Muses: The City & The Artist

Mel Bochner, Alexander Calder, John Chamberlain, George Condo, Willem de Kooning, Niki de Saint Phalle, Shepard Fairey, Keith Haring, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Alex Katz, Richard Prince, David Salle, Mickalene Thomas, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselman, Kehinde Wiley

Opera Gallery New York is pleased to present Muses: The City & The Artist, a group exhibition exploring the reciprocal influence of New York City on its artist community. From artists who’ve lived and died in the city, to artists whose relationship to the city was merely transient, this exhibition explores the personification of the city as a demanding and mercurial muse and ‘the artist’ as an assemblage of interwoven stories both real and imagined from the past and present.

Muses: The City & The Artist examines broader themes of cultural currency and the artist’s economic and identity-oriented relationship to urbanism. The exhibition further explores the influence of fame, politics, education and public policy on the development, destruction and/or disappearance of hallowed cultural ground in New York City. The exhibition takes a nonlinear approach in examining the city’s contributions to the art historical canon and questions what that will look like in the future.