As spring turns to summer, the streets of New York become perfumed by the stench of trash, whose brownish liquids and rotting foods bake beneath the sun. But this season, you can find some of that rubbish not just outside museums and galleries but within them, too. Call these trash assemblages “gather art,” a kind of work made by foraging for tossed-out junk.
The rise of gather art is most abundantly visible at MoMA PS1 in a group show called “The Gatherers,” a thought-provoking survey of 14 artists fascinated by debris in all its many forms. But it is also noticeable in an array of solo exhibitions held across the city, from shows for figures like Rachel Harrison, the subject of a memorable outing at Greene Naftali, to Robert Rauschenberg, whose lesser known work involving refuse from the 1980s and ’90s was recently showcased at Gladstone.
The trend is not entirely new, of course. The art of Rauschenberg and Isa Genzken, with their collections of ramshackle arrays of spare industrial parts, urban litter, and consumerist detritus, comes to mind. Yet this recent crop of gather artists is not merely reviving Rauschenbergian techniques, which evinced a greater concern with the notion of the readymade itself than in the capitalistic forces that gave rise to it. By contrast, these gather artists have issues related to our globalized economy and climate change on their mind, though these ideas are woven into their art obliquely rather than addressed outright.
Notably, the prevalence of gather art has sped up in the past five years in New York, a period of Covid-induced slowdown and economic downturn. Does that make gather art a recession indicator? It definitely feels that way, especially because so much of this work is quite dour. Plus, there’s the fact that it costs less to appropriate preexisting material than it does to buy new art supplies. When the going gets rough, artists reduce, reuse, and recycle.
But the curious thing about gather art is that it isn’t always bleak: some artists seem optimistic about what will arise from the ruins of our bottomed-out society. Below, a look at three New York shows of gather art.
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“The Gatherers” at MoMA PS1
Image Credit: Kris Graves/Courtesy MoMA PS1 Many of the artists in this conceptually rich show, curated by Ruba Katrib with Sheldon Gooch, exhibit a taste for gadgetry that was once worth a pretty penny and has since been relegated to a dump, having now grown obsolete. One unruly assemblage by the wonderful sculptor Ser Serpas features a television set whose back has been removed to reveal a tangle of circuitry; its frame is now delicately balanced on a dirty rolling chair in the corner of a gallery. Jean Katambayi Mukendi also has TV on the brain with Trash TV (2022), a sculpture whose screen is formed not from televisual materials but a truck windshield, to which he has appended pain medications, cassette tapes, a clock, a ruler, and more. Selma Selman is showing a pile of computer towers that she tore open to obtain enough gold to form a single nail, here driven into a wall of PS1 and exhibited as a sculpture unto itself. All these artists subvert the typical use for their found objects, repositioning them so that we might begin thinking about why it’s even possible to find so much refuse at all.
In vastly different ways, each of these works responds to a global economy in which the Global North consumes pricey goods, then ends up with unwanted waste as a byproduct. Often, that trash winds its way backto the Global South, whose citizens find fresh use for it. That much is made explicit in a documentary-style video by Karimah Ashadu called Brown Goods (2020), in which Emeka, a Nigerian migrant residing in Hamburg, can be seen traversing a pile of tires, looking for goods to resell within that German city’s Billstrasse, where the activities of West African migrants like Emeka have been claimed by some as evidence of social rot. “Nobody is really happy seeing all these goods exported to Africa because to the Germans, all these goods are rubbish,” Emeka says in the video, noting that he’s turned to vending trash because he cannot get a job in Germany because he lacks a visa. The video shows that one person’s waste is another person’s financial lifeline.
A man scouring a junkyard as a form of survival sounds like the stuff of sci-fi, but the apocalypse is now in “The Gatherers,” which features many works that look like wreckage—most notably a glorious installation by Tolia Astakhishvili in which one room of PS1 is made to look like a squatter’s nest, with graffitied temporary walls, dusty fire extinguishers, and plugged-in devices of undisclosed function.
