Mishkin Gallery: Exhibition Opening | Christian Hincapié: Decisions at a Desk

Mishkin Gallery
Baruch College (CUNY)
135 E. 22nd Street, Ground Floor
New York, NY 10010

Mishkin Gallery is pleased to present Decisions at a Desk, a solo exhibition by Christian Hincapié, on view from September 25 through December 5, 2025. Encompassing drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, this exhibition emerges from Hincapié’s extensive research across municipal archives and site visits throughout New York City. Expanding on a project Hincapié developed between 2018 and 2019, the works on display investigate decorative motifs found within the Harlem section of Riverside Park—in particular, four shackled monkey statues that were installed at the entrance of the 148th Street playground’s restrooms. In Hincapié’s project, these sculptural forms act as a prism towards understanding the subtle ways that pernicious ideology is designed into the built environment and the structures of cultural memory that further entrench it.

Hincapié first visited the playground in 2018, after reading a brief mention of the statues in The Power Broker (1974), Robert Caro’s expansive biography of Robert Moses, the longtime New York City Parks Commissioner and infamous city planner. He began documenting the statues’ material presence in the park and searching for official traces of their existence and provenance in various city archives. Dating from the playground’s development by Moses in the 1930s, the motif of the shackled monkey is evocative of racist and colonialist symbolism that glorifies Western dominance over objects, animals, and people through exoticization and display. The statues remained in the park for nearly a century, until they were removed by the Parks Department in 2023.

In this exhibition, Hincapié adopts the visual language of architectural drawings and recontextualizes found archival documents to address social and material histories of the built environment. The works include inverted photographic diazotype blueprints, monumental site-specific rubbings, and a negative impression of one of the monkey figures captured in a sunken relief sculpture made from kneaded eraser putty, a gesture that conjures their eventual removal. Keenly attuned to the whims of public discourse and social memory, Hincapié has assembled a counter-archive through which to contend with the afterlife of these now-removed statues, as well as the broader landscape of racialized urban planning.

Decisions at a Desk is Hincapié’s first institutional solo exhibition, marking the first time this project has been presented in New York. The exhibition is organized by Alexandra Tell, Interim Director of Mishkin Gallery. It is made possible by Friends of the Mishkin Gallery, the Schindler-Lizana Fund, and the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College (CUNY). Additional support is provided by The Jenni Crain Foundation, an initiative dedicated to preserving the legacy of the esteemed artist and curator.

Christian Hincapié is a Colombian-American visual artist. His work is multidisciplinary and expansive, incorporating projects in drawing, photography, assemblage, printmaking, and the artist book form. He has exhibited through the Public Art Fund; La Mama Gallery; Mana Contemporary; NARS Foundation; High Tide Gallery, Philadelphia; and various artist-run spaces in the Tri-state area. In 2018, he participated in the Palazzo Monti residency in Brescia, Italy. In 2021, he was a Keyholder Resident at the LES Printshop and was included in a three-person exhibition at Abrons Arts Center in the Lower East Side, alongside artists Emily Jacir and Rose Salane. In 2022, he was a printmaking fellow at the Vermont Studio Center and in 2023, he was a Sculpture Resident at 51 CTH in Roskilde, Denmark. His work and writing have been featured in The Brooklyn Rail and Viscose Journal, among other publications. He attended Yale Norfolk School of Art in 2012, and received his BFA from the Cooper Union in 2013. In 2020, he received his MFA from Rutgers University. He teaches printmaking at Parsons School of Design and drawing at the Cooper Union Summer Art Intensive Program.