NADA New York 2026
VIP Preview (by Invitation)
WED, MAY 13, 10am–4pm
Open to the Public
WED, MAY 13, 4–7pm
THU, MAY 14, 11am–7pm
FRI, MAY 15, 11am–7pm
SAT, MAY 16, 11am–7pm
SUN, MAY 17, 11am–5pm
BOOTH E10
The Starrett-Lehigh Building
601 W 26TH STREET, 3RD FLOOR
NEW YORK, NY 10001
Enter on 11th Avenue
Between 26th St. & 27th St.
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smoke the moon is thrilled to present Iridescent World, a two-person exhibition of colcha embroidery and oil paintings by Santa Fe, New Mexico based artists Cory Feder and Diego Medina at NADA New York. The two artists share a creative mythos; their work bursts into being through a spiritualized relationship to place, purpose and practice. Feder and Medina work magnanimously, inter-weaving spirituality and place-based research throughout their individual studio practices.
Diego Medina approaches landscape painting as devotional practice. His paintings are a threshold toward a realm of omniscient, enduring spirit and transcendent vision. The work at NADA New York will expound on Medina’s research into the borderlands region of New Mexico and their relationship to both charged cultural histories and enduring spiritual journeys. Last year, Medina debuted a series of seven paintings at the 12th SITE Santa Fe International Biennial inspired by the stations of the cross, each representing contentious, or “wounded,” sites across Southern New Mexico.
In this new series of paintings, Medina inserts New Mexican cultural motifs into the frame of landscape painting. Mesas, monsoon skies, and a glowing horizon are coupled with glimmers of Christian iconography. Medina’s interest in landscape painting lies in the spiritual and cultural dimension a location opens us to. Rather than trying to document, Medina renders a place in its most sublime hues. Flashes of light, be it from a crack in the heavens or a flickering candle, often guide the way into his compositions. Saturation and pigment are vessels for the altered states of rapture in Medina’s landscapes. Throughout this new body of work Medina approaches the rainbow as an icon in its own right: its prismatic, mystic force boomeranging off the viewer to forge a covenant with the full spectrum of divine perception.
Cory Feder will present a series of new wall-oriented colcha embroidery works at NADA New York. The playful and sublime unite in Feder’s textile compositions. Across the rural communities of Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico, colcha is a communal means of preserving local history by rendering images of important places, stories and people through intricate, knotless wool embroidery. Feder, who grew up in Denver, Colorado, has delved into the vernacular language of Southwestern folk traditions. She incorporates the history of the lands where she was raised into her own visual world of symbols, creatures and colors.
Feder’s recent work engages her Korean ancestry by iterating on the traditional jogakbo: a centuries old form of handmade textile that was created from a patchwork of existing fabric scraps and was used as gift wrapping for ritual objects in weddings and Buddhist rites. Jogakbo was a way to cloak objects in physical and symbolic protection and offer good luck to the receiver. Engaging with these vast material traditions is a means of grounding and translating the fantastic in Feder’s work. Colcha is a form of sanctifying the everyday, and Feder extends this impulse to deify animals and icons from her sprawling folkloric lexicon.
At the core of Iridescent World is a feeling of a great and mystic joy: that something known, and of the earth, may appear new—drenched in colors that bend with time and light. Feder and Medina’s work is a reflection of earth’s paradisic possibility. Their work appears like the flash of the smaller rainbow—light shining through a ripple, the scales of a butterfly wing, parhelia around the sun—illuminating these beautiful and strange earthly delights. The artists couple a heavenly gaze with a historic lineage to make a divine pact with the bright and terrestrial present. Feder and Medina are catching the spark, guiding us toward an everlasting shine.
ABOUT NADA:
The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) is the definitive non-profit arts organization dedicated to the cultivation, support, and advancement of new voices in contemporary art. Founded in 2002, NADA’s membership comprises an international roster of leading contemporary art galleries and professionals. The organization hosts year-round programming, including art fairs and collaborative exhibitions in New York, Miami, Paris, and Warsaw, as well as at its exhibition space, LUNCH (Located Under NADA’s Central Headquarters), in the Lower East Side.