Yet this smart show is not all doom and gloom, given that some artists here function more like alchemists, transforming the remainders of a declining world into something new altogether. Miho Dohi, for example, is represented by several sculptures formed from unlike materials assembled to make organ-like forms. In one, coils of fabric and a metal spring come to look like an intestinal tract—something you might find in a healthy, functioning being.
At 22-25 Jackson Avenue, through October 6.
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Danica Barboza at Lomex
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Lomex Whereas Serpas, Dohi, and other artists in “The Gatherers” abstractly lend refuse corporeal qualities, Danica Barboza goes at it more bluntly, sculpting torsos from clay and adorning them with cut-up newspapers, tape, and bits of salvaged urban detritus. (Though not explicitly gendered, her torsos tend to splay their legs to reveal slits and openings.) Barboza’s bodies are always partial—none of the ones portrayed in this show have heads attached. In that way, they recall ancient Greek and Roman sculptures whose limbs have been lost to time.
But Barboza’s bodies are clearly located in the here and now. You can tell from the newspaper headlines repurposed here as skin—one on the waist of a torso features display copy about data theft—and from the trash that accompanies these bodies. The Opposite of Super-Fluidity (2025), for example, features a laughing head set atop an aluminum block sheathed in a shower curtain; nestled into the back of the sculpture is a group of computer keyboards. Hakini Sollemnis Dimidiatus (2025), meanwhile, includes another bust, this one with a more downcast face, set atop a plinth formed from stacked Sony video recorders.
All these disparate objects, despite being only a few decades old at most, look like the stuff of a fallen civilization from centuries ago. But even though much of this junk is relatively new, it’s already hard to tell what purpose it once served—in part because Barboza has jumbled together so many unlike things that it’s hard to get a good look at any element in isolation. That makes Barboza a worthy inheritor to Rachel Harrison, another artist known for absurdist combinations of used matter. Yet Harrison alludes frequently to Duchamp and other pranksters who followed him, and Barboza’s sculptures contain no explicit references, either to recent art history or to antiquity. Perhaps that makes sense: Barboza’s pieces, after all, are about the loss of history in the present.
At 86 Walker Street, #3, through June 21.
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Yuji Agematsu at Judd Foundation and Gavin Brown’s House
Image Credit: Timothy Doyon/Artwork ©Yuji Agematsu/Image ©Judd Foundation Since 1996, Yuji Agematsu has been plucking trash off New York’s streets daily, showing no aversion to the half-sucked candies and crumpled receipts most would consider a blight on Manhattan’s sidewalks. With the rigor of an anthropologist, he compiles the results in cellophane packets carefully removed from cigarette boxes, before cataloging his path and his findings in his journal, noting stops at Popeye’s, major thoroughfares, and other locales via a combination of handwriting and abstracted mapping. The fruits of his foraging in 2023 and 2024 are, respectively, now on view at the dealer Gavin Brown’s Harlem house and the Judd Foundation, where Agematsu’s delicate containers are neatly arranged on shelving units.
The precision of Agematsu’s presentation method, with one cellophane container for each day, equally spaced to mimic the look of a calendar, recalls Minimalist art—most notably the work of Donald Judd, who produced shelves of his own. (Agematsu knows a thing or two about Judd, given that he has served as general manager of the Judd Foundation for more than 20 years.) Agematsu’s working process, too, contains the same exactitude as that of many Minimalists. But whereas Minimalist sculptures are austere, steely, and heavy, Agematsu’s are warm and intentionally flimsy, with the potential to be destroyed with the flick of a finger.
Some of Agematsu’s sculptures are deliberately unstable: a few contain elements that appear to ooze a tarry black liquid just barely contained within his see-through containers; one holds an orange peel that’s already showing signs of decomposition. Others have things that may never decay: Dum Dum wrappers, a mini plastic tiara, a fake flower, used flossers, a figurine depicting Anger from the “Inside Out” movies. Most of these elements have recurred in Agematsu’s past work, but these new sculptures are strikingly personal—one at the Judd Foundation features what appears to be a hospital bracelet with the artist’s name on it. In that way, Agematsu shows that we may make our trash, but our trash also makes us, acting as evidence that we ever existed at all.
At 101 Spring Street and 229 Lenox Avenue, through August 30.
