Paula Cooper Gallery opens a new group exhibition, Art is for the Spirit: Records of the Self, on Thursday, October 29, 2026, at its 521 West 21st Street space in Chelsea. An opening reception runs from 6 to 8 p.m. that evening, and the show stays up through December 12.

The exhibition brings together work by eight artists with long ties to the gallery: Jennifer Bartlett, Jonathan Borofsky, Robert Gober, David Hammons, Kazuko Miyamoto, Ree Morton, Elizabeth Murray and Joel Shapiro. It was organized by Ivy Shapiro, and its theme is the home and autobiography as ways of keeping a person grounded.

A show built from memory

According to the gallery, the exhibition starts from Ivy Shapiro's own memories of childhood and uses them to trace how Paula Cooper, the artists she showed and their families lived alongside one another in the tight New York art world of the 1970s and the decades that followed.

Some of the threads run back more than half a century. Joel Shapiro and Jonathan Borofsky both showed at Paula Cooper for the first time in 1969, the same year Ivy Shapiro was born. Shapiro exhibited a drawing made from rows of his own fingerprints, while Borofsky showed the first piece in his long-running Counting project, writing consecutive numbers on graph paper in an attempt to reach infinity. The gallery points out that both early works rely on one simple, repeated action to record the passing of time.

Houses recur through the show. In Joel Shapiro's later solo exhibitions at the gallery, small cast iron and bronze sculptures sat on the floor or hung on the wall, and a single house shape turned up again and again: stretched out on a shelf, cut in half, or set spinning and breaking apart in a nod to Giacometti. Jennifer Bartlett's paintings on white enameled steel plates began including simple peaked-roof houses in the early 1970s, and in later years her houses left the wall and took three-dimensional form on the gallery floor.

Robert Gober has his own history with the gallery. In the late 1970s he worked for Paula Cooper as a preparator, the staff member who handles and installs art, while building dollhouses on the side, using skills his father had used to build the house Gober grew up in. The gallery says making those dollhouses reconnected the young artist with the emotional pull of a small imagined world made carefully by hand.

Other ways of recording a life

The other artists approach the self from different directions. Beginning in 1968, David Hammons made body prints by pressing his own skin directly onto paper, producing unidealized images of real bodies under pressure that speak to past and present mistreatment. Kazuko Miyamoto works with natural materials and woven forms, including wearable sculpture meant to tie the person wearing it to the place they live. Ree Morton's narrative drawings, made soon after she moved to New York in 1972, offer views into a childlike world with hints of something darker. Elizabeth Murray rounds out the group.

About the gallery

Paula Cooper opened her gallery in 1968, and it was the first art gallery in SoHo. Its first show, a benefit for an antiwar student group, included work by Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman, along with Sol LeWitt's first wall drawing. The gallery moved to Chelsea in 1996, into a redesigned 19th century building at 534 West 21st Street, and opened its second space at 521 West 21st Street in 1999. It now runs three spaces on the block, and over the years it has also hosted concerts, dance, poetry readings and benefit events.

The new show is one of several changes on West 21st Street this fall. The gallery's current shows by Tauba Auerbach and Eric N. Mack close on October 24, and a Claes Oldenburg exhibition, Six Themes, opens at 534 West 21st Street on November 5 and runs through December 19.

Getting there

The gallery is on West 21st Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, a block from the High Line. The nearest subway is the 23rd Street station on the C and E lines at Eighth Avenue, about a ten-minute walk west. The 1 train's 23rd Street station at Seventh Avenue is a few minutes farther.

Plan your visit

Art is for the Spirit: Records of the Self is on view October 29 through December 12, 2026, at Paula Cooper Gallery, 521 West 21st Street. The opening reception is Thursday, October 29, from 6 to 8 p.m. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The gallery does not list tickets or reservations for the show; for questions, call 212-255-1105 or email info@paulacoopergallery.com.

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