UFOs, Galleries, and the Politics of Belief in New York
The latest wave of UFO fascination is moving easily between Hollywood, the White House, and Manhattan’s art scene. In New York this summer, that convergence has taken on a distinctly art-world shape, with exhibitions by Karla Knight and Dr. Thandi Loewenson turning extraterrestrial imagery into a way to think about language, colonial history, and the limits of perception.
Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day (2026) sits at the center of the broader cultural surge. The film follows a cybersecurity specialist, played by Josh O’Connor, and a Kansas City weather reporter, played by Emily Blunt, as they uncover a government conspiracy to conceal the truth about close encounters. Around it, the subject has spread across the city: a UFO-themed video by Chloe Wise is premiering at Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger, while Prada staged a celebrity-heavy, UFO-themed immersive exhibition in a Chelsea Hotel room this summer, curated by Nicolas Winding Refn and Hideo Kojima.
The political backdrop is harder to ignore. In May, the Trump White House launched Aliens.gov, a site that pairs declassified UFO files with anti-immigration rhetoric aimed at “illegal aliens.” The result is a strange and pointed overlap between pop culture’s fascination with visitors from elsewhere and the state’s own language of exclusion.
At Andrew Edlin Gallery, Karla Knight’s paintings offer a quieter, more searching response. Works such as Watching for the Planets (2025) combine bright, intricate surfaces with phrases like “ASTRONOMY FOR EVERYBODY” and “PLANET—ANY WORLD THAT MOVES.” Knight’s canvases slow the eye, even as they suggest how quickly contemporary life trains us to scan and misread. Her invented marks and recurring phrases point to a central problem: how do you describe what resists description?
That question also drives Dr. Thandi Loewenson’s exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture, which uses the voice and research of Cynthia Hind, a leading African UFOlogist, to frame decades of encounter stories. The installation’s wall texts and projected drawings take time to absorb, but they reveal a more complicated history beneath the spectacle. In Zimbabwe, the sightings Hind recorded were often interpreted along colonial lines, with White and Black residents describing the same events through different cultural and political lenses.
At Gagosian, Eliza Douglas’s Ghosts extends the conversation through Leslie Kean, the investigative journalist largely responsible for the current UFO craze. Kean’s 2017 New York Times article on the Pentagon’s U.F.O. program helped move the subject from fringe obsession to mainstream discourse.
Taken together, these projects suggest that UFOs are less about proof than about projection. They expose how people organize fear, wonder, and uncertainty — and how art can make those pressures visible.
