# apexart

> 4 upcoming shows at apexart in Downtown NYC, including “TRIBUTE”, “Lands That Feed the World”. Showtimes, tickets, and directions.

- Section: [NYC Art Galleries](https://bronder.nyc/gallery/index.html.md)
- Address: 291 Church St, New York, NY 10013 ([Google Maps](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Apexart/@40.7190458,-74.0044688,15z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0xbffe208fdf98b165?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiK99Cg9ObiAhXPct8KHcbGAQ0Q_BIwDnoECA0QCA))
- Neighborhood: Downtown
- Web page: https://bronder.nyc/gallery/galleries/apexart.html
- Markdown: https://bronder.nyc/gallery/galleries/apexart.html.md
- Last updated: Nov 04, 2026 at 10:27 AM

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## TRIBUTE

- When: Opens Nov 07, on view through Dec 19
- Run: Nov 07 – Dec 19, 2026
- Source: https://apexart.org/ha.php

This text was submitted as a proposal to the apexart NYC26 Open Call In 1998, eighteen-year-old Jonathan See Lim, known as "Tie One", was shot and killed in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. A prolific graffiti artist, Lim was painting on the side of a building and pleaded for his life to his killer, a resident who claimed self-defense. Though no hate crime charges were filed, many in the Asian American and art communities understood the killing through the lens of race. After his death, fellow graffiti writers created massive tribute murals called "Tie Tributes" across the Bay Area insisting on his continued presence. In graffiti culture, a tribute honors artists by refusing to let their memory fade, by putting their name back into circulation, by declaring they still matter in the world. TRIBUTE borrows this framework to spotlight Asian American artists who helped build American DIY, punk, and street culture--figures who remain largely invisible in these movements' histories. When we think of punk, zines, riot grrrl, or graffiti, Asian Americans rarely appear in the narrative. This exhibition corrects that erasure. The exhibition emphasizes how independent publishing, DIY making, punk bands, and online communities weren't just cultural products but essential infrastructure. Zines like Slant and Bamboo Girl created space for Asian American voices within riot grrrl. Publications like Yolk and Giant Robot built pan-ethnic community before social media existed. Punk bands became sites where immigrant kids could claim American youth culture on their own terms. Early internet forums allowed geographically scattered Asian Americans to forge collective identity. This was the "AZN Pride" movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s: DIY identity-making built from the ground up. TRIBUTE features five artists who emerged from these networks and continue using these methods today in their mid-career fine arts practices. One came up through riot grrrl, playing in an all-Asian American teenage punk band before developing a sculpture practice examining consumer culture and waste--maintaining punk's DIY ethos in gallery contexts. Another documents suburban Asian American adolescence through low-fi video diaries, zines, and collaged ephemera using the same grassroots archival tools that built the movement. A third creates installations with security gates and technological detritus, continuous with street culture's material inventiveness. The exhibition also includes a writer and cultural critic whose essays excavate forgotten subcultures, continuing the archival work that zines pioneered. Finally, a zine-maker and theorist whose publications challenged riot grrrl's racial blind spots from inside the movement. The exhibition presents sculpture and installation alongside the zines and publications that are inseparable from understanding these practices. Live performances and readings will be a part of public programming that activates the space. These performances honor the movement's roots in punk shows, zine release parties, and DIY venues where art, music, and writing converged. Like the tribute murals painted after Tie One's death, TRIBUTE refuses erasure. It says: Asian Americans were always central to these movements. It keeps that presence alive, insists they still matter.

