The DART Board: 09.16.2026
Continuing: Isamu Noguchi at Lever House
Marking the 75th anniversary of both Lever House and Noguchi’s iconic Akari light sculptures [above], this exhibition revisits one of the most significant unrealized collaborations in the history of American modernism. When Lever House opened in 1952, it defined a new relationship between the office building and the public realm. SOM created an open public plaza where art, landscape, and architecture could be brought together. Working closely with SOM’s Gordon Bunshaft, Noguchi developed two extraordinary—yet unrealized—proposals for the building’s courtyard, conceived as a total work of art.
Isamu Noguchi at Lever House presents Noguchi’s s, models, and drawings are installed throughout the courtyard plaza and lobby. To mark the anniversary, a special presentation of Akari light sculptures illuminates the lobby facing Park Avenue.
Through Summer 2027 at Lever House, 390 Park Avenue at 54th Street, New York NY Info
Last chance, September 26: Robert Rauschenberg | Important Early Works at Gagosian
Organized during the centennial of Robert Rauschenberg’s birth, this presentation of his works from the Cy Twombly collection accompanies the exhibition of works by Marcel Duchamp, inaugurating the gallery’s new ground-floor space at 980 Madison Avenue. Rauschenberg and CyTwombly met in 1951 at the Art Students League of New York and subsequently attended Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, before traveling together throughout Italy, Morocco, and Spain in 1952 and 1953.
Key milestones of Rauschenberg’s early development, the works now on view are especially significant given the close friendship and substantial exchanges of ideas that took place between the two artists. Left: Rauschenberg at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, ca. 1951. Photo: Cy Twombly. Courtesy Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio
Whereas much of his production of 1950–51 was lost, destroyed, or incorporated into new works, an early sculpture was kept and preserved by Twombly. Additional pieces include key examples from the Black Painting, Elemental Sculpture, and Combine series. Together, they chart Rauschenberg’s engagement with Duchamp’s radical reconception of art making and his commitment to acting in the gap between art and life, while anticipating the incorporation of technology and performance into his practice.
Note: Watch the documentary film, Taking Venice (dir. Amei Wallach 2024) which revealis the machinations behind the.1964 Venice Bienniale, in which Rauschenberg was awarded the Grand Prize. Streaming widely.
Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, Ground Floor, New York, NY Info
Thursday, September 17, 6:45pm: Talk | Brad Holland | Making It Personal
School of Visual Arts presents a talk on Brad Holland: Making It Personal, a survey of works by the late American illustrator. with Steve Heller, Terry Brown and Stephanie Plunkett, moderated by artist/curator Jonathan Twingley.
While the illustrator Brad Holland may not be a household name, you could say that if anyone represented the power of illustration to provoke, over the past half century, it would be this artist. Entirely self-taught, he worked his way up from studio rat, sweeping floors in a Chicago tattoo parlor to being one of the first in The New York Times’ roster of artists for its new Op Ed page, in 1970.
This panel delves into his work and process, in conjunction with the exhibition at SVA’s Gramercy Gallery, which closes on Saturday, September 1ith. Click to read the feature in DART.
Amphitheater at SVA, 209 East 23rd Street, FL3, New York, NY Info
Thursday, September 17, 6:30-8:00pm: Panel on Art As Care at MCNY
When Abram Champanier painted his Alice mural cycle for the children's ward at Gouverneur Hospital in 1938, he understood something that took the field of healthcare design decades to articulate: that the environment in which a child receives care is integral to that care, as much as any clinical intervention. This panel Art as Care: Hospital Murals in Pediatric Healthcare, brings together the artists, advocates, and hospital leaders behind some of that work to examine what intentional, ambitious art does in the spaces where New York's youngest and most vulnerable patients receive care, and what it demands of the public institutions that serve them. Click for a full list of the presenters. Above: From Abram August Champanier’s "Alice of Wonderland Visiting New York," 1938–40, NYC Health + Hospitals Arts in Medicine Collection
Since 2012, RxART has placed nine major commissions by internationally recognized artists throughout NYC Health + Hospitals, with pediatric spaces as a central focus of that work, among them a commission by Julia Chiang, whose work is installed at NYC Health + Hospitals/Maimonides [above, detail]. Alongside those commissions, the Arts in Medicine Community Mural Project, believed to be the largest public hospital mural program in the country since the WPA era, has brought community-rooted artists into pediatric units across the system.
Presented in connection with the exhibition Another Wonderland: Abram Champanier's Alice Mural. The exhibition celebrates the rescue and decades-long restoration of Alice of Wonderland Visiting New York, a major New Deal–era mural cycle created for the children’s ward at Gouverneur Hospital between 1938 and 1940. Commissioned through the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, the sixteen-panel series reimagined Lewis Carroll’s beloved characters exploring 1930s New York City—from the subway and Brooklyn Bridge to Coney Island and Central Park—bringing color, fantasy, and joy to a space dedicated to healing. Info
Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Tickets
Friday, September 18, 6-9pm: Aho, Lewis, Li | Three Material Views
In Three Material Views, curator John Yau unites paintings by Eric Aho, Stanley Lewis, and Ying Li—three contemporary artists placed in retrospective dialogue with nineteenth-century American landscape artist Albert Pinkham Ryder. As they explore the specific materiality of their medium, they examine its transportive qualities along the lines of their 19th century predecessor. Above: Eric Aho, Summer Night, Fireflies, Mists and Vapors I, 2022
Ryder’s introspective approach finds contemporary reflections in the organic, twinkling vistas of Aho’s Fireflies series; Lewis’s fragmented, architectural attention to individual facets of quotidian life under the weathering passage of time; and Li’s dynamic “world of pigment and light” built up in swirling, overlapping strokes of paint applied with various implements."
The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, 87 Eldridge Street, New York, NY Info
Friday-Saturday, September 18-19: Tatanka Owe Akupi | Return of the Buffalo
For two days, a herd of life-size buffalo puppets will gather in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge Park. Part spectacle, part ritual, Return of the Buffalo invites us to join the herd as they roam, graze, and run wild through the city, encountering live music, poetry, ceremonies, and performances along the way. Inspired by the buffalo’s extraordinary return—from near extinction to repopulation—Return of the Buffalo ushers in a new period of healing.
Created by Amir Nizar Zuabi in partnership with Elders from Lenape and Lakota Tribes, Return of the Buffalo is one of the largest and most unique public art spectacles taking place in the U.S. this year. The featured artists include Sam Waterston, Laurie Anderson, Rhiannon Giddens, Nathalie Joachim and Talie Cerin, Davóne Tines & The Truth, Rosario Dawson, Susan Sarandon, Dither, Caridad De La Luz, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Native Pride Dancers, Chaske Spencer, Pilobolus Dance Company, Fogo Azul marching band, Heather Christian and the Terce Choir, and Brooklyn United Marching Band.
Presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse, The Walk Productions, & KBH Arts. Click and scroll down for maps and details.