CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/8/2026

Maï Lucas reception and book signing at Dashwood Projects

Friday, April 8 from 6 to 8 PM, Dashwood Projects presents the opening reception of Maï Lucas: New York Days and a book signing for Maï Lucas: All Eyes On Me, published by Edition Patrick Frey. The show will be on view through May 23 at Dashwood's East Village gallery, located at 63 East 4th Street between Bowery and Second Avenue. Preorder the book here.

One summer evening in 1986, Maï Lucas arrived in New York, she was supposed to stay with a distant aunt who had assured she’d meet her in front of Lincoln Center. At 10PM, still with no sighting of the woman, she waited on a street corner without a way to reach her. Lucas ended up bumping into a couple on the street as she waited, two men heading downtown, offering her a couch for the night. Lucas’ stories in New York are hard to make sense of without asking questions of fate, of connection, of safety, until one witnesses how she unfolds in her day. She is a precise, fierce and trusting presence, curious and open to the unknown. Over the years, friends of friends, musicians, brothers and girlfriends showed her around town and she kept on coming back.

The photographs span nearly two decades: late eighties, nineties, into the early 2000s. From Harlem to East New York, Jamaica Queens, and later in the Heights with her husband and his family. Mostly outside. The block, the stoop, the corner, the car hood. Manhood and womanhood stand side by side, as markers of time, in a world where today it is all a blur. At the time, space feels negotiated, subjects are held up for each other to see. Recording the birth of hip-hop, and composing her own life in the footsteps of jazz and the blues, Lucas’ archive stands as a score for taking part in the act of remembrance.

Summer after summer, Lucas’ days are spent documenting a tension that is specific to New York City: exhaustive joy as a lasting flame of its own conditions. It is obvious to think of resilience when one attempts to decipher the shape of the city: belief. Lucas photographs groups coming together, time bound in love and tenderness, presence, the hustle and the heat.

Lucas returned to the same blocks for years, the same light, the same gatherings. The act of returning to is the one of adoption. She adopts the city in symphony with the city adopting her. These photographs are a cartography of her presence. Where she was, who she was with, what they let her see, and how they let her in.

In 1982, Audre Lorde invented a genre. She called Zami a biomythography: a form that refuses the separation of history, biography, and myth. Lorde grew up in Harlem, the child of Caribbean immigrants who raised her to believe home was elsewhere, a place left behind, longed for, never returned to. Home, for Lorde, had to be made. She made it in the city, in the women who shaped her, in the sustained practice of witnessing. Lorde reminds us that to be transformed by proximity is the constitution of arrival.

–Philo Cohen, 2026

New York Days is Lucas’ first solo exhibition in New York, forty years after her first visit to the city. This exhibition is presented in collaboration with Speciwomen, the non-profit arts organization committed to womxn and LGBTQIA+ artists.

Maï Lucas is a Franco-Vietnamese photographer based in Paris whose work spans art, fashion, and documentary photography. Since her debut in 1986, she has chronicled the emergence of hip-hop culture in France, building close relationships with the young musicians, graffiti artists, and dancers who pioneered the movement. Her bond to New York City is one of many decades during which Lucas has photographed the city from within. Her monographs include Hip Hop Diary of a Fly Girl 1986–1996 Paris and All Eyes On Me (Edition Patrick Frey). Her work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums since 2003.

Maï Lucas: New York Days Reception and Book Signing
Friday, April 10, 6–8PM
On view: April 9—May 23
Dashwood Projects
63 East 4th Street
New York NY 10003