Paula Cooper Gallery has opened a group exhibition that looks back to the New York art world of the 1970s through the intertwined lives of the gallery, its artists and their families. Art is for the Spirit: Records of the Self, organised by Ivy Shapiro, is on view at 521 West 21st Street from 29 October to 12 December 2026.

The show gathers work by Jennifer Bartlett, Jonathan Borofsky, Robert Gober, David Hammons, Kazuko Miyamoto, Ree Morton, Elizabeth Murray and Joel Shapiro, exploring the home and autobiography as tools for grounding the self. It is anchored in Shapiro's memories of her own childhood, and in the close-knit world her father, the artist Joel Shapiro, inhabited alongside Paula Cooper's artists.

Joel Shapiro and Jonathan Borofsky both first exhibited at Paula Cooper Gallery in 1969, the year Ivy Shapiro was born. Borofsky's contribution recalls Counting, the serial project in which he wrote consecutive numbers on graph paper in an attempt to reach infinity, while Bartlett's dotted paintings from the early 1970s began to incorporate childlike houses with pointed roofs.

Other works in the show carry the same charge of memory. In the early 1970s Robert Gober was working for Cooper as a preparator and making dollhouses, adapting the carpentry skills his father had used to build the house he grew up in. David Hammons's body prints, begun in 1968 by pressing skin directly to paper, offer vulnerable, non-idealised images of real bodies under pressure, while Ree Morton's narrative drawings, made soon after she moved to New York in 1972, open onto a childlike world with hints of foreboding.