Meg Webster: Thicket in CULTURED Magazine

Here’s What Art to See in New York Before the Wave of Summer Group Shows Hits

Plan your air-conditioned field trips to the major museums and peruse our sweaty under-the-radar gallery picks with our June guide to the city's art-world offerings.

Meg Webster

Paula Cooper Gallery | 521 West 21st Street
Through July 24, 2026

Like a coda to her long-running exhibition at Dia Beacon, which closed in April, Meg Webster’s “Thicket” at Paula Cooper Gallery presents, for its centerpiece and title work, a simple large-scale form, anchored in the olfactory. But, if at Dia, the artist’s sculpture (including a curved wall of fragrant beeswax, a dome of soil) fell into inescapable dialogue with the canonical Minimalism and Land art of the institution’s collection, here, it seems to breathe easier. Thicket is an oasis on its own terms: an Elysian cul-de-sac of bunched-together branches, berries, and grasses, an abbreviated spiral that leads visitors—one or two at a time—to its center in a single whorl. Elysian may be the wrong descriptor, though, for this un-idealized, unsentimental, decidedly impermanent gift to the senses which retains its wildness, despite its carefully molded structure. The small, upstairs gallery smells like warm dirt, a flowering meadow, and brush, exquisite scents of desiccation and impending decay. —Johanna Fateman