When 52 Walker opened in Tribeca in 2021, it did so with unusual fanfare. The space, founded by Ebony L. Haynes under the umbrella of David Zwirner, was widely framed as a corrective gesture within the commercial gallery system: a Kunsthalle-style venue with an all-Black staff, full curatorial autonomy, and a mandate untethered from the usual pressures of artist representation. The New York Times hailed it as a rare experiment inside a mega-gallery structure, emphasizing both its symbolic and structural ambitions.
Now, four years later, that experiment has quietly entered a new phase.
The Tribeca space known as 52 Walker is officially a David Zwirner gallery space. The change has already taken place, though it has not been publicly announced as such. As of this week, the gallery’s website lists the space as closed “for installation,” with no indication that its mandate has shifted. The most recent exhibition, a critically engaged presentation by Nicole Eisenman, was the final show at 52 Walker as a standalone brick-and-mortar project.
The transition follows Haynes’s promotion last fall to a newly created position at Zwirner. In September, ARTnews reported that she had been named global head of curatorial projects, a role that would extend her reach across the gallery’s international footprint while allowing her to continue overseeing 52 Walker.
What went largely unremarked at the time was that the shift also marked the beginning of the end of 52 Walker as a dedicated physical space.
“It’s now a David Zwirner gallery space,” Haynes told ARTnews recently. “That shift has already happened following the closure of Nicole Eisenman’s exhibition earlier this month. The next show here will be an Isa Genzken show titled ‘Vacation,’ which I am curating, and it will open in March.”
Haynes described the change as an organic evolution rather than a closure. “Everything needs to evolve, and I want to be able to take on new projects and opportunities,” she said. “52 Walker was in one location for four years and will now be more global and nomadic. Hopefully all of that is a part of its legacy, and it’s still forming.”
Her new role enables her to curate across Zwirner’s global network, including New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Hong Kong. “I have an open line to David, and we’re constantly discussing future shows and artists I would like to work on,” she said, adding that she also works closely with a gallery-wide programming group that meets to brainstorm new ideas.
Among her recent and upcoming projects are a Raymond Saunders exhibition in Los Angeles, the Isa Genzken show in New York, and earlier exhibitions such as “Let Us All Be Citizens 2” in London and a Tau Lewis presentation in Los Angeles.
At the same time, Haynes said that 52 Walker was never intended to function solely as a fixed site. “I think of 52 Walker, or 52W, as a curatorial program,” she said. “It was always meant to be broader than a single physical space.”
Going forward, 52 Walker will continue as a nomadic, project-based initiative under Haynes’s direction, with exhibitions staged across Zwirner’s global locations. “It will be clear when something is a 52W exhibition,” she said. “It will be presented as a ‘52W’ show.”
Asked about the staffing model that initially drew so much attention, Haynes said the original team remains part of the project and will continue to work with her on 52W shows and other curatorial projects.
The shift marks a notable contrast with the space’s founding narrative. When the gallery was first announced, David Zwirner framed it as a response to longstanding inequities within the commercial art world, particularly on the employment side. Haynes was granted full autonomy over programming, staffing, and vision, with the freedom to operate at a remove from the gallery’s primary commercial engine.
Over its four-year run, 52 Walker mounted an ambitious and often intellectually demanding program, pairing historical figures with contemporary artists and staging exhibitions that rarely resembled traditional sales shows. Its exhibitions included artists such as Kandis Williams, Arthur Jafa, Nora Turato, Tau Lewis, and Lotus L. Kang, among others.
Unlike its founding, the fact that the space is now being folded fully into Zwirner’s gallery infrastructure has happened with little public comment. A representative the gallery told ARTnews that the former 52 Walker location will now be programmed like other David Zwirner spaces, will present the work of gallery artists and non-gallery artists, and will not operate under a separate curatorial mandate.
The gallery added that the transition was discussed internally as a strategic realignment rather than a closure, the timing of which coincided with Ebony’s promotion and her expanded role, and the fact that the 52W program can, in practical terms, work as a nomadic project.
Zwirner also reiterated that the original goals of 52 Walker have not been abandoned, but rather redistributed. “The 52W program reflects Ebony’s broader curatorial practice, which is largely interested in conceptual and research-based work,” the gallery said. “This will remain the same, but the 52W exhibitions will now be on view at global locations and to global audiences.”
If 52 Walker began as a place, it now exists as a proposition. What that proposition becomes will be determined less by a storefront in Tribeca than by how its curatorial ambitions unfold across a far larger stage.
