January 8 - February 8, 2026

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 10, 4 - 6 PM

440 Gallery is pleased to announce Heart of the City, a solo exhibition of "deeply urban” photography by David Stock. Stock has long drawn inspiration from the rich social landscape in and around Jackson Heights, Queens. In this show, he turns his lens on "the intense rhythms of local streets, crowded with hardworking New Yorkers of every nationality, animated by irrepressible hope and energy." Within the seemingly random flow of the street, Stock discovers coherent scenarios and everyday dramas, offering a colorful portrait of grass roots New York that is both descriptive and evocative.

Stock is a long time photographer and political activist. After graduating from Harvard in 1972, he worked for several decades in gas stations, factories, shipyards and on the docks. Alongside his labor, solidarity, and anti-imperialist organizing, Stock makes photographs that are widely exhibited, published and collected in the US and abroad.

Exhibition venues include Fogg Art Museum, Panopticon Gallery, California Museum of Photography, Museet for Fotokunst, Long Beach Museum of Art, Blue Sky Gallery, California Museum of Photography, Santa Monica College Photography Gallery, University of Sinalóa, UCLA, Casa da Fotografia FUJI, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Powerhouse Arena and dozens of other community and commercial spaces. Heart of the City marks Stock’s fifth one-person exhibition at 440.

In the Project Space:

“Finding the Thread”: Ellen Chuse, Gail Flanery, Hyunju Kim

A thread is a metaphor for the connections between things that link them over time. We think of a storyline, a train of thought, a theme, or a motif as a thread that weaves ideas together. These artists utilize this idea both literally and figuratively, and the title prompts viewers to look closely and discover connections.

Ellen Chuse is best known for her color-saturated acrylic paintings on paper. Pairing archetypal forms with intensely layered color, her paintings contain inherent mysteries and ambiguities of both scale and context. In these new paintings, she returns to the dark spheres that dominated her work about ten years ago. They range from meditative to unsettling, and weave through her body of work as she continues to explore the emotional resonance of color and form.

Gail Flanery’s devotion to trees is longstanding. Her daily walks in Prospect Park provide inspiration for her work, which is primarily printmaking but often incorporates pastel or collage. Flanery uses the linear structure of the leafless trees in winter as the basis for this work. She states, “My imagery is fed by nature.” The branching pattern of trees is a motif that has threaded its way through Flanery’s work for quite some time.

Thread is Hyunju Kim’s medium. The large work, NUBIGI,000,078 is a portrait of her father stitched onto his actual work clothes. Kim explains her use of these specific materials: “My mother’s sewing machine and my father’s rusty, worn-out work clothes were their means of livelihood, but for me they became the tools that fueled my artistic life.” In NUBIGI,000,105 (above), she uses thread worked onto traditional Korean paper to create a three-dimensional still life that references a detail of Paul Cezanne’s Dish of Apples. For Kim, thread is both a medium and a metaphor - a process of repeating and refining, mirroring life’s journey.