Where to See Stellar Collectible Design in New York During Salon Art + Design
As Salon Art + Design draws collectors uptown, New York’s galleries answer with inventive exhibitions of their own
After a month that drew collectors abroad for Frieze, PAD, Art Basel, and Design Miami, the art and design sphere is shifting its focus back to New York. The headline event is Salon Art + Design, returning to the Park Avenue Armory from November 6–10. While the fair’s blue-chip offerings will surely command attention, the city’s galleries have mounted their own ambitious programs in tandem. Across Manhattan and Brooklyn, the below exhibitions are testing the limits of material and craft, revealing the depth of the city’s creative talents, and introducing new voices shaping the collectible design landscape. From Joyce Lin’s simulacra of invasive kudzu vines to Adam Pendleton’s furniture debut, these are the shows defining the season.
1. “Elizabeth Browning Jackson: RE/CONSTRUCT” at Superhouse | Chinatown
In 1980s New York, Elizabeth Browning Jackson helped redefine how art could inhabit a room. Her shaped rugs and origami-like aluminum furnishings, shown at legendary downtown gallery Art et Industrie, infused everyday forms with sculptural panache and collapsed distinctions between art, design, and architecture. Her first solo exhibition in more than three decades revisits that radical vocabulary through four original rugs and four new “reconstructions” paired with her bent aluminum furniture. The new works build on her early experiments in dimensional textiles. In Split Spiral (2025), she reassembles her 1980 Spiral rug into a vibrant topography of curves, while another introduces industrial hues that deepen her exploration of surface and form. Decades later, she continues to reshape how form occupies the floor.
Until December 20
2. “Matt Byrd: Found Time” at Zarolat | Dumbo
Matt Byrd’s granite sculptures interlock like puzzle pieces, balancing a sense of whimsy with deep reflections on time and craft. “Found Time” gathers thirteen new works that reveal the Raleigh local’s evolving relationship with material through pared-down yet technically demanding single-stone carvings. Working with little more than hammer, chisel, and grinder, Byrd allows each fragment of granite, salvaged bluestone, or clay to dictate its own form. The ceramic pieces, created this summer during his residency at Shiro Oni Studio in Japan, draw from the folk pottery traditions of North Carolina. Each piece captures the mark of process and the weight of duration. As Byrd observes, “Time is like an object to me.”
Until December 14
3. “Adam Pendleton: Who Owns Geometry Anyway?” at Friedman Benda | Chelsea
Adam Pendleton often poses sharp questions through his work: “Who Is Queen?” he asked at the Museum of Modern Art during a breakout solo exhibition in 2021. His latest inquiry, expressed through furniture, turns to geometry itself. In wood, onyx, and marble, the Brooklyn artist arranges circles, squares, and triangles into forms where heavy materials appear to levitate. Wedges of timber cleave space while tabletops frame voids like drawings made solid. Restrained in palette—black, white, and stone—the works manage to vibrate with movement. On one wall, a painted black triangle and an onyx tabletop align in deliberate tension, transforming the installation into a drawing extended through space.
November 7 – December 19
4. “Akiko Hirai: Immortality” at Guild Gallery | SoHo
The tension between Akiko Hirai’s hand and the will of clay is palpable in the Japanese ceramist’s textural moon jars. In her second solo exhibition with Guild Gallery, she explores this fragile push-and-pull through forms that seem eroded by time itself. The vessels, glazed in milky layers of ash and feldspar, glow with a pale blue-green cast that pools and crackles across their curves, veiling the clay beneath. Other series, including Cocoon Forms and Cracked Plates, extend her process through the use of sediment, ash, and deliberate breakage. Each work shows the physical effects of firing, where cracks, glaze pooling, and surface variation reveal how the clay responded to heat and handling.
Until January 2, 2026
5. “Joyce Lin: Hypernatural” at R & Company | Tribeca
Kudzu vines are blanketing the American South in dense green drapery, climbing trees, fences, and power lines with unstoppable force. Joyce Lin is channeling that restless energy into a new body of sculptural furniture that reimagines the invasive plant as both material and metaphor. Harvested vines seem to coil around wooden frames, binding together found objects, epoxy, and paint in forms that seem to blur growth and decay. In a chair and floor lamp, the creeping tendrils appear to consume their supports while simultaneously holding them upright. The Houston-based designer’s process mirrors the vine’s dual nature—destructive yet adaptive—by recreating its twisting forms; each piece is a simulacrum rather than a specimen, capturing the unruly motion of kudzu through meticulously fabricated surfaces.
Until January 9, 2026
6. “Sébastien Léon: Inca City” at Ralph Pucci | Flatiron
Sébastien Leon’s mastery of material alchemy comes into vivid focus in a solo exhibition two years in the making, realized during a residency at Ralph Pucci’s in-house sculpture studio. There, the Galerie Creative Mind artist collaborated with Pucci’s master craftsmen to create a suite of furniture and lighting that conjures relics of an imagined civilization. The collection spans resin consoles, cast-metal mirrors, hand-woven rugs realized with Carini Lang, and Plasterglass chairs that mimic the supple pull of stretched leather. In the Mirage series, silvered and marbleized glass becomes a luminous solid that seems to breathe with light. The Codex tables reveal cryptic hand-painted markings like unearthed inscriptions. Nearby, Sapera chain lights—blown-glass orbs entwined in welded loops—appear to sway in suspended motion.