## Lands That Feed the World

- When: Opens Jan 15, on view through Mar 13, 2027
- Run: Jan 15 – Mar 13, 2027
- Source: https://apexart.org/benhalim.php

This text was submitted as a proposal to the apexart NYC26 Open Call In today's food system, farmers serve the world's appetite, and in Egypt and North Africa, agricultural production fills plates far beyond its borders. At the heart of this exhibition lies a question: what forms of dependency and displacement are created when aid becomes investment, and cultivation becomes extraction? Regional knowledge and native plant varieties often slip into obscurity due to climate stress, industrial agriculture, and agricultural colonialism. Farmers cultivate crops for export markets that promise economic growth, but at the expense of eroding local ecologies, sovereignty, and food traditions. High-yield seed programs and development initiatives, often framed as tools of progress, have over the decades generated a deep reliance on imported technologies, patented seeds, and volatile global markets. The result is an agricultural landscape increasingly governed by capitalist cycles of export, profit, and loss rather than ecological balance or local need. Farmers and communities across Egypt have steadily lost sovereignty over land, seed, and diet. Regions once known for their self-sufficiency have given way to the cultivation of export crops, housing projects, and infrastructure that deplete soils and sever local supply chains. The exhibition brings into focus the fertile lands and their agricultural histories that persist in the present: which crops are grown, whose standards dictate them, who profits, and who eats. It asks what is lost when export-oriented monocultures replace diverse ecologies and food traditions? What forms of regeneration remain possible? And what does the future of our food and farm lands look like? Through artworks and research practices that approach these entanglements from multiple perspectives and mediums, whether through food installations, or documentary film on the Nile floods preAswan Damn, wool tapestries, botanical illustration and specimen of crops native to modern day egypt, and food-based interventions and a comprehensive public program with a collaborative dinner inviting a New York-based chef to interpret the works through ingredients that trace these global routes. While this exhibition is rooted in Egypt and North Africa, it speaks directly to New York, tracing the circuits through which ingredients, policies, and tastes travel. The aim is not to assign blame, but to examine the colonial continuities embedded in agricultural systems and the biopolitical implications of what we grow and consume. By bringing art, science, and gastronomy into dialogue, the exhibition calls for curiosity and critical awareness about the politics of what sustains us. Audiences are invited to look, taste, and question. To consider how policies materialize on a plate. To imagine food sovereignty not as nostalgia, but as a practical framework for ecological and cultural survival. And to ask how art can help redesign our relationships with what we eat, and to engage with dignity towards our growers, care for the land, and intelligence in what we choose to cultivate and consume.

## Disarm: Art in the Shadow of Gun Violence

- When: Opens Mar 26, on view through May 22, 2027
- Run: Mar 26 – May 22, 2027
- Source: https://apexart.org/gialanella-vomacka.php

This text was submitted as a proposal to the apexart NYC26 Open Call Gun violence has become a defining trauma of our time, shaping individual lives, politics, communities, and national identities. From mass shootings in schools, in public, and places of worship, to state violence enacted by police and military, to the persistent toll of everyday gun deaths, the presence of the gun extends far beyond the weapon itself. It permeates memory, architecture, and even language. Disarm is an exhibition of international and U.S.-based artists who confront the cultural, political, and personal dimensions of gun violence. Their works move between grief and resistance, absence and remembrance, silence and collective witness. The title Disarm operates on multiple levels. It evokes the urgent demand to remove weapons from circulation, but also the vulnerable act of disarming oneself?of relinquishing not only tools of violence but the myths of protection, masculinity, and power that have been attached to them. In doing so, the exhibition aims to reframe gun violence not as a series of isolated events but as a continuum of systemic conditions: racism, colonialism, militarization, poverty, and political neglect. One artist, originally from Mexico, casts bullet shells in unfired clay. Their fragility destabilizes the permanence of metal and industry, transforming ammunition into brittle vessels that cannot harm but can shatter at a touch. In this gesture, the artist imagines a world where the most lethal objects become the most delicate. Another artist, based in South Africa, works with ballistic gel?the material used in forensic laboratories to simulate human flesh when testing firearms. Through sculptural installations, she transforms the gel into translucent, body-like forms suspended in light. Her work implicates the global arms trade, connecting violence in local communities to the circulation of weapons across borders. Another artist draws from archival research, working with police reports, court transcripts, and crime scene photographs from her hometown. She reimagines these documents as large-scale abstract drawings, obscuring and layering the bureaucratic language until it becomes unreadable. In doing so, she questions how institutions narrate violence, whose voices are heard, and whose grief remains invisible. The exhibition also acknowledges the historical and global dimensions of firearms. The gun has long been a tool of colonial domination, imperial expansion, and state enforcement. From European conquest to present-day militarization of borders, the circulation of guns is tied to broader systems of control and exploitation. Disarm draws attention to these continuities, suggesting that today?s gun violence is not an aberration but an extension of historical patterns. The public program accompanying Disarm will extend these conversations into community engagement. Trauma-informed practitioners will facilitate workshops where visitors can process the exhibition in collective dialogue. A live reading of testimonies from survivors, paired with original sound compositions, will bring fragmented narratives into a shared listening space. Panel discussions with policy advocates, artists, and researchers will contextualize the art within larger debates about disarmament, public health, and justice. The exhibition insists that to disarm is not simply to take away weapons, but to dismantle the systems and myths that allow violence to persist.

