Mad World: A Bag to Breathe Into

Zain Alam, Alyxåndra Ciale, Gia Abucejo & Benja August, Anxious to Make (Liat Berdugo & Emily Martinez), Faith Brown, Leah Byck, Kelly Clare, Amber Doe, Dollar Slice (Eden Butvinik), Anna Dossmann, Esther, The Bipedal Entity!, Linda Felcher, Vardit Goldner, Onaje Grant-Simmonds, Jiayi Gu, Karl Kaisel, Melonie Knight, Alexandra Kumala, Keith Lafuente, Jihyun Lee, Regan Loggans, Yutong Leah Liu, Eleanor Mahin Thorp, Meicen Meng, Maya Nguyen, Sam Nguyen-Jones, Mona Okulla Obua, Andrew Ordonez, Abdel Karim Ougri, Zulu Padilla, Leo de Paula, Perry Picasshoe, María-Elena Pombo, Nadia Younes, Lilian C. Scheuer, Máte Vargas, Natacha Voliakovsky Rosado, Kathy Wu

SoMad—the New York-based independent art space, residency program, and archive—presents Mad World 2026: A Bag to Breathe Into, the organization's annual Earth Day exhibition and celebration, featuring 44 artists working across visual art, experimental film, installation and performance.

This Mad World spans the globe in its scope, illustrating the interconnectedness of all living things and the struggles we each face as we share in this experience of life on Earth. Grounded in the framework of Intersectional Environmentalism, the curation refuses to separate issues of social justice from concerns of environmental collapse. The exhibition draws from the writings of Kimberlé Crenshaw, the Combahee River Collective, and Leah Thomas, among other sources of queer and Black feminist thought, with its title originating from the poem “A Personal History of Breathing” by Joy Priest. Mad World questions the limits of environmentalism as it is conceived within institutional and mainstream society, recognizing that environmental injustices and social inequalities are interconnected and disproportionately affect oppressed communities. The selected group of artists presents works that directly challenge the systems that oppress us and our environment. Their practices engage with themes including colonialism, development, migration, stress, disability justice, and Afro-surrealism. In response to our collective anxieties, we seek to imagine alternative systems of care, emphasize a return to ancestral practice, and inspire cultural action.

Founded in 2018, SoMad is a femme and queer led art space that serves as a platform for emerging artists to experiment, collaborate, and challenge conventions. SoMad empowers artists through a combined gallery and artist residency program, production house, and event space, emphasizing creative freedom and the absence of rigid expectations. The name, “SoMad,” reflects both the physical location—south of Madison Square Park—and the collective’s frustration with the current landscape of resources and support structures available for emerging artists, particularly artists from marginalized communities.