Thursday and Friday carry this week. Sonia Rosa Kahn opens a show at The Boiler that is about The Boiler, and Pioneer Works turns over its entire fall season the same night. The day before, Lichen sits eight people down in Ridgewood to carve a rock and set a USB drive inside it. Carved stone turns up in both of those, which I did not plan. The weekend runs hands-on from there.
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Kahn makes the building itself the subject. The Boiler is a former factory boiler room on North 14th Street with forty-foot ceilings, and she traces the site backward through a swamp, a boiler plant, a gym, and a fish cannery. Rejected tax documents, legal charters, and microfilm clippings run on 16mm across six channels, set against oxidized aluminum plates and carved stone, with sound design by Aleksis Luriņš. The show stays up through September 26, Thursday to Sunday.
Fri 6–9p -
Pioneer Works opens every fall exhibition on one night, which makes it the densest few hours on the calendar this week. The building runs studios, a garden, and a press under the same roof, so the shows sit next to the people who made them. I'd anchor Friday here and get there early, because the rooms fill.
Fri 7–9p -
Boyd and Weiss spend two days on lamps, pendants, and candlesticks, throwing and hand-building them and then glazing and firing what you make. Boyd is the 2026 artist in residence at LAND gallery in Brooklyn, and Weiss works in Asheville with wild clay dug from her own land in Arkansas. This one is pitched at intermediate and advanced, and a third optional session in October covers wiring the lamps you fired.
Sat–Sun, instruction to 5p -
Lichen sells furniture and objects out of Ridgewood, and the third edition of its Future Artifacts series teaches lapidary technique. You mark, cut, and shape a rock, then set a 128GB drive into it and carry it home. There are eight seats and you should be willing to run a power tool. Kahn is showing carved stone at The Boiler the next night, which makes this an accidental pairing.
Thu 5–9p -
Beyond the Sky is an immersive installation of animation, projection, and generative sound that shifts as you move through the room, made with sound artists Kyle Luntz and Ryan Vahey. A fire destroyed the work at its original venue a year ago, and this is its return. The Yellow Chair Salon opens downstairs in Gallery A the same night, so one trip to 40th Street gets you both.
Sat 6–9p -
Adanne is Darlene Okpo's shop on Ralph Avenue in Bed-Stuy, stocking Black authors alongside goods from Black makers. The shop is running a Saturday session with ebanks.creates where you pot, paint, and plant a head-shaped planter. I'd think of it as the rare workshop that doubles as a reason to spend an afternoon in a good bookstore.
Sat 12–3p -
QUADRAPHONICS runs three composers through a quadraphonic system in North Brooklyn. Block performs Breach, a portrait of a lagoon built out of field recordings and synths. Bertucci plays from The Oracle alongside unreleased work for voice, tape, ocarina, and flutes. There is a second sitting at 7:30 if the afternoon does not work.
Sat 2:30–5:30p -
Nicolás Jaar and Dave Harrington now play as a trio with Tlacael Esparza, a drummer who also designs instruments. They are doing two shows in one night, at eight and at eleven, which is how this band has been working lately. The live sets run looser and more improvised than the records, and I'd take the late one if you can stay up.
Wed 8p and 11p
Casey Kaplan opens two solo shows on the same day. Ronay carves and dyes basswood into forms that read as organic and machined at once, and Unzueta works in hand-dyed felt and thread. Both run through October 24, so the trip does not have to happen this week.
Anthea Hamilton curates a Pesce show in Salon 94's Upper East Side townhouse, built on the premise that a chair can also be a nest or a foot. Pesce made furniture that refused to behave like furniture, in resin and foam and colors nobody else was using. This is the same building where CJ Hendry filled a room with pastel beads, and it runs through October 24.
Sonia Rosa Kahn was born in London and works in New York. Her practice runs on erosion, oxidation, and chemical development, treating a photographic image as a material with a lifespan rather than a fixed record. She is finishing an MFA in painting and printmaking at Yale, and she spent 2026 as artist in residence at the Henry Moore Foundation, working through the archive of how Moore's own sculpture was photographed. I'd read her show at The Boiler as a portrait of the building it sits in.
Read the full profile →See you out there,
Sam