Danh Vo: Rebuilding Liberty

The Vilcek Foundation is presenting "Danh Vo: Rebuilding Liberty," an exhibition on liberty, migration, national identity and the unstable meanings of public symbols. It runs through June 25, 2027, so there is plenty of time to plan a visit.

Vo was born in Vietnam, holds Danish citizenship and now lives in rural Germany. His work places seemingly unrelated cultural and historical contexts in conversation, and this year he received the Isamu Noguchi Award. The pairing is apt: Noguchi's own practice moved freely across disciplines and cultures.

The Vilcek show ran alongside a separate Vo exhibition at White Cube New York, which closes October 16. That presentation gathered bronze sculptures, religious relics, glass pieces inspired by ikebana and Vietnamese ceramics recovered from the ocean floor, forging unexpected links between objects and their histories. "Culture is not native: culture is cross-pollination, cross-contamination," Vo has said, a line that also frames his approach to national symbols.

The foundation is on East 70th Street on the Upper East Side. For anyone who misses the White Cube show, this is the place to meet Vo's thinking, and for immigrants and those living between identities, a long-running chance to reconsider what a symbol of liberty can mean.