## DEVOTION: A Black Love Archive

- When: Opens Jun 04, on view through Jul 24, 2027
- Run: Jun 04 – Jul 24, 2027
- Source: https://apexart.org/babers.php

This text was submitted as a proposal to the apexart NYC26 Open Call The receipts of Black love have no public form. A weathered Hallmark card from 1987, anniversary number written in ballpoint. A screenshot of a 2AM apology text with typing bubbles visible. A voicemail saved for six years: "Call me when you get home." These artifacts—the actual documents of care—remain invisible while wedding reels and carceral files dominate cultural narratives of Black intimacy. In 2025, as anti-DEI rollbacks erase institutional memory and Black Studies programs close nationwide, DEVOTION stages what's being systematically dismantled: the mundane labor of devotion as contemporary art. Grounded in Black Feminist Theory and Intersectionality, this exhibition proposes devotion itself as a public technology—receipts, screenshots, counseling worksheets, and apology drafts that build, weather, break, and repair life, transforming ordinary artifacts into both archive and teachable toolkit. New York City—with its concentrated Black cultural institutions, long history of archival activism, and dense networks of mutual aid—provides crucial context for making private devotion public. The city's legacy of community archives, from the Schomburg Center to grassroots digital memory projects, demonstrates how ordinary documents become collective infrastructure. This exhibition extends that lineage, staging intimate artifacts in a gallery accessible to diverse audiences navigating the complexities of urban intimacy and collective care. Visitors move through seven conceptual stages mapped across apexart's space: The Ask (first DMs, "circle yes/no/maybe" notes), Becoming (love letters, saved voicemails), Building (vows, mortgage photos, baby announcements), Weathering (counseling worksheets, apology drafts), Breaking (break-up texts, redacted divorce decrees), Still (ordinary Tuesdays, porch audio, hands clasped), and After (eulogies, unheard voice notes, recipes from repasts). Each stage refuses sanitization while maintaining curatorial care and visitor dignity. Four artists working independently translate devotion's grammar through distinct media. An anthropologist-filmmaker contributes a 12-minute film triptych threading anonymized intake forms and counseling worksheets into a quiet bureaucracy of intimacy—DMV-style counters, waiting rooms, clipboards—making visible the systems that scaffold love. A documentary photographer presents environmental portraits of doorways, kitchen tables, and porches where tenderness happened, translating personal memory into shared cultural witness. A multidisciplinary artist installs layered relief works anchoring Building and Breaking, using textured materials to hold the physical tension between construction and dissolution. A neo-expressionist painter contributes caulk-textured compositions indexing touch and repair through bold tactile surfaces; a community-forward curatorial practice informs the show's participatory ethic. The installation is lean but resonant: vinyl text on walls, clip-framed artifact facsimiles, two refurbished rotary handsets playing intimate audio with captions, one compact projection. At the exit, visitors encounter a 1980s thermal receipt printer—the kind that printed love notes between pagers in the '90s. Print a gratitude. Print a boundary. Print an apology. Print "I miss you." Pin it to the shared ledger wall. The archive grows throughout the run as 200, 500, 1,000 receipts accumulate, transforming spectators into practitioners of the grammar they just witnessed. Visitors leave with a takeaway card containing simple prompts for asking, building, weathering, repairing—making devotion's grammar portable, teachable, and impossible to ignore. Success is measured in practices carried home, in conversations shifted, in repair attempted.