A new campaign starring Julia Garner celebrates the House’s storied silk scarves and their enduring legacy within the House’s design codes. DISCOVER MORE

Installation view, General Conditions (2025), The School: Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica Studio/Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery

When Jack Shainman was renovating the massive building that would become his new Tribeca gallery, his architect had a funny habit of fobbing off questions with a meaningless abstraction: “These are the general conditions.” Shainman held on to the phrase, which he considered the sort of hollow pablum that old-school hegemons might have used to justify their sway. Now the term has become the tenuous theme for this summer’s show at The School, Shainman’s gallery outpost in Kinderhook, near Hudson, about 90 minutes north of Manhattan. It befits the self-effacing dealer, who apologized for his jodhpurs when I bumped into him at the gallery this past Saturday. You may have heard the story of The School—Shainman bought the building in 2013 as a storage space, and ended up turning it into a three-story gallery. He dug down 10 feet in the lower level to show monumental artworks, like Rose B. Simpson’s 26-foot-high figures made from layers of clay, and the 15-foot-tall abstract wall installation by Brazilian artist Emanoel Araújo. The current show features 130 works by 29 artists, eight of whom are not on the gallery’s roster. Each of the artists questions the powers that be—the general conditions, as it were. Richard Mosse, known for his use of infrared photography to document refugee camps, is represented with the 24-foot-long Skaramagas Camp, Athens, Greece (2016)—a digital c-print on metallic paper. Salt Lake City–based artist Jaclyn Wright’s art focuses on climate change as evidenced by the drying lake; her Desert Simulation (2025) is a multimedia installation of found objects from a firing range on an island in the lake. The paintings of gallery preparator Donyel Ivy-Royal, including how to stretch $20 for 2 weeks (i owe everything to you), from 2024, bracket the show. Shainman recommended that I also stop by September Gallery, Bill Arning Exhibitions, and the Shaker Museum outpost, which are all just down the street from The School in the one-intersection town of Kinderhook. But my daughter vetoed this idea in favor of lunch (we went to Quinnie’s).

A new campaign starring Julia Garner celebrates the House’s storied silk scarves and their enduring legacy within the House’s design codes. DISCOVER MORE

Rendering of lobby, Ray Harlem. Photo: Courtesy of Ray

When I asked Zhukova about her long-term vision for Ray, she said with disarming candor that she really wasn’t sure: She was feeling her way along, learning how to develop and program for the buildings once they were in operation. In Philadelphia, Ray has five artist studios incorporated into the footprint—and a rotating exhibition and event space. Events like collaging workshops and ceramics sessions led by a resident ceramicist have become an integral part of life at Ray. Zhukova says that curated, no-cost workshops for residents leads to a stronger sense of community and higher retention levels. In Harlem, though, it’s a whole different story.

Art, of course, is a central feature of Ray’s developments. But the endeavor goes beyond simply choosing art for public spaces, as some developers do to enhance the appeal of their buildings—a common sight in New York and Miami. It goes beyond even opening the interior of its buildings to rotating exhibitions, as with the 21c chain of museum-hotels. And Zhukova isn’t simply incorporating art from the artists she has relationships with—as, for instance, Hauser & Wirth does with its own artists at its hotels and restaurants. Instead, Zhukova’s impetus to develop real estate comes from her experience building the Garage Center for Contemporary Art, in Moscow, starting in 2008. She noticed that people who visited the private museum were reluctant to leave, and she felt compelled to transport that experience to everyday life. “Why can’t we live like this?” she asked me rhetorically. Obviously, Zhukova, who has an extensive art collection and sits on the boards of the Met and LACMA, lives with art in the way very few others do—she does, in fact, live like this. But I don’t think anyone would have guessed, after years appearing in party pictures as a jet-setter, that Zhukova would emerge as a figure doing the hard slog to actually figure out how to integrate art into more lives. That’s what makes Ray so interesting. It addresses an unacknowledged issue at the center of the art world: Going to a museum or art gallery is not the ideal way to experience art. Art exists as something to live with every day—you shouldn’t have to have an epiphany, or an aesthetic experience, in the brief moment when you’re standing in front of an artwork at an exhibition. Ray is trying to scale art as an experience to a broader audience.

My tour of Ray Harlem started with a quick run-through by Jonathan McCrory, the executive artistic director of the National Black Theatre—a Harlem institution, initially founded by Barbara Ann Teer in 1968 for Black actors and playwrights, that occupies the third and fourth floors of the building. NBT, now run by Teer’s daughter, Sade Lythcott, began working with Zhukova in 2019. Ray has two entrances on the 126th Street side of the building, and sits on top of the National Black Theater and its two performance spaces: a 99-seat black box theater and a 250-seat “immersive technology performance space.” The latter is where McCrory says NBT, in addition to its other programming, will be able to mount ticketed performances that convey Black history and culture to tourists. Harlem is a major tourist destination for church services—and historic sites like Sylvia’s and the Apollo—but it currently lacks an easy-to-access venue for the culture of the African diaspora. The 27,000 square feet of NBT’s two main floors also include classrooms, offices, and rehearsal space, and the basement houses a set-building shop where the company can train a new generation in the theater trades. The lobby and staircases of NBT, accessed on the 125th Street side, will be filled with commissioned works from artists like Sanford Biggers.

Rendering of rooftop lounge, Ray Harlem. Photo: Courtesy of Ray

African art has been central to NBT’s story. Teer had a connection to Nigeria, and the theater has several examples of artwork made by Osogbo artists in the 1970s. NBT’s connection to the Yoruba diaspora is so great that Zhukova, Lythcott, and Ray Harlem architect Frida Escobedo (working with Handel Architects) devoted a great deal of time to sourcing brick that would match the pink color of the clay in the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, a UNESCO World Heritage site. (Linoleum can’t handle everything…) The brick also ties the 21-story building—whose height was the result of hard-won zoning changes—into the surrounding brownstones, whose shades vary from deep umber to a pinkish brown. After our spin through NBT, Zhukova gave me the tour of Ray Harlem, toting a folder of printouts showing the paintings she’d chosen for the public areas. At each spot, she held up the sheet of paper with proper perspective and pride. Judging from the images of work by artists like Freddy Carrasco, Larissa Lockshin, Ellon Gibbs, Dylan Rose Rheingold, Nikko Washington, Michael Abel, and Jurell Cayetano, she had chosen good works, not trophy art. The details of the public spaces, designed by Little Wing Lee, are perfectly pitched to the nostalgic, organic modernism now so familiar to us all through Danish design. If you grew up in the ’70s, Ray has a familiar, homey aesthetic. Zhukova showed me model apartments, an airy gym, light-filled hallways, a common “living room,” and a co-working/library space that was all curved edges and light woods. She was eager to get us up to the roof, where there are entertaining spaces that she hopes will be used by the artists and theater people. The view from the terrace puts an entirely different perspective on Harlem. To the east, I saw the Harlem River and the line of bridges that bisect its expanse. To the south, Marcus Garvey Park was lush and green, its new multicolored pool beckoning just two blocks away, and beyond lay the wide expanse of Central Park with rain clouds hovering. Rather than feeling gloomy, the view was peaceful, comforting, and cozy.

That’s it for today, folks. We’re back tomorrow with the Inner Circle, which will include an interview with Nick Acquavella and Jean-Paul Engelen. Sign up for access here. Until then, M

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