Maï Lucas: New York Days
Reception and book signing: 04/10/26 6–8PM
The photographs span nearly two decades: late eighties, nineties, into the early 2000s. From Harlem to East New York, Jamaica Queens, and later in the Heights with her husband and his family. Mostly outside. The block, the stoop, the corner, the car hood. Manhood and womanhood stand side by side, as markers of time, in a world where today it is all a blur. At the time, space feels negotiated, subjects are held up for each other to see. Recording the birth of hip-hop, and composing her own life in the footsteps of jazz and the blues, Lucas’ archive stands as a score for taking part in the act of remembrance.
Summer after summer, Lucas’ days are spent documenting a tension that is specific to New York City: exhaustive joy as a lasting flame of its own conditions. It is obvious to think of resilience when one attempts to decipher the shape of the city: belief. Lucas photographs groups coming together, time bound in love and tenderness, presence, the hustle and the heat.
Lucas returned to the same blocks for years, the same light, the same gatherings. The act of returning to is the one of adoption. She adopts the city in symphony with the city adopting her. These photographs are a cartography of her presence. Where she was, who she was with, what they let her see, and how they let her in.
In 1982, Audre Lorde invented a genre. She called Zami a biomythography: a form that refuses the separation of history, biography, and myth. Lorde grew up in Harlem, the child of Caribbean immigrants who raised her to believe home was elsewhere, a place left behind, longed for, never returned to. Home, for Lorde, had to be made. She made it in the city, in the women who shaped her, in the sustained practice of witnessing. Lorde reminds us that to be transformed by proximity is the constitution of arrival.
–Philo Cohen, 2026
New York Days is Lucas’ first solo exhibition in New York, forty years after her first visit to the city. This exhibition is presented in collaboration with Speciwomen, the non-profit arts organization committed to womxn and LGBTQIA+ artists.
Maï Lucas is a Franco-Vietnamese photographer based in Paris whose work spans art, fashion, and documentary photography. Since her debut in 1986, she has chronicled the emergence of hip-hop culture in France, building close relationships with the young musicians, graffiti artists, and dancers who pioneered the movement. Her bond to New York City is one of many decades during which Lucas has photographed the city from within. Her monographs include Hip Hop Diary of a Fly Girl 1986–1996 Paris and All Eyes On Me (Edition Patrick Frey). Her work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums since 2003. New York Days (Dashwood Projects, forthcoming 2026) is Lucas’ first solo exhibition in New York, forty years of her first visit to the city.
Book
Published by Patrick Frey
First edition
Hardcover
220 pp
9.5 × 11.75 in
$65
More info
Matchbox
2.25 × 1.375 in
$3
Install views by Poyen Chen