lens transforms absence into inquiry—inviting reflection on surveillance, silence, and fragility.
Ibrahim Khalil Awan (Abstract Painter & Conceptualist) – Metro is a visual poem composed in layered washes and rhythmic marks. Drawing from subconscious systems and musical notation, Awan explores the psychological undercurrents of urban motion. The painting pulses with chromatic energy—suggesting both the structure and chaos of life underground.
Kimberly Rodriguez (Street Photographer) – In By the Bridge, The Person in the Window, and Commute, Rodriguez captures the emotional architecture of the subway with a deeply human gaze. Her archival pigment prints distill public space into acts of quiet observation—solitary figures beneath arches, reflected faces in motion, stairwells charged with cinematic tension. Rodriguez’s images document not only the infrastructure of the MTA, but the fragile poetry of urban solitude and presence.