Art is for the Spirit: Records of the Self at Paula Cooper Gallery

Paula Cooper Gallery presents Art is for the Spirit: Records of the Self at 521 West 21st Street in Chelsea from October 29 to December 12, 2026. An opening reception takes place on October 29 from 6 to 8 PM. The group exhibition is organized by Ivy Shapiro.

Eight artists are included: Jennifer Bartlett, Jonathan Borofsky, Robert Gober, David Hammons, Kazuko Miyamoto, Ree Morton, Elizabeth Murray and Joel Shapiro. The show treats the home and autobiography as ways to ground the self. It begins from the organizer's memories of her childhood, and it also traces how Paula Cooper, her artists and their families were bound together in the tight-knit New York art world of the 1970s and after.

One starting point is 1969, the year Ivy Shapiro was born and the year Joel Shapiro and Borofsky first showed at the gallery. Shapiro exhibited a fingerprint drawing, his finger leaving neat rows of marks. Borofsky presented the first work in his Counting series, writing consecutive numbers on graph paper in an effort to reach infinity. Their paths diverged soon after, but both early pieces use a simple repeated action to record time and process. In later solo shows, Shapiro placed small cast-iron and bronze sculptures on the floor or wall, and the house recurred in many guises: stretched onto a shelf, cut in half, or spinning and shattering in homage to Giacometti.

In the early 1970s Bartlett began adding childlike pointed-roof houses to her dotted paintings on white enameled steel plates; later these houses left the canvas and became three-dimensional forms on the floor. Gober, working as a preparator for Cooper in the late 1970s, made dollhouses using skills his father had applied to building the family home. The work reconnected him with the emotional force of an imagined world made carefully by hand.

Hammons, Miyamoto and Morton offer other ways of locating and recording the self. From 1968 Hammons pressed skin directly onto paper to make body prints, unidealized images of bodies under pressure that point to historical and present mistreatment. Miyamoto's natural materials and woven forms mark process and place, and her wearable sculpture ties the wearer to a lived environment. Morton's narrative drawings, made soon after she moved to New York in 1972, open onto a childlike world tinged with foreboding. Across the exhibition runs a quiet sentimentality for what has been left behind.