Though she is still actively pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts at Columbia University, artist Shaina Tabak is hardly a newcomer to the contemporary art world. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in furniture design, Tabak already boasts an impressive resume with more than 20 exhibitions under her belt. Now, she is expanding her creative footprint even further by adding curator to her multifaceted credentials. Her latest venture, 260 Madison, is an ambitious, artist-run exhibition that brings together more than 50 artists across an unusual dual-level venue: a former Duane Reade storefront and a sprawling, 23,000-square-foot commercial office floor directly above it in the heart of Midtown Manhattan.
Tabak’s own artistic practice is equally expansive and multifaceted. Drawing deeply on history, technology, and materiality, she explores the complex relationship between the digital and physical worlds. Her creative process often begins with digitally modeled forms that she meticulously translates into physical sculptures through hands-on fabrication methods, including cutting, perforation, lamination, and extrusion.
However, her fascination with materials extends far beyond their immediate physical and tactile properties. She views them as enduring records of human labor, industrial manufacturing, resource extraction, and everyday use. Her work examines contemporary material culture through a critical historical lens, imagining how the objects and systems we make, value, and consume today might be understood and interpreted generations from now. As she succinctly describes her approach, her sculptures are "less concerned with imagining the future than with creating historical distance from the present."
That insightful perspective comes through vividly in her recent bodies of work, which examine the increasingly blurred line between passive viewing and active shopping. Working out of her Brooklyn studio, the Queens-born artist has been embedding collected industrial objects directly into three-ply cardboard. This deliberate choice references the pervasive packaging and shipping infrastructures that silently sustain modern consumer culture. Furthermore, she is actively exploring the pervasive influence of visual search technologies and algorithmic commerce, where a simple object spotted in an online image can instantly trigger an endless stream of purchasable alternatives. It serves as a sharp commentary on a contemporary culture in which digital images do not merely inspire aesthetic desire; they actively generate immediate financial transactions.
The Project: “260 Madison”
For her high-profile curatorial debut, Tabak drew extensively upon Columbia University’s vibrant MFA community alongside her own wide-reaching network of peers, successfully bringing together a compelling mix of emerging talents and established names. Co-curated by the dynamic artistic duo Dayana Matasheva and Edson Niebla Rodríguez of Demon Lovers, Inc., 260 Madison features works by notable artists such as Simon Denny, Jon Kessler, and Eva and Franco Mattes. The expansive exhibition was organized in close collaboration with the building’s property owner, AmTrustRE, which notably granted the curators full creative control over the vacant spaces.
On view through November 22, 2026, the sweeping exhibition brings together familiar materials, everyday objects, and modern technologies that have been intentionally dismantled, reconstructed, or rendered strange. The raw, unvarnished backdrop of the venue features exposed HVAC ductwork, ripped-out restrooms, and corporate-logo wallpaper, creating a stark and provocative environment for works spanning sculpture, new media, and video installation. Tabak’s overarching goal for 260 Madison is to examine the overarching systems that organize contemporary life—ranging from corporate control, digital surveillance, artificial intelligence, and resource extraction to the tangible material and architectural structures that dictate how we work, move, and live.
In her own words, Tabak shares the specific historical and theoretical influences that shaped her curatorial approach to 260 Madison, drawing inspiration from legendary artist-run exhibitions that challenged traditional institutional boundaries, architectural theories, and iconic sculptures that have long informed her own studio practice.
What Inspired 260 Madison?
Two Exhibitions That Set a Precedent
Discussing the historical framework of her project, Tabak points to two key exhibitions that paved the way for independent, site-specific showcases. "The first one, Damien Hirst’s Freeze (1988), was suggested to me by my professor Jon Kessler," Tabak explains. "Freeze was particularly compelling because it took place amid the redevelopment of London’s Docklands and was itself supported by real-estate developers, revealing the uneasy relationship between artistic independence and the production of urban capital. That history made me particularly conscious of a contradiction in our own project: While 260 Madison temporarily interrupts the building’s commercial function, the exhibition also generates cultural value for a property undergoing modernization."
She also draws a direct line to a more contemporary precedent: Christopher Wool’s See Stop Run (2024). Staged in New York City’s Financial District, that exhibition demonstrated how contemporary artists could operate successfully outside established institutional models by creatively appropriating vacant commercial spaces. "Wool’s exhibition was also installed on a gutted office floor and offered a more immediate architectural reference, allowing the building’s exposed infrastructure and traces of demolition to enter into dialogue with the work," Tabak notes. "With 260 Madison, we wanted to push these precedents even further, treating the vacant corporate office as a material record of changing relationships between labor, capital, and the built environment."
The Writing of Rem Koolhaas
Architectural theory also played a critical role in conceptualizing the exhibition space. The writings of Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas provided a vital intellectual bridge between the physical environment and the artworks on display.
"Rem Koolhaas’ book Delirious New York and his essay ‘Junkspace’ were really helpful in connecting the architecture of the space to the exhibition," Tabak says. "My partner has worked on the 17th floor of 260 Madison for the past three years—a complete coincidence—and his 9-to-5 job as a paralegal brought to mind Koolhaas’ concepts of the vertical schism, architectural lobotomy, and definitive instability as I considered the exhibition’s function."
She elaborates on how these theoretical frameworks manifest physically within a metropolitan high-rise: "All three of Koolhaas’ concepts, in their own ways, describe the Manhattan skyscraper as a structure in which the exterior remains independent of the interior, allowing different floors to accommodate radically different and constantly changing activities without altering the building’s outward appearance."
Rachel Whiteread’s “House” (1993)
Sculptural precedent likewise guided Tabak’s hands-on contributions to the exhibition, particularly her piece Swept Towards Skylight (2026). In creating the work, she embedded an earlier sculptural piece within insulation foam and coated it entirely with cement, producing the distinct visual illusion that the surrounding negative space had been cast solid.
"I was thinking about House, a temporary public sculpture by Rachel Whiteread, when creating my sculpture Swept Towards Skylight for 260 Madison," Tabak notes. "Whiteread’s work transformed the interior of a house slated for demolition into a concrete monument to its former inhabitants and the lives that had occupied it."
This philosophy ultimately defined the entire curatorial ethos of the Midtown project, where the empty office floors continue to whisper stories of the corporate routines that once animated them. Rather than treating the location as a neutral white cube, Tabak embraced its industrial scars.
"I kept returning to this idea while curating 260 Madison, where the vacant office floor still bears physical traces of the labor and routines that once animated it," she says. "I wanted the building to function not simply as a container for artworks, but as an artifact in its own right, with its exposed infrastructure and signs of abandonment becoming part of the exhibition. What interests me about House, and what I hoped to capture at 260 Madison, was how architecture outlives its function and becomes a monument to the systems that once gave it meaning."
260 Madison remains on view through November 22, 2026, at 260 Madison Avenue in New York City.
