In the Heat of Becoming Opens Next Week

March 18 – April 11, 2026
Wednesday – Saturday, 1–6 PM, and by appointment

Opening Reception
Thursday, March 19, 6–9 PM

325 Broome Street, New York, NY 10002

There is a moment, in any act of making, where the outcome is not yet known. The material has been touched but not resolved. The decision has been made but not delivered.

In the Heat of Becoming was assembled around exactly this tension: work that makes visible the moment before settlement, when everything is still in play.

Twenty artists across painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography — not because they share a style or a subject, but because their work enacts, rather than describes, transformation. These are not pictures of change. They are change itself — held in suspension, made tangible in oil and steel and glass and charcoal and ink.

Aleksandra Scepanovic · Betsy Jacks · Bill Buchman · Carin Kulb Dangot · Elizabeth Johnson · Heather Abshire · Jason Fondren · Jessica Tobin · Katsura Okada · Lisa Lee Freeman ·
Lucianna Ania · Maki Hajikano · Marieken Cochius · Marina Chistyakova · Megan Reilly ·
Noah Alexander Isaac Stein · Patti Jordan · Sandra Cavanagh · Sara C. Sun · Svetlana Askenazy

The iridescent powders shift with the light — gold one moment, then silver, then something close to violet. Jordan maps the formation of an unnamed star cluster at a scale so intimate it feels personal, as if the universe assembled itself at your desk. Anonymous Star Cluster 006k has no catalog entry, no place in any official record. That namelessness is part of the work. You are watching something become before it can be claimed.

Buchman has been painting and playing jazz for fifty years, and this canvas holds both practices at once. There is the loose urgency of improvisation — marks that move the way a phrase moves, forward and sideways and back — and underneath it, a structural logic that makes the whole thing breathe. At 52 by 72 inches, it has an opinion about the room it enters. It gives back more than it asks..

The crown of the figure opens. The face softens toward dissolution. Scepanovic spent years reporting on the Balkan conflicts before turning to clay, and she understands what it means for a surface to give way under sustained pressure. The Erosion works that knowledge through: what the fired clay has surrendered matters less than what it has become. The figure that remains is distilled, essential, and permanently mid-transformation. It does not mourn what it has lost.

Collective Z was founded with the belief that the most vital art is art that refuses to explain itself — work that creates conditions for experience rather than providing conclusions.

In the Heat of Becoming is this belief made physical.

Come stand inside the heat of it.

Admission is free. Gallery hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 1–6 PM. By appointment: [email protected]