Celebrating MoMA PS1’s 50th anniversary year, Greater New York 2026 marks the sixth edition of the museum’s survey of artists living and working in New York. The exhibition spans the entirety of MoMA PS1’s building and features more than 150 works by more than 50 artists, including two CalArtians: Rachel Handlin (Art BFA 20) and Kite (Music BFA 14).
The exhibition centers on the conditions shaping daily life in the city today, considering increased surveillance, economic precarity, and shifting technologies, while also foregrounding artists’ strategies of resistance and adaptation.
Handlin’s works in the exhibition are drawn from her Scooter Shots photography series, a project she began as a high school senior and later developed as her CalArts thesis. The series started with a photograph taken along the Seine and grew into a multiyear body of work made in 2016, 2017, and 2018.
For the thesis, Handlin connected the photographs to semiotics, laying out the images in relation to hand-painted street maps on the floor. The maps became a way of tracing the streets she walked while making the photographs, turning the series into both a record of movement and a study of how images interrupt their surroundings. “My Scooter Shots, they break the background of the image,” Handlin writes on her website. “It interrupts the background of the image. I interrupt a lot. What I want to say is more important.”
Born in New York City and raised in Manhattan Beach, California, and Kailua, Hawaii, Handlin works across large-format film and digital photography. She maintains a studio in Brooklyn.
Kite is represented in the exhibition by works including A Quilling for Time-Laying (2026), a sculptural work incorporating crystals, rocks, and beads, and rereading the constellations to fit my desires (2025), made with black deer hide, and a mirror. These pieces connect to Kite’s ongoing exploration of relationships between land, materials, technology, and nonhuman beings.
An Oglála Lakȟóta artist, composer, and scholar, Kite works across sound, sculpture, performance, installation, and computational media. Her influential article “Making Kin with Machines” introduced Indigenous ontologies into conversations around artificial intelligence and received an award from the MIT Journal of Design and Science.
Kite also participated in the exhibition’s performance program with Four Handdreamers (2026), an improvisational musical performance exploring sonic collectivity through Lakȟóta values of exchange and reciprocity. In a review of Greater New York 2026, Observer called her “futuristic-looking tapestries and spiritually evocative installations” among the exhibition’s most compelling works.
Greater New York 2026 is on view through Aug. 17.
