Best by 07/21/2026: The Residency

Eli Klein Gallery is pleased to present Best by 07/21/2026 a residency-then-exhibition featuring artists Clare Hu, Tianyi Sun, and Shaan Ken Rao, opening on its own expiration date. Following At-Will Adaptation (2024), the gallery’s residency program returns this year for its second installment, running from July 21st and culminating in a three-artist exhibition on Thursday, September 17th. The three artists, working in various mediums such as sculpture, weaving, painting, and photography, will create entirely new bodies of work using Eli Klein Gallery as their studio. The gallery will be open to the public during normal business hours throughout the duration of the residency.

“Can the concept of the human survive discovering how the “sausage” of us is actually made, what we really look and smell like at the cellular level?”

This question, raised by the writer and scholar Sophie Lewis in her catalog essay “New Wombs for Old Men” of the New Museum’s inaugural exhibition “New Humans,” challenges the default practice of separating the maker from their associated defecations during the formation of a public-facing identity. On a metaphorical and non-visceral level, contemporary art’s birth-giving process today resembles an ectogenesis, with the “sausage-making” process susceptible to both curated previews and packaged commercialization. An artist’s studio is only alive when it breathes and excretes, and more so when the discarded substances are studied, categorized, archived, and recycled. 

If artistic production generates its own forms of excretion, "Best by" borrows from the language of a system that organizes such distinctions: product packaging, where expiry dates sort the viable from the expired. These dates make disposal feel inevitable and predetermined as though an object’s ending was written the moment of its making. The art world is no exception to expiry logic. In a climate of rising costs, contracting budgets, and institutional retrenchment, galleries are shedding artists and staff, recalibrating toward the marketable—what some might call a search for the institution's "soul.” Yet it is rarely the boldfaced names that go. Biennials and art fair cycles operate on the same logic, determining who and what is current, emerging, and relevant—and by extension, what has been spent. 

Residencies, in particular, are temporary by design, existing in the threshold between process and product, between studio and exhibition. What it protects, however briefly, is duration—the right of a work to remain unfinished, not yet fixed as a commodity. In a climate where the pressure to produce sellable and institutionally legible work has never been more acute, the residency insists on holding open the space of making itself. Best by opens on its own expiry date, July 21st. These three artists work with what the system already disposed of—cultural memory, technological infrastructure, the human body.