“Meg Webster creates works that are often fleeting. At 82, with a new show at the Paula Cooper Gallery, now she’s looking for a place in history.”
“You can hear and smell Meg Webster’s latest exhibition before you see it.
Walking up the stairs of Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea, there’s a chorus of birds chirps. Then comes the smell: a dusky, dense scent reminiscent of wet earth. Finally, you walk into the main space and encounter “Thicket,” the show’s titular artwork, a beckoning spiral made of local branches, leaves and flowers.
As visitors to the gallery make their way inside the installation, the bushy walls ascend, swallowing them up. (Once inside, the birds are still audible: it’s a sound artwork called “Nearest Virgin Forest,” which was recorded under Webster’s direction in Hutcheson Memorial Forest in New Jersey, an hour’s drive from New York City.)
The show is her first solo exhibition at Paula Cooper in a decade. It arrives amid growing interest in Webster, an 82-year-old environmental artist who has spent her career staunchly committed to the kind of subtle, ephemeral art that makes it nearly impossible to become rich or famous. Her best-known sculptures include “Wall of Wax” (1990), an eight-foot-tall curved wall of beeswax, and “Moss Bed, King” (1986-88), a low, moss-covered form the size of a king mattress. At the end of every exhibition, she destroys her installations and recycles or returns the materials to nature.”
Julia Halperin reports for the New York Times with visuals by Sara Messinger June 10, 2026.
