New York’s nonprofit art spaces are becoming more than a fallback. In a city where gallery closures have accelerated, they are increasingly the places where artists can test ideas that feel too fragile, too temporary, or too unruly for the commercial market.
That role is on view now in Lower Manhattan, where two exhibitions at very different stages of life are quietly making the case for impermanence. At Times, a new SoHo nonprofit opened in February with an unusual premise: it says it has a “planned obsolescence of three years.” At Canal Projects, another nonprofit is preparing to shut down after four years, citing the costs of maintaining a building with complex and outdated infrastructure.
Times, founded by patron Francesca Sonara and curator Summer Guthery, has given its entire space to Danish artist Nina Beier (b. 1975) for Old Friends, a new installation that lines the floor with evenly spaced, off-brand ice cream cones. They are left to melt, producing small spills of plastic-looking chocolate and turning the room into a study in slow disappearance. The work can be read as a sly reversal of Minimalism’s hard-edged permanence, but it also fits Times’s own self-consciously temporary model. The space is not pretending to outlast the work it shows.
Canal Projects, meanwhile, is closing with a final exhibition that includes Thai artist Jakkai Siributr (b. 1969). His Broadlands (2023) refers to an incident involving his late mother at Broadlands in the British countryside, while Outworn began in 2019 with Shan refugees at a camp along the border between Thailand and Myanmar. The works bring together textile practice, displacement, and family memory with unusual restraint.
The contrast is telling. New York still has sleek new ventures, including Wang Contemporary in Chinatown, launched in February by Alexander Wang and Ying. But the city’s most consequential alternative spaces remain the ones that understand uncertainty not as a problem to solve, but as a condition to work with. That has been true since the era of The Kitchen, Artists Space, and White Columns — and it may be even truer now.
