Genevieve Goffman

All the words that came down to meet the body that came up from the ground, presented jointly by Alyssa Davis Gallery and Foreign & Domestic is Genevieve Goffman’s most ambitious exhibition to date.

“Is it wrong to form with words something that cannot speak?

Terribly wrong, but this is the order of things

As it comes down from heaven—

All 600 letters, alphabetically.”

—Genevieve Goffman, All the Words that Came Down (2025)

The golem stands over seven feet tall, iridescent and immobile. Its surface finish is a gleaming hand-made paint of K-500 medium, Cekol, and Iriodin 9605 Blue-Shade Silver SW. The golem does not move. Its mouth does not open — actually it’s crammed with pages repeating, “He can not call out to anyone with his mouth stuffed full of paper,” as if silencing it with its own rhetoric. Its chest bears the Hebrew word for truth — אמת (Emet) — but the aleph has been struck through, rendering it just מת (Met), meaning dead, like a silent monument to the historical lore that shapes it and the present in which it is situated.

Across centuries the golem has been rewritten to suit the fears of its storytellers — first a mystic experiment, then a household assistant, eventually a holy bodyguard tasked with assuming the worst parts of the world. By the early 20th century, it had morphed into a kind of spiritual security system: a passive threat in an increasingly hostile Europe. Its evolution mirrors a shift in how we wield stories, from creation myth to trauma script. Goffman’s golem is not merely an ominous totem to the tragedy of the past, but a prism for understanding the violent ideologies that define our present. She asks what it means to shape identity through a creature whose entire purpose is to absorb threat, to embody it, to preempt it, and eventually to justify it. The golem does not judge. It reverberates with distorted echoes of history, while absorbing the stories of now into the ever-expanding archive that defines its shape.

In both book and body, Goffman composes a creature that is not so much alive as endlessly spoken into being. It is an object made of fear, born of language, but unable to speak for itself. In its monumental stillness, the golem becomes a reflection not only of collective memory, but of our compulsion to author fear into flesh. If stories are how we inherit meaning, then the golem is our most paradoxical heir. Whether you see a protector, a corpse, a glitch in the system, the result is a figure that resists closure, defined not by what it is, but by what we need it to be.

—Madeline Cash, 2025

Genevieve Goffman (b. Washington D.C.) is an artist based in New York City. She graduated from Yale with an MFA Sculpture in 2020. Goffman's recent solo exhibitions include The Triumph Of A Lonely Place, Espace Maurice, Montreal (2024); Before It all Went Wrong, Hyacinth Gallery, New York (2022); Grind, Money Gallery, St Petersburg, Russia (2021); Here Forever at Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York (2020).

Group exhibitions include Petzel Gallery, New York (2024, curated by Simon Denny); Hagiwara Projects, Tokyo (2024, curated by Kai Yoda); Blade Study, New York (2024); Eyes Never Sleep, New York (2024); CANADA, New York (2023); Thierry Goldberg, New York (2023); Fragment Gallery, New York (2022); Real Pain, Los Angeles (2021); Workroom.Daipyat, Voronezh, Russia (2020); Patara Gallery, Tbilisi, Georgia (2020); EXILE, Vienna, Austria (2019). Goffman also exhibited at NADA x Foreland in 2021 and NADA Warsaw in 2024 with Alyssa Davis Gallery.

The View, an installation deriving from Goffman’s research into Adolf Loos, was exhibited in 2023 at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria.

Genevieve Goffman exhibited in After Lives, a group exhibition at Foreign & Domestic in 2023, alongside work by Lee Brozgol, Gryphon Rue, and Bob Smith.

Goffman’s first book The Triumph of a Lonely Place was published in 2024 by Inpatient Press.

Foreign & Domestic is a gallery located on the Lower East Side, opened by Alexander Meurice in July 2022. The gallery has staged solo exhibitions by Ittah Yoda, Nicholas William Johnson, Egle Jauncems, Joseph “Count Slima” Williams, Greg Carideo, Armando Nin, Joey Frank, Joseph Brock, Michael Iveson and Rhys Coren. Recent artist-curated group exhibitions include I used to be a tree, curated by Greg Carideo, and Minotaurs, curated by Harris Rosenblum. The gallery also produces special publications with exhibited artists.

Foreign & Domestic takes its name from an exhibition titled ‘European, Foreign & Domestic’ curated by Alexander Meurice at the Averard Hotel, an ostentatiously derelict west London townhouse turned exhibition space, which he ran from 2016 to 2018.

In 2025, Foreign & Domestic is growing its program by collaborating with other dealers and curators on a number of special exhibition projects, both onsite and offsite.

Alyssa Davis Gallery is a New York City-based gallery founded in 2016 in the Varitype Building in the Greenwich Village Historic District. Recent exhibitions include: Martina Cox’s Waist Management at the historic Beaux-Arts Estonian House; Justin Warsh’s Extended Play or a trailer for Infinite Jest at SARA’S; a presentation at the inaugural NADA Warsaw with Bora Akıncıtürk, Genevieve Goffman, Radimir Koch, Zuzanna Milobedzka, Anna Pederson and Karolina Szwed; Secrets to Graceful Living, a duo exhibition with Radimir Koch and Anna Pederson at the site of the early-2000s former nightclub, Lotus; Eight Paintings Proving Angels Are Really Watching Over Us, a solo exhibition with Robert Roest curated at Europa. The gallery has also organized public performance and music events as expanded affairs for exhibiting contemporary art, including the 1500-person gala Merde! in 2022 at 99 Scott.

Alyssa Davis Gallery curates sites, exhibitions and events focusing on solo and duo presentations with contemporary artists. Currently the programming is focused on exhibition-making as a vehicle for historical preservation, engaging specific notable sites based on the body of work being introduced.