NYU Steinhardt Art Gallery 80WSE Presents Exhibitions Featuring Manga and Other Drawings

NYU Steinhardt’s art gallery, 80WSE, presents two exhibitions that celebrate drawing as an intimate and immediate art form. 

Beetles, Cats, Clouds: The Manga of Tsurita Kuniko, Yamada Murasaki, and Kondoh Akino showcases the work of three influential women artists who create manga, the Japanese comics and graphic novels that are popular around the world. The exhibition includes manga drawings, sketches, illustrations, animated shorts, and printed books and magazines, most never before publicly displayed, even in Japan.

Curated by Ryan Holmberg, a leading art historian, editor, and translator of alternative manga, Beetles, Cats, Clouds features Tsurita Kuniko, Yamada Murasaki, and Kondo Akino, artists who have pushed the boundaries of the medium by defying gender conventions and challenging artistic and social norms. The exhibition follows the evolution of manga from the 1960s into the 2000s.

Escapements features six artists whose work mediates different worlds. Jesse Chun, Taína Cruz, Hamishi Farah, Mark Lombardi, Adam Putnam, and Mark Van Yetter explore the tensions between heaven and earth, presence and transcendence, and freedom and constraint. The exhibition title refers to the mechanism in a timepiece that releases stored energy as regulated movement. It serves as a metaphor for the illusion of control and stability that springs from raw energy.

The exhibitions open September 10 and continue through January 24, 2026.

80WSE Curator Howie Chen chose two different shows—presented in distinct styles—to examine the intimate nature of the medium.

“Because of its directness in mark making, drawing feels unmediated. There’s an intimacy, and immediacy to it,” Chen explains. “I think about drawing as a one-on-one encounter, and I wanted to explore it from unexpected curatorial perspectives.”

Visitors to the gallery will enter Beetles, Cats, Clouds first, where they will find comics presented in an art exhibition context. Holmberg, who is the author of The Translator Without Talent (Bubbles, 2020) and Garo Manga: The First Decade, 1964-1973 (Center for Book Arts, 2010), has contributed essays and reviews to leading art publications and advised on manga-related exhibitions at the British Museum and the Honolulu Museum of Art. He has selected three artists and a range of work to explore themes of youth culture, motherhood, and gender.

Flowing directly from the first three rooms is Escapements, which is presented in dramatic fashion across the next three connected galleries. The group exhibition includes depictions of Christian martyrs, mechanical drawings, colonial allegories, and mystical worlds.

“The exhibition design for the shows are very distinct. I hope that visitors will find a new enchantment from these surprising and often rare works we are featuring,” Chen says.

Beetles, Cats, Clouds includes:

Kondoh Akino (b. 1980) debuted in AX magazine in 2000 and lives in New York City. Her comics include surreal stories, romantic comedies, and diaristic pieces. She also works as a fine artist, exhibiting drawings, paintings, and animated videos internationally. She chronicles her life in the city in the ongoing series New York Diaries. An English translation of her 2004 debut, Beetle, is forthcoming.

Tsurita Kuniko (1947–1985) began drawing shōjo manga, a category targeting an audience of adolescent girls and young women, for rental libraries in the mid-1960s. Her stature grew after she joined the alternative magazine, Garo, in 1965. The magazine was known for experimentation and progressive politics, and Tsurita remained its only regular woman contributor until the late 1970s. Her work is collected in The Sky Is Blue with a Single Cloud (Drawn & Quarterly, 2020).

Yamada Murasaki (1948–2009) began cartooning in 1968 with COM magazine, and her early work depicted the challenges of growing up as a woman in conservative Japan. She paused her career in 1973, when she married and began having children, but she returned soon after to support herself, gaining attention as the “single mother cartoonist.” Her best-known work includes Sassy Cats (1979–80), Talk To My Back (1981–84), and A Blue Flame (1983–84), which was adapted into the 1986 film, Bed-In.

Escapements features:

Jesse Chun works across moving image, drawing, sculpture, and sound, centering on her concept of “unlanguaging.” Drawing from Korean folk and shamanic traditions, as well as diasporic and familial archives, she has developed a material vocabulary that evokes alternate semiotics and untranslatable temporalities. Her drawings include meticulously hand-cut and drawn asemic scripts on hanji paper, inspired by shamanic talismanic paper-cutting and her grandmother’s Buddhist writing. In HERE 시: concrete poem (no.041924), 2024, drawing becomes a time-based meditation, with thousands of graphite lines, cuts, and shadows conjuring non-linear passages of meaning, mediating spiritual and material worlds.

Taína Cruz’s practice spans painting, sculpture, and video, drawing on pop imagery, online subculture, and personal archives to create a surreal visual language. Blending satire, horror, and seduction, her avatars—elves, goblins, and sirens—bring together contemporary image worlds, art history, and post-colonial narratives, serving as allegories for mythology, selfhood, and transformation. In recent drawings, these figures emerge gradually, their slow formation generating a charged stillness with bodies suspended between tenderness and disappearance, or bracing with a psychic anticipation as if the body senses what the mind has yet to comprehend.

Hamishi Farah uses conceptual and figurative painting to bring together subjects that invoke what he terms the “colonial libido,” including Christian iconography, power systems and visual allegory. Most recently, Farah has turned his attention to explorations of Christian martyrdom, with his latest paintings taking Saint Sebastian as a central subject. These works depict the saint’s arrow-pierced body as an enduring Renaissance motif and an askew symbol of resilience, strength, and transcendence within our contemporary moment.

Mark Lombardi developed a drawing-based practice known for intricate “narrative structures” that map complex networks of power, institutions, and capital rendered in a web of lines and notations. Study for World Finance Corporation 7th Version, 1999, offers a rare glimpse into a study drawing based on his extensive research, using syndicated news and public sources to chart the role of the World Finance Corporation, a global conglomerate tied to drug trafficking and money laundering in the 1970s.

Adam Putnam’s practice spans photography, drawing, sculpture, film, and performance, investigating the boundaries between architecture, nature, the physical body, and the internal self. His imagery frequently returns to motifs such as holes, obelisks, and towers—forms that collapse distinctions between interior and exterior and presence and absence. Visualizations (Escapement Annex), 2025, a series of postcard-sized ink drawings, builds on earlier series that form an archaic diagram of the unconscious. A new drawing from this work will be displayed each day of the exhibition.

Mark van Yetter engages in drawing and painting, realized in pastel and oil on paper and often presented in artist-made frames. His compositions elude simple narratives, inviting contemplative engagement with the depicted subjects and the compressed spaces they inhabit. Embedded in van Yetter’s tableaus, landscapes, and portraits are pointed reflections on society, including culture, power, alienation, and modernity.

The gallery takes its name from its location at 80 Washington Square East in Greenwich Village. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 6 p.m. The opening reception is September 10 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

About 80WSE
Founded in 1974, NYU Steinhardt’s 80 Washington Square East Gallery is a not-for-profit gallery presenting contemporary and historical exhibitions. Its calendar features student and professional exhibitions. The main gallery is open Tuesday-Saturday from noon to 6 p.m. Its two other locations, Broadway Windows at E. 10th Street and Broadway, and Washington Square Windows, next to the gallery, are on view 24/7. For more information, visit 80WSE.org

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