EFA OPEN STUDIOS 2026
Schedule
Friday, October 9
4:00 pm – 6:00 pm Professional Preview (by RSVP)
6:00 pm – 9:00 pm Opening Night Registration encouraged
Saturday, October 10
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm Panel Discussion: All History is Contemporary
1:00 pm – 6:00 pm Open Studios
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm Walkthrough of Asilah Oui: Robert Blackburn in
Morocco with Curator Imani Congdon
Location
EFA Center
323 West 39th Street
New York, NY 10018
Free and open to the public.
EFA OPEN STUDIOS
The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts welcomes the public to explore 85 artist studios, along with a host of arts programming and exhibitions, all located in the EFA building in Midtown Manhattan. This event offers a rare opportunity to witness the creative process up close and engage with a vibrant community of professional artists. Our internationally recognized members, each with established studio practices and career honors, will open their doors to showcase their most recent works. Additionally, the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop will be open for special events and tours, providing firsthand experiences of the transformative power of art.
Image: Wafaa Bilal, Domestic Tension, 2007
Programming
Saturday, October 10, 12–1 PM
Panel Discussion: All History Is Contemporary
EFA Gallery | 3rd Floor
Please join us for a lively conversation on where three prominent curators will share recent exhibition projects and their thoughts on curating history in relation to contemporary perspectives. When facing challenges, we turn to history for answers, yet the same historical moments present their own complexities, fractures, and trauma. How do we ascertain, assemble, and respond to the past?
Sean Corcoran
Jody Graf
Dr. Gervais Marsh
Moderated by Lise Kjaer
Saturday, October 18, 2–3 PM
Curator Walkthrough: Asilah Oui: Robert Blackburn in Morocco with Imani Congdon
Study Center | 2nd Floor
Join curator Imani Congdon for a guided walkthrough of Asilah Oui: Robert Blackburn in Morocco, an exhibition exploring the artistic exchange between Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and the Asilah Cultural Moussem in Morocco.
Through a selection of prints, photographs, and archival materials, Congdon will discuss the exhibition's research, the featured artists, and the lasting impact of Robert Blackburn's vision of collaboration, cultural exchange, and international printmaking. Following the walkthrough, attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions and engage in conversation about the exhibition and its themes.
Imani Congdon is a researcher and archivist whose work focuses on the communal, political, and organizational functions of the print shop as a site of artistic innovation and cultural exchange. She is the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Print Collection Archivist and curator of Asilah Oui: Robert Blackburn in Morocco, supported by the Teiger Foundation.
Pathways
Pathways is a curatorial initiative within The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Open Studios program that highlights the creative processes behind contemporary artistic practice. Focusing on works in development as well as completed projects, it offers visitors insight into the research, experimentation, and critical thinking that shape each artist’s journey.
By foregrounding process and dialogue, the initiative transforms the studio visit into an opportunity for deeper understanding and exchange, revealing the many pathways through which contemporary art is imagined, developed, and shared.
Laura Anderson Barbata, Intervención: Wayamou, 2026
Technologies of Resistance
Curated by Cassie Packard
In their socially minded practices, the artists gathered here don’t only expose such structural violences as extractivism, colonialism, imperialism, racism, and ableism. They intervene in the very systems – legal, pedagogical, economic, archival – routinely put in service of these violences and their necropolitical logics, identifying critical openings for resistance and repair.
This pathway futures: Laura Anderson Barbata, Wafaa Bilal, Jason File, Pablo Helguera, Jan Mun, Bundith Phunsombatlert, Finnegan Shannon.
Tamiko Kawata, Divergence, 2023
Generative Repetition
Curated by Dominika Tylcz
Working across painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, these artists explore the generative power of repetition. Through the persistent proliferation of marks, gestures, forms, and ideas, subtle variations accumulate, revealing new layers of meaning. Their sustained investigations engage visual codes, natural structures, architecture, cultural heritage, overlooked objects, and geometry, transforming repetition into a means of heightened perception, deconstruction, and discovery.
This pathway futures: Vicky Colombet, Mahmoud Hamadani, Kate Hopkins, Tamiko Kawata, Armita Raafat, Marjorie Welish, Yu-Wen Wu.
Nazanin Noroozi, Black Milk of Dawn We Drink You at Night #0009, 2026
Bodies of Memory
Curated by Sameer Aurora
Nine artists use everyday materials to reckon with inherited stories, exploring memory, displacement, and belonging. Working in textiles, found objects, painting, film, sculpture, and performance, they treat the body as a living archive of layered, intersectional identity.
This pathway futures: Fanny Allié, Nazli Efe, Watson Mere, Nazanin Noroozi, Whitney Oldenburg, Regina Parra, Yali Romagoza, Jia Sung, A Young Yu.
Exhibitions
Sally Apfelbaum, After Sex with a Spy, 2025
Post Seduction
Floor 3 | EFA Gallery
September 15–December 8, 2026
Opening Reception: September 15, 6–8 pm
EFA Gallery is pleased to present a selection of works that unfold under the rubric of post-seduction, suggesting a value system that integrates disquiet and disorder alongside attraction. There are many registers at play, ranging from the confrontational to the poetic, often lingering in states of aftermath and longing. The works engage seduction as both a visual and conceptual strategy, drawing viewers in while simultaneously disrupting conventional expectations of desire, resolution, and fulfillment.
Artists include: Sally Apfelbaum, Dietmar Busse, Katya Grokhovsky, Rie Hasegawa, Calvin Kim, Cary Leibowitz, Regina Parra, Charlie Perez-Tlatenchi, Armita Raafat, Dena Sturm
Curated by Deric Carner
Detail of Plain Sense
Sarah Leahy, Plain Sense
Floor 3 | EFA Gallery
September 15–December 8, 2026
Opening Reception: September 15, 6–8 pm
EFA Gallery is thrilled to present an immersive wall painting by Sarah Leahy. Spanning 33 feet across two walls, this site-specific commission represents an intensification of Leahy's image-making practice. Rendered in black India ink directly on the white walls of the gallery, Plain Sense is, on the surface, an image of a beech grove. The title cues us to how the artist intends us to experience the work–directly, without special elaboration or recourse to fantasy.
Curated by Deric Carner
Asilah Oui: Robert Blackburn in Morocco
Floor 2 | Study Center
September 15–December 13, 2026
Opening Reception: September 19, 3–6 pm
Asilah Oui: Robert Blackburn in Morocco brings together firsthand accounts and never-before-exhibited prints, photographs, and ephemera from the first decade of the Asilah Cultural Moussem. Established in 1978, the international festival brought together artists, musicians, intellectuals, and poets from around the world.
The exhibition explores Robert Blackburn’s role in connecting the Moussem’s international artists through printmaking, highlighting the creative exchange between the Asilah and Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshops and their intertwined communities.
Curated by Imani Congdon
