Marcus Manganni: The NADA Booth You Can’t Walk Past

Some artists make work about experience. Marcus Manganni makes work that is the experience — compressed, transfigured, and, in its way, devastating.

1,600 razor blades, assembled by hand. Manganni's chandelier at Silver Art Projects, World Trade Center,

Manganni bends light into thought: he traces its edge, gathers its sliver, and builds structures that do the radical thing art is meant to do—make you see. We had the chance to view the chandelier a few weeks before NADA at Silver Art, where Gregory Alan Thornbury, PhD, oversees a residency program tirelessly supporting artists and expanding their possibilities. Manganni was in the studio finishing pieces, working with an almost ceremonial patience and riffing on new ideas, while the chandelier read extravagant from across the room and revealed its menace up close.

At first glance the chandelier reads like opulence, a ceremonial object fit for a lobby or cathedral, until the material asserts itself. It is assembled from some 1,600 razor blades and steel, each clipped and placed by hand, so that from a distance light suggests arrival and status. Up close the piece is all edge, labor, and warning. The same discipline animates Untitled Triptych (2026), where surgical gauze and fluorescent light sit between evidence and elegy: gauze remembers wounds, fluorescent light remembers institutions, and together they refuse to choose between beauty and damage.

The light at the World Trade Center has it’s own magic: Manganni’s finished pieces and new objects.

Studio Visit at Silver Art Studio.

Manganni discovered his method in a practice of patient observation by tracking the daily movement of a sliver of light and learning to measure time by it. From those small gestures he taught himself to coax reflection and focus from the humblest materials. That persistence, applied now at a larger scale, gives the work its hard, quietly moral force.

A Silver Art resident this past year, Manganni has had the space and infrastructure to realize ambitious pieces; seen in that particular light, his work absorbs its surroundings without becoming ornamental. His reach already extends into the public realm—permanent installations across Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, Nashville and Memphis—and institutional shows and collections have quietly followed, building toward the kind of attention fair week accelerates.

Untitled Triptych, 2026. Surgical gauze, fluorescent light. Trotter&Sholer, NADA New York 2026.

Marcus Manganni, Silver Art Projects resident 2025–2026, showing with Trotter&Sholer at NADA New York, May 13–17.

This week he shows with Trotter&Sholer at NADA New York; the Lower East Side gallery’s artist-forward program is exactly the right home for these objects. In a fair often given to volume and theater, Manganni operates on a different frequency: not louder, not angrier—simply more exacting, and more honest about what it takes to make something luminous out of materials designed to diminish you.

Don’t walk past this booth.

NADA New York, Starrett-Lehigh Building, 601 West 26th Street. Open to the public Wednesday, May 13, 4–7pm; Thursday–Saturday, 11am–7pm; Sunday, May 17, 11am–5pm.