How We Work: Smack Mellon at 30, a group show marking Smack Mellon’s 30th anniversary, opens Saturday, September 19, 2026 in Brooklyn, New York. An opening reception will take place from 6 to 8 PM Saturday evening and the show will run through November 22, 2026. The exhibition includes work by Pat Oleszko (CRF 2011, DG 2019), Sreshta Rit Premnath (CRF 2011), and Ward Shelley (CRF 2010).
How We Work reflects on Smack Mellon’s work over the past three decades. Gathering new and old works by program alumni, former/current employees, artists who are new to the program and exemplary of the mission, alongside archival material, the exhibition explores the idea of “work” as a foundational throughline of the organization’s operations. Growing from an introspective gaze, it asks: what does it mean to make and maintain space for artists to create their work?
Pat Oleszko
Pat Oleszko, known as the Ms Tricks of Dis Guise, has a large body–of work. Utilizing elaborate costumes and props, she creates performances, films, installations, inflatables and spatial events with much puntification and uttered shenanigans. She has worked from the popular art forms of the street, party, parade, and burlesque house, to the forests, fields, mountains, and waters. Oleszko has presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Documenta, the Lake Placid Winter Olympics, and Lincoln Center, and shown in Esquire, Ms, Playboy, Sesame Street Magazine, and Artforum. For her diverse efforts she has been awarded the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a DAAD (Berlin), 5 NEA’s, 6 New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowships, several Tony nominations, a Jim Henson Grant, and a Bessie (the New York Dance & Theater Award for Sustained Excellence) all while doing intermittent battle with the Authorities at Large. Most recently, her survey show, Fool Disclosure was at Sculpture Center, Queens, and she exhibited in the 2026 Whitney Biennial where she received the prestigious Bucksbaum Award. From the personal to the political, the work is an exorcize thru absurdity and humor. The truth squirts.
Sreshta Rit Premnath
Sreshta Rit Premnath is an artist from Bangalore living in Brooklyn and Williamstown, where is an Associate Professor of Art at Williams College. He has had solo exhibitions at venues including MIT List Visual Arts Center, Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver, and Nomas Foundation in Rome. He is the founding editor of Shifter, a platform that convened public discussions and produced topical publications from 2004-2021.
Sreshta Rit Premnath will be showing Vanishing Point, which was part of his show Overbody at Usdan Gallery, Bennington College last year.
Ward Shelley
Ward Shelley is an artist associated with the Brooklyn scene. He works with large installation projects that freely mix architecture and performance, sprawling text-oriented installations, as well as informational diagrams and timelines on culture-related subjects. Shelley has exhibited in more than 10 countries. Major projects in New York include the Mir 2 Project at Smack Mellon and the Voyage Platform at Socrates Sculpture Park. In 2004 he lived and worked inside the walls of Pierogi Gallery for 5 weeks for “We Have Mice.” Ward Shelley enjoys working on collaborative projects. In 2007 he organized a group to realize the Flatland project at the SculptureCenter, an investigation into the effects of architecture on social relationships. He continues to work with Alex Schweder on projects such as living on a 20 foot wheel often referred to as the “artist hamster wheel,” and a 7-day/24-hour outdoor performance in the Wall Street district called The NewComers sponsored by Performa. Along with Douglas Paulson he recently completed The Last Library IV for ArtBasel Miami and the St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts. Shelley’s work is in a number of museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. His diagrams have been included in anthologies on art with text and information graphics. Shelley received a Painting and Sculpture award from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and has been a fellow of the American Academy in Rome since 2006. He has received NYFA and NEA fellowships in sculpture and new media categories, a Bessie Award for installation art, and grants from the Jerome Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. He is represented by Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn and does projects with Freight+Volume in Tribeca.
Image: Vanishing Point by Sreshta Rit Premnath, photo courtesy of Alon Koppel via williamsrecord.com. Vanishing Point depicts a figure subjected to the piercing gaze of another figure—perhaps exemplary of the overbody—through a large lens. If the light from an adjacent window is just