Current Columbia Students Curate and Launch Artist-Run Exhibit '260 Madison'
Visual Arts students Shaina Tabak and Dayana Matasheva created, curated, and launched an artist-run group exhibit across two spaces of the AmTrustRE’s 260 Madison Avenue office building, located at Madison Avenue and 39th Street. The curation team also includes Matasheva’s partner, Edson Niebla. Together, they form an art collective called Demon Lovers Inc.
260 Madison (39th Street and Madison Avenue) utilizes a former Duane Reade on the lower levels of the building, as well as a former office-space on the 14th floor, and features fifty artists, including Columbia Visual Arts students Ben Shirken, Chris Crary, Matasheva, Tabak, and alums Alison Nguyen '23, Char Jere '23, Eugene Jung '26, Grayson Cox '10, Kristin Walsh '17, Leigh LeDare '08, Miguel Gallego '26, Miles Scharff '25, Sasha Fishman '24, Soomin Kang '26, Yasue Maetake '06, Yehwan Song '26, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Visual Arts David Humphrey, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Sound Art Ivana Dama, Professor and Concentration Head of Sculpture Jon Kessler, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Visual Arts Liz Magic Laser, and Visual Arts staff member Ben Gould.
Working across sculpture, new media, and video, the artists’ work intervenes in a space with an almost utopian, formless, disorienting feel, the product of late-stage capitalism and 20th century modernism, a condition diagnosed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas as “Junkspace.”
“What initially interested me was the opportunity to work within a space that was never intended for art,” Tabak told me over email. “The exhibition occupies an entire former office floor in Midtown Manhattan, a place built around systems of labor, commerce, and productivity, now temporarily suspended between uses. Rather than trying to neutralize the architecture and turn it into a conventional gallery, we wanted the building's existing conditions to remain visible and become part of the exhibition. There's something compelling about inserting art into the machinery of the city at a moment when that machinery has temporarily stopped functioning.”
The exhibit stretches multiple levels of the multi-floor building. On the lower level, art takes the place of the makeup and medicine aisles of the former drugstore, set against toxic-green paint and under surviving lightboxes that read, "WHAT I NEED NOW" and, "HOW I LOOK," an homage John Carpenter sci/fi horror film They Live (1998).
The exhibition is accessible via security escorts who take visitors through the building’s 14th floor—“a post-cubicle necropolis,” according to the press release. On this upper level, exposed HVAC, ripped-out toilets, and corporate logos surround pieces of art that might be seen in a home exploring the various organization systems of contemporary life—“from control, surveillance, AI, and extraction to the material and architectural structures that shape how we work, move, and live.”
“The show needed to acknowledge its architecture, rather than exist in the vacuum of a white cube or black box,” Matasheva said over email.
“My own work is concerned with the relationship between materials, technology, industrial production, and the human hand. I'm interested in the systems that determine how things are made, what we assign value to, and how objects shape our understanding of the world,” Tabak added. “As a sculpture student, it was especially exciting to bring together artists from different generations whose work approaches materiality, technology, and the built environment in radically different ways. Curating this exhibition became a way of pursuing some of those questions on a much larger scale, through the work of artists whose practices I've admired and followed for years.”
260 Madison, which is free and open to the public, will run until November 22, 2026. The exhibit hours are 12 am to 10 pm, Fridays through Sundays.