At White Cube on the Upper East Side, NYC: Doris Salcedo's Hair House and Rice Vessels

Colombian artist Doris Salcedo (b. 1958, Bogotá) opens a new exhibition at White Cube New York, 1002 Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side, running November 13, 2026 through January 16, 2027. It is her first major New York show since the US retrospective that opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2015 and traveled to the Guggenheim Museum and the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

At the center stands House (2023–26), a monumental yet ethereal structure made from human hair, with individual strands knotted and woven by hand. It continues themes from Uprooted (2020–22), the prize-winning installation shown at the 2023 Sharjah Biennial that addressed migration driven by the climate crisis. "The loss of a home is more than simply losing a structure or a roof," Salcedo says. "It is the catastrophic loss of a central pillar of our life."

On the gallery's other level, Grains of Sorrow (2023–26) brings together 47 small vessels made solely of rice and human hair, laid out on the floor. They are conceived as a counter to the dehumanization of man-made starvation, which is still used as a weapon of war.

Both works took three years and many hands to produce. Salcedo links that painstaking, collaborative labor to the often unrecognized work of the Global South that drives the modern economy, and sees it as central to her idea of the anti-monument. "A collective statement is far more powerful than a lonely solo voice," she says. "It becomes like a chorus, and a really potent one."

A companion publication, Doris Salcedo: Acts (an anthology), with new essays by six writers, is available to pre-order from White Cube's bookshop.