Until March 2026
7. “Alice Gavalet” at Twenty First | Tribeca
In her first stateside solo exhibition, Alice Gavalet is reveling in her exuberant sense of color and form. Celebrated for her instinctive, drawing-led process, the French ceramic artist builds sculptural lamps, vessels, and wall sconces through slab and coil construction, finishing each surface with matte engobe that softens her bold geometries. The show introduces seventeen works, including two new departures—a ceramic cabinet and coffee table—that extend her practice into furniture. Glazed ceramics in tartan green, deep blue, and waxed oak reveal her fascination with rhythm and pattern, while playful contours recall the decorative spirit of Betty Woodman and Ettore Sottsass. Trained at ENSAAMA Olivier de Serres and Les Arts Décoratifs, Gavalet approaches clay as a medium of improvisation and unbridled joy.
Until January 30, 2026
8. “Chen Chen & Kai Williams: Basic Instinct” at The Future Perfect | West Village
In their most materially ambitious outing to date, Chen Chen and Kai Williams work with salvaged tree trunks and fallen branches gathered across Brooklyn to explore the expressive potential of wood. Segments of trunk retain their natural contours and knots, set against the precision of milled planes and welded metal grids. The combination reveals how organic form and fabrication can coexist within a single object. Furniture and lighting pieces pair bark, steel, curve, and line, creating compositions that feel simultaneously primal and constructed. Certain works recall Constantin Brancusi’s Torso of a Young Man, while others nod to the bodily provocations implied by the exhibition’s title.
Until January 2026
9. “A Shared Vision: 15 Years of Jacques Jarrige” at Valerie Goodman Gallery | Upper East Side
For fifteen years, the rapport between Jacques Jarrige and Valerie Goodman has charted a remarkable arc of creative exploration. Born in Paris and steeped in a childhood of art collecting and scientific inquiry, Jarrige has long been driven by early encounters with African sculpture in Saint-Germain. He enrolled briefly at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts but left to pursue a tactile practice rooted in hand-shaping wood and metal. This show opens a fresh chapter in that trajectory. Fifteen new works—carved oak and MDF furniture, hammered bronze and aluminum sculpture, lighting, and an architectural fireplace—extend his “drawing in space” vocabulary and reflect the shift he describes as a “second artistic birth.” Design scholar Glenn Adamson notes that Jarrige’s work, spanning furniture, jewelry, and sculpture, may be seen as “one continuous creative act.”
Until December 15
10. “Framed: An Unjustifiable Collection of Shattered Self-Reflection” at Emma Scully Gallery | Upper East Side
Mirrors need not be perceived merely as a reflective object, but a symbol of absence, identity, and authorship. That notion underpins the Upper East Side gallery’s latest group exhibition, in which Dana Arbib, Simone Bodmer-Turner, Rafael Prieto, Paul Cocksedge, and Marcel Wanders lend their artistic stamp to the oft-overlooked mirror frame. Gallery founder Emma Scully and co-curator Erica Boginsky of Friedman Benda encouraged each designer to explore frames as the artwork itself: design that encloses nothing, ornament that surrounds emptiness, and structure that questions identity. Arbib conceived a Murano glass stunner envisioned as an homage to Venetian architecture, its pale green evoking the canals; Wanders fashioned an egg-shaped mirror whose colorful shards mimic a diamond mid-shatter.
Until December 13
11. “A Shared Scaffolding: Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery x Bruises” at Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery | Tribeca
Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery is fully delivering on its promise to broach topics and dialogues the design world rarely treads. Its latest exhibition, hosted in collaboration with Montreal gallery Bruises, draws inspiration from the architectural attributes of early 20th-century circus tents to plumb the overlooked yet essential structural intricacies that give shape to a complete, singular form. Bruises will debut dream-like, anthropomorphic ceramics by Sylvie Cauchon and metalwork furniture by gallery creative director Florence Provencher-Proulx, joining furniture and objects spanning a breadth of historical time periods. Unexpected dialogues ensue, from an Arts and Crafts bench’s neo-gothic ornamentation conversing with a medieval-inspired chain link structure fashioned by London studio LS Gomma to a Neoclassical-style mirror showcasing a different approach to delicate metalwork from Provencher-Proux’s theatrical furniture.
Until November 15
12. “Luna Paiva: The Seed” at StudioTwentySeven | Tribeca
In her most versatile body of work to date, Franco-Argentine artist Luna Paiva transforms cast-off construction materials into glazed ceramic totems that dance between sculpture and function. Curated and scenographed by StudioTwentySeven founders Nacho Polo and Robert Onuska, the show immerses visitors in a Brutalist dreamscape of modular beams, totem cubes, and whimsical structures that practically beg one to climb them. It marks a gleeful shift away from the Barcelona-based artist’s signature monumental sculptures and toward colorful ceramics and colored pencil drawings that draw from megalithic architecture and playground structures alike. “I discovered the satisfaction of creating climbable, jumpable, and crossable sculptures,” she says, “where beauty becomes useful and ultimately meaningful.”
September 4—November 10
13. “All The World’s a Stage” at Galerie56 | Tribeca
Galerie56 joins forces with stalwart London dealer Themes & Variations for a cross-generational show that rekindles the theatrical spirit of the Creative Salvage movement, which saw scrap and steel transformed into icons of British design. Co-curated by Lee F. Mindel and Liliane Fawcett, the show gathers rare early works by Tom Dixon and André Dubreuil alongside new sculptures by Benedetta Mori Ubaldini and Anna Barlow. Highlights include Dixon’s throne-like Crown Chair (1988), produced by slicing metal into strips with a guillotine and applying gold leaf; Dubreuil’s wrought-iron Desk and Chair (1986), upholstered in leather by Bill Amberg; and Mark Brazier-Jones’s stone-topped Messenger Console composed of dynamic bronze components.
November 7 – January 8, 2026