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NOW: 3RD ST.

June 25 - August 2, 2026

THESE WALLS CAN TALK


Featuring Syd Abady, Aileen Bassis, Isa Dorvillier, Beka Goedde, Beatriz Manteigas, Andy Marlowe, and Flora Wilds.


NEW YORK, NY––All Street Gallery is pleased to announce These Walls Can Talk, a group exhibition featuring seven women artists whose work engages text as both form and force. On view from June 25 through August 2, 2026, the exhibition brings together works across weaving, printmaking, sculpture, quilting, and found image, each rooted in the proposition that art has something to say and demands to be heard. The participating artists are Syd Abady, Aileen Bassis, Isa Dorvillier, Beka Goedde, Beatriz Manteigas, Andy Marlowe, and Flora Wilds.

Text exists in service of legibility. It is the clearest tool we have for communicating directly. Yet the artists in These Walls Can Talk complicate that clarity deliberately: sentences fragment, words drift out of alignment, language is both functional and formal. Rather than failing communication, these works insist on a different kind of reading: one that is active, effortful, and necessarily interpretive. The viewer is not a passive recipient but a participant in the meaning-making process.

The exhibition takes its cues from the long history of the poster as a vehicle for propaganda, protest, and social movements. That lineage is neither incidental nor nostalgic. These works operate in a politically charged register even as they resist alignment behind a single cause. What unifies them instead is a shared politics of labor: the works are handmade, slow, and deliberately craft-based. Weaving, printmaking, quilting, and crochet—practices historically coded as feminine, domestic, and therefore minor—are here elevated as acts of sustained political action, highlighting effort and persistence.  The text within these works is frequently addressed directly to the viewer—as imperative, as inquiry, as challenge—demanding a reckoning not only with the work itself but with the viewer's own position within the systems the work interrogates.



Aileen Bassis, Deportee/Sons, 2026

Aileen Bassis’s work combines found imagery and text drawn from news headlines, rendered in stark black and white, that personify the language of racial justice and political violence. Her pairings of image and text resist any stable truth in either element, asking whether what we read or what we see can ever be trusted on their own terms. The origin of Bassis’ texts and images from art books and news headlines further emphasizes the nature of political truth as it is typically presented. Deportee/Sons, for example, utilizes lithographs of planes used for deportation of Venezuelan men under the Trump administration and text from news coverage around said event to force an evocative confrontation of social reality. Bassis’ work uses news media to draw out an essentially human register of emotion around moments of social unrest and instability. 

Isa Dorvillier's work takes a quieter register, deploying a rhetorical question (“How will you use this crisis?”) as a form that simultaneously highlights and obscures its subject. Reflecting its crocheted form, Dorvillier uses the medium to imbue a sense of fragility to the sentiment. Like Bassis, Dorvillier’s use of text calls upon the viewer to engage with an interpretive and imposing political force. Unlike Bassis, however, whose use of text is solidified in print, Dorvillier’s crochet restricts the text through the medium’s delicate and almost invisible form.

Beatriz Manteigas works with her living environment as both material and collaborator: inscriptions that become legible only through sunlight and shadow, the message becomes dependent on what is absent just as much as what is present. Manteigas’ work bears both thematic and formal similarities to Dorvillier, using text as an address to the viewer, working with rhetorical questions as a means of redress. The formal components that Mantiegas works with play with the same ideas of shadow that Dorvillier is using. While the text extruded from the plate is mostly illegible, the presence of light shadows the text onto the wall. In both artists' pieces, it is absence that allows for meaning and legibility rather than the materials present. 

Beka Goedde's work performs a different kind of dissolution: a literal deconstruction of letterforms that grows increasingly abstract across her two pieces, the text becoming kinetic, the repetition of the loop as both formal strategy and obfuscating force. Goedde’s two “Loops and loops and loops” play with the canvas, literally having the letters of “loop” layer on top of each other in negative space. The layering of the letters infringe onto the legibility of the piece, while the repetition further echoes the single “looping” word. The scored background acts as a live substance swallowing the letters, resisted by the aforementioned repetition. Geodde and Manteigas works both utilize absence as means to contend with text, letting negative space create image and meaning, while simultaneously engaging with text in a critical way.



Syd Abady, Signs [No. 2], 2023


Syd Abady subverts the grammar of signage, the language of property and ownership, by replacing metal with cotton: a gesture that simultaneously lightens the sign and permanently embeds it, the textile baked into the surface it inhabits and unable to be removed. This imposed inextricability complicates the relationship of property and ownership, where the buying of houses, for example, can no longer be separated from the house itself—advertisement and consumption are no longer extractable from the home space.  

Andy Marlowe works in a parallel vein, using the physical materials of construction and shattered glass to distort and collapse language itself. A poem runs across Marlowe's series, describing bodies, violence, suppression, and the strange resolution of erasure, rendered unreadable by the very process of its making. Marlowe’s work purposefully obfuscates the sign as a reflection of the text's central turmoil. The specific use of orange construction signs evokes feelings of warning, which are then reflected in the poem’s caution and erotic violence.  

Flora Wilds quilts the language of commodity and sale, turning the domestic textile practice toward an inquiry of value, urgency, and scarcity. By beautifying the language of clearance, Wilds’ work deliberately slows a process most obviously categorized by its speed. Like Marlowe, Wilds complicates the typical use of language by specifically modifying the language that usually attunes the respective signage. In “Everything Can Go” Wilds subverts the “everything must go” phrasing of typical commerce, not only removing the haste of the process, but the rhetoric as well.  Similar to Abady, Wilds’ work entangles domestic textile work with commercial practice, complicating both aspects relationally.  

All the artists featured in These Walls Can Talk play with the usage of text as content and form. By highlighting both the limits and potential of text. The pieces reckon with the political and social ramifications of what is said, but also potency of what goes unsaid, and the silence that follows in crisis. All of works unburden text and word from the constraints of journalistic truth and toward one of poetic truth. The works draw from intuitive and shared understandings of the malleable nature of language, leveraging that understanding through the pairings of text with certain images and forms to guide the viewer to a more visceral point of interpersonal realization.  

Opening Reception



Install





About the Artists:

Syd Abady is an artist and educator working primarily in textiles to explore ideas of home, belonging, and the environments we move through every day. Her practice draws from architectural imagery, found objects, and fiber techniques to examine how domestic and familiar spaces are shaped by social, political, and emotional forces. She uses the repetitive processes of weaving, needlepoint, and printing to mimic the repetitive urban sociological processes she witnesses. She uses these methods to create works that operate on the border of painting and sculpture. Her parents are Syrian Jews who spent most of their adult lives in New York City before raising her in Los Angeles in the 1990s; they were lifelong renters and theater artists, and Abady’s house was often shared with friends, actors, writers, and artists, who lived with her for months at a time. While her home was rarely empty, the streets outside were often quiet, shaped by a pedestrian-hostile city and the aftermath of the 1992 Rodney King uprisings. These early experiences drive both her art and teaching practice. Drawing from personal history, political policy, historical precedent, and classroom dialogue to ask recurring questions: who is a space for, how do we live together, where do individual agency and collective responsibility meet, and what does it mean to belong without possession?

Aileen Bassis was born in New York City. Her art practice includes book arts, printmaking, installation, and mixed media on paper. She is also a published poet and author of a collection, "Among Sinners and Saints" and two chapbooks. The Consulate General of Spain awarded her a "Mixtures" project residency to create a collaborative project and she received an art education and social practice residency from ProjectArt. Her artists' books are in library special collections including Wellesley, Swarthmore, Rollins College, Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design, MIT, Newark Public Library, King St. Stephen Museum in Hungary and others. Her prints are in the collections of the NY Public Library, Antwerp Museum of Fine Arts, Frans Masereel Center in Belgium and the Nelimarkka Museum in Finland.

Isa Dorvillier is an artist and educator from Queens, NY. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Art in Fiber from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2021. Isa’s work has been shown and supported by The Fabric Workshop and Museum, The Peter Bullough Foundation, Psychic Readings Gallery, Immaterial Projects, Tempest Gallery and All Street Gallery. Dorvillier teaches art in formal and informal settings including Queens Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, and NYC Public Schools. She leads walking tours in Ridgewood and surrounding areas supporting participants to develop embodied awareness of the neighborhood’s topography and ecology both historical and present. In 2026 will serve as Storyteller In Residence with the Newtown Creek Alliance and Melting Metropolis where she will investigate the impact of urban heat on communities surrounding the creek.

Beka Goedde is a sculptor and printmaker who has exhibited work at Al Held Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Galerie Rene Blouin, Soloway, Sunday Takeout , Zane Bennett Gallery, Inside Out Art Museum, Deborah Berke Partners, Assembly Room, and Helen Day Art Center , among other venues. Goedde received an MFA in Sculpture from Bard College, and holds a BA from Barnard College in Behavioral Neuroscience and Philosophy. Goedde has been awarded residencies at Cill Rialaig in Ballinskelligs, Ireland; Obracadobra in Oaxaca, Mexico; Interlude, Yaddo, Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency, Millay Colony, Women’s Studio Workshop, and PS122. Goedde co-founded the design label E for Effort in 2010, which has been carried in the shops of The New Museum, The Jewish Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Whitney Museum in New York, Toledo Art Museum, Available Items, Artware Editions, and Special Special. Goedde has taught at City College New York, MassArt, NYU, and Columbia University, and has been on the faculty of the Studio Arts department at Bard College teaching printmaking, drawing and natural dyes courses since 2015.

Beatriz Manteigas is a Portuguese visual artist whose practice moves between drawing, interdisciplinary approaches, and research-based practices. She earned her PhD in Drawing at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon, in 2022, supported by a scholarship from the FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology – where she is now Professor of Drawing. She also holds an MFA in Artistic Anatomy (2014) and a BA in Painting (2012) from the same institution. In 2016, she co-founded Associação Quinta das Relvas, an ecological farm and cultural association where she currently lives and works, presiding over the board and coordinating the Arts Department. That same year, she became a collaborating researcher at CIEBA – Center for Research and Studies in Fine Arts. Since 2009, her work has been presented in exhibitions and projects across Portugal and internationally, with highlights in Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, England, Scotland, Spain, Turkey, and the USA. Her works are held in both public and private collections in Portugal and abroad.

Andy Marlowe (b. 2000) is an artist and writer from the Forgotten Coast of Florida. They are based in New York City. Their work is an exercise in devotion. In their practice, they juxtapose labor-intensive traditional techniques (paper-cutting, embroidery, and oil painting) against quick, modern methods of production (inkjet printing and laser-cutting). Parallel to this, they are interested in handmaking recreations of manufactured objects and mass-produced images. They look for moments with potential for collision: the faultlines between the rigid and organic, the concrete and the imagined, the contemporary and the ornate, the sterile and the emotive.

Flora Wilds’ practice is committed to a collaboration with found materials, including previously worn clothing, purses, quilts, and other textiles traditionally associated with femininity. She often works with objects that have disparate and gendered histories, that harbor pop-cultural and middle class associations, and that reflect capital and its pace. She is thinking about the language surrounding commodities, learned aesthetics of gender roles, handmade labor traditions within "women's work” and textile production (fast fashion v. quilt making), gestures that complicate and queer the Minimalist sculptural cannon, and material synchronicities that stretch through time. Her work centers the process of deconstruction and reconstruction (via sewing) and is materially and conceptually informed by her youth spent in Southern California.


About All Street Gallery:
Founded in 2018, All Street Gallery is a gallery and platform for emerging and underrepresented artists whose work focuses on social engagement and community empowerment. Initially created as an artist collective and grassroots protest organization, All Street is driven by its roots in the city’s creative community. The gallery’s mission is to use art as a means of protest, resistance, and social change, highlighting voices that challenge the status quo. After opening its first location on East Third Street in the East Village, All Street expanded in 2023 with a second space at 119 Hester Street. Both locations continue to provide a platform for artists whose work addresses important social and political issues.