Art is never
the object alone.
Anne-Laure Lemaitre shapes places
where makers and viewers belong.
For the latest ‘State of Art,’ the NY-based curator reflects on art beyond the white cube, the work that reignited her love for it and why 2026 feels wide open.
Anne-Laure Lemaitre has long been interested in what happens when art is given more room to move.
Based in New York, the curator specializes in large-scale, in-situ projects, splitting her time between consulting for a range of clients, including Fortune 500 companies, and managing curatorial programs centered on emerging artists. Rather than treating architecture as a backdrop, her work often considers how an artwork can respond to, occupy and transform the space around it.
It makes sense, then, that two of the exhibitions that have stayed with her most this year took place far outside the conventional gallery model. One unfolded inside an empty Brooklyn office, while another took over six floors of a building in Jersey City. For Lemaitre, their appeal was not simply their scale, but the ambition behind them: independent curatorial projects using underutilized spaces to create something rigorous, unexpected and alive.
That same appetite for work that expands beyond familiar formats runs through her assessment of the art world in 2026. She sees an industry in transition, but also one filled with artists and organizers testing new ways of working, gathering and reaching audiences.
For the latest edition of State of Art, Lemaitre discusses the exhibitions still on her mind, Lesley-Anne Cao’s haunting “Amphibian Palm,” the artists she would invite to dinner and why she gives the art world a B-minus.
What’s the one show from the first half of this year that you can’t stop thinking about?
There are a few, but I’ll mention two. Both are very different, but function on a similar principle.
The first would be The Gallery’s WeWork (oralmoral), an evolving group show put together by Florian Meisenberg in an empty office space in Brooklyn. It showcased site-responsive works by so many artists I respect and adore, such as Cato Ouyang, Craig Jun Li, Kyle Clairmont Jacques, Shaina Tabak, Brian Oakes, Anna K.E., Fin Simonetti and Pol Morton, among many others. It also offered free daily co-working space for artists alongside extensive, thorough and sharp programming on site.
The second is Six Artists. Six Floors. Six Solo Exhibitions., Gladwell Projects’ takeover of six floors of a building in Jersey City to organize solo presentations by Chunghee Yunm, Vamba Bility, Lisu Vega, Trevor Warren, Purvai Rai and Chiffon Thomas, a personal favorite. The quality of the show rivaled what you can see in major institutions. I’m quite in awe of what Christina Ine-Kimba Boyle organized on her own.
The scale and magnitude of both endeavors were thoroughly impressive. Both utilized vacant spaces to showcase rigorous curatorial projects with bite and a vision, and both felt incredibly fresh in an art world everyone seems convinced is in crisis.
Did any artwork actually make you feel something real this year, or has everything felt a little flat?
I’d say “Amphibian Palm” by Lesley-Anne Cao has definitely made an impact on me. The work presents a series of “books” in water tanks, with the pages flipping at random underwater.
It’s a visually striking and haunting work that brings to mind many layers of thought around accessibility, knowledge, bias and presence. It’s quite conceptual, yet mesmerizing and emotional. Lesley-Anne is the type of artist who makes me want to fall in love with art all over again.
I first saw a version of the work in the Philippines during a fair, then showed another iteration of it in Mexico City at THIRD BORN earlier this summer.
What’s a show you have marked on your calendar for the rest of the year and why?
I usually don’t plan too far ahead when it comes to what I may see or why. I tend to be very impulsive and just schedule as I go.
If you had to give the 2026 art world a report card grade right now, what is it and why?
Probably a B-minus. I’m seeing so much creative energy that I’m excited to see unfold, but I also understand it’s a transitional phase, which comes with quite a bit of growing pains and confusion.
What’s one trend in the art scene you want to see go away and what’s one you want to see more of?
I’d love to see fewer comments and analyses about the art world’s state, its shifts and what they may mean dominating conversations around art overall.
Instead, I’d love to see more concrete, direct support for endeavors, artist-led or otherwise, that are navigating new ways to exist and connect with their public within our broader current context.
If you can sum up the art world right now in exactly three words, what would they be?
Changing. Exciting. Challenging.
If you could grab a drink or meal with any artist tonight, living or dead, who would it be and what’s the first thing you’re asking them?
It kind of changes every day. Last week I would have said Öyvind Fahlström and would have asked him about his way of infusing political criticism and subversion into his practice.
Before that it could have been Derek Jarman, Ana Mendieta, Artemisia Gentileschi, Hélio Oiticica, Nam June Paik or so many others.
When it comes to living artists, David Hammons, Rossella Biscotti, Emeka Ogboh or perhaps, today, Francis Alÿs. I’d ask him how he has, over and over again, so magically created such powerful spaces for attention and emotion through simple gestures.
Photo: Alexander Laurent Rubalcava
Anne-Laure Lemaitre is a curator, writer, and producer based in New York, Paris, and the Nova Scotia wilderness. Her practice begins by questioning a territory: its physical and emotional dimensions, its history, its context, its belonging, before turning to the art it calls for. This orientation has shaped a body of work spanning the most experimental corners of the emerging art world and leading corporations and public institutions.
Many artists she has worked with early in their careers have since gone on to significant critical and market recognition. Those relationships rarely end with the exhibition. For several, she remains a resource: someone to think with, exchange with, workshop with.
For nearly twenty years, she has worked across scales and contexts: from intimate solo exhibitions at artist-run spaces to permanent public commissions, from single-artist career conversations to cultural programs spanning five continents. Her practice is built around the specific rather than the repeatable, treating the space, the institution, the sidewalk, and the online environment each as curatorial material in its own right.
Lemaitre writes regularly about art for catalogues, publications, and for herself. Her writing, whether commissioned or not, tends toward the felt rather than the prescribed: a belief that how we speak about a practice, and what it does to us, shapes how it is seen and received.
Intentional art programs · Site-specific commissions
Curatorial strategy · International practice
Art In Context is a curatorial production practice whose work ranges from international public commissions, corporate collections and multi-venue cultural strategies to ongoing collaborations with artists, brands and cultural institutions.
Every project begins with the same questions: what does this place need, what story belongs here, and who should tell it. That orientation shapes everything from artist selection and fabrication to the logic of how a program holds together in one location or across multiple sites.
Drawing on nearly twenty years of work, Art In Context has built the infrastructure to operate anywhere and at any scale. An extensive network of creative partners allows it to move from a single commission to a coordinated program spanning dozens of sites without losing the specificity that makes a project land. Art In Context works worldwide.