Double Bind: Belonging and Its Discontents (curated by Catharine Clark): Off-Site: Fridman Gallery, New York City

Announcing a special off-site exhibition in collaboration with Fridman Gallery (New York) and Catharine Clark Gallery (San Francisco): https://fridmangallery.com/2026/05/27/exhibitions-double-bind-belonging-and-its-discontent-06-30-08-07-2026-2/

Fridman Gallery (New York) and Catharine Clark Gallery (San Francisco) are pleased to present Double Bind: Belonging and Its Discontents, a group exhibition curated by Catharine Clark at Fridman Gallery, New York, featuring works by:

Through drawing, sculpture, textiles, photography, video, installation, painting, and performance, Double Bind explores belonging as both a political condition and a lived experience. While many of the participating artists engage questions of migration, citizenship, public memory, and national identity, the exhibition ultimately asks a broader question: What allows us to feel that we belong?

The exhibition’s title references the paradox at the heart of contemporary belonging. To belong often requires visibility, yet visibility can expose individuals to surveillance, exclusion, or control. To assimilate may provide access and recognition, yet difference remains marked and policed. These contradictions are not abstract. They are experienced through bodies, families, communities, institutions, landscapes, and histories.

Opening Reception at Fridman Gallery, New York  | Tuesday, June 30 | 6 – 8 PM

Curator’s Statement:

Double Bind: Belonging and Its Discontents emerged from a conversation with a collector who observed a common thread running through works she had acquired over more than a decade. Across artists with widely differing backgrounds and approaches, she recognized a shared inquiry into what it means to be American—a story told from many perspectives rather than a single point of view. Her observation prompted me to look more closely at the artists in my own program and to recognize how consistently their work grappled with questions of belonging, national identity, migration, and civic life.

As I spent more time with the works, it became clear that the artists were asking a larger question as well: not simply what it means to belong in America, but what allows us to experience belonging in the first place. Is belonging found through citizenship and legal recognition, or through family, memory, language, labor, compassion, and acts of mutual support? Is it something granted by institutions, or something created through relationships?

The artists gathered in Double Bind approach these questions from many different directions. Together, they reveal belonging not as a fixed condition, but as something continually negotiated, carried, contested, and remade. Their work invites us to consider not only who belongs, but how we come to feel that we belong—in the body, in the home, in community, in collective memory, and in the fragile yet enduring bonds that connect people across distance, difference, and time.”

— Catharine Clark