Ethan Shoshan: For Those Without A Tribe Opening Reception

lived alongside the artist Geoffrey Hendricks and archivist Sur Rodney (Sur) for almost two decades. The building, an 1813 Federal-style seaman’s boarding house, became a pivotal site in Shoshan’s artistic development. A social experiment for intergenerational living, the Greenwich Street home became a place where art, friendship, history, and everyday life were deeply intertwined. Geoffrey Hendricks, a.k.a. “Cloudsmith,” was an early and pivotal figure in the Fluxus movement and created seminal queer works that challenged the relationship between art, life, and performance. He worked alongside Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts, helping to transform Rutgers University into a hub for avant-garde art and performance, and was Shoshan’s mentor. Sur Rodney (Sur) was an early champion of East Village artists in the 1980s, co-directing Gracie Mansion Gallery, and has been an important force in preserving artists’ legacies through his writing and cultural work. He is also a longstanding member of the seminal Black queer writers’ group, Other Countries. Having lost numerous friends and lovers to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s, they both are witness bearers to a generation of artists, which made living on Greenwich Street more joyous and significant for Shoshan. These formative years at the Greenwich Street home were a period of learning from immensely talented queer elders. The home was a living archive, studio, library, and museum—a place where Shoshan was surrounded by a wealth of knowledge and possibilities, activated through gatherings and performances by an extended community of artists and organizers. For Those Without a Tribe considers home and domestic space beyond the nuclear family as a radical site for artistic practice, activism, mutual aid, and skill sharing. Through a series of large-scale hooked rugs, the work reveals interior spaces and totemic objects using repurposed fabrics and the traditional nineteenth-century technique of rug hooking. The rugs preserve a model of chosen family and communal urban life increasingly threatened by displacement and capitalism. Visitors are invited to walk across the works and move through vignettes of rooms, encountering the rugs as touchstones to the past and reminders that art can be felt, expressed, lived in, and used as a tool for empathy and shared connection. For Those Without a Tribe asks how we preserve the spaces, relationships, and alternative forms of family that have shaped our lives. It offers space for conversations, collective breathing, and a reminder that we are cared for when we are part of a community. The exhibition of rugs is only the first part of this project. If you or someone you know has spent time in a collective living situation and would like to share your thoughts and experiences, Shoshan would love to talk with you in hopes of a future publication exploring these themes. About the Artist Ethan Shoshan is an artist, activist, curator, writer, and social ecologist based in New York City. Living independently from an early age taught him care, resilience, and the importance of community. These values continue to shape his art. Working across media, his practice bridges creativity and social engagement, shedding light on inequity and belonging. Behind the scenes, he supports activist and cultural communities as a technical consultant, seeing no separation between sustaining art and sustaining people. Shoshan has exhibited widely and led programs for queer and unhoused communities. His work transforms personal and collective histories into acts of connection and possibility.