'Looking Back' featuring Leon Polk Smith at White Columns, New York, USA

11 February 2025

Until 1 March, White Columns is presents the 15th edition of its annual exhibition 'Looking Back', featuring artist Leon Polk Smith among others, selected by New York-based artist Elisabeth Kley. The exhibition will be presented throughout all of White Columns’ galleries.

Through the recontextualization of artworks encountered in other circumstances, the exhibition hopes to establish a new ‘narrative,’ a conversation of sorts, amongst both artists and artworks that seeks to illuminate and/or explore certain underlying tendencies or connections that might otherwise have remained elusive or obscured. In rethinking aspects of the recent past the exhibition hopes to provoke something akin to a sense of déjà vu, establishing a scenario that is at once both reflective and forward-thinking.

The exhibition hopes to reveal something of the complexities involved in trying to negotiate – and engage with – New York’s constantly shifting cultural landscapes. The format of the exhibition inevitably encourages highly subjective and personal responses to the realities of viewing art in New York City. The annual exhibition series hopes to illuminate aspects of the specific, yet highly idiosyncratic networks – historical, social, aesthetic, etc. – that individuals follow in an increasingly expansive and fragmented cultural environment.

Find out more via White Columns.

Image: Looking Back / The 15th White Columns Annual, installation view, 2025 © The Artists, Courtesy of White Columns New York, Photography by Marc Tatti