If you wish to attend the opening, please RSVP to info (at) nataleadgnot.com. Security at the World Trade Center requires all guests to be on a guest list and to present a valid ID.

Curated by Sarah Walko

“I shall create! If not a note, a hole. If not an overture, a desecration.” — Gwendolyn Brooks

The Women Sculptors Group (WSG) was founded by artist Sarah Bednarek as a series of intimate gatherings of female-identified and non-binary sculptors in New York City. Created to foster connection, support, and exchange, the group grew through collective convenings centered on dialogue, shared learning, and community-building. Today, WSG is a network of more than 350 members across New York City, the tri-state area, and upstate New York. Following Sarah’s passing in 2019, the group has been stewarded by members Alta Buden, Dena Paige Fischer, and Heidi Norton, who continue to sustain and expand its founding mission.

In the End, Everything Gives presents a selection of works by thirty-one WSG members responding to turbulent political, ecological, and social conditions. The exhibition takes its title from a line by Ada Limón, which names both material and emotional states of yielding: “Everything gives way—the shorelines, the house decaying and becoming shrub and moss and haunt, the body that gives and gives until it cannot give anymore.” Here, giving way is not framed as collapse alone, but as a condition that calls making into being. Creation becomes a form of muscular hope—first for oneself, then extending outward—through which artists hold, shape, and reckon with the complexities of the present moment.

In this context, making emerges not as a search for answers, but as an urgent act in itself. “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song.” First appearing in Joan Walsh Anglund’s 1967 book A Cup of Sun and later taken up by Maya Angelou, this idea finds resonance in Brooks’s declaration above. Together, these voices point to art as something born not only of inspiration, but also of grief, rage, and injustice. I shall create! becomes the shared cry of this exhibition. Across the works on view, materials range from watercolor, clay, plaster, steel, paper, and canvas to vintage prayer books, horsehair, eelgrass, antelope hide, and horns. Through varied materials, gestures, and forms, these artists insist on the necessity of creation itself. The works do not offer resolution, but they do offer care—affirming making as a collective act of attention, endurance, and survival.

Exhibition Dates: January 23 – April 3, 2026
Opening Reception: January 23, 6–8pm

Location: Silver Art Projects
Four World Trade Center, 28th Floor
150 Greenwich Street
New York, NY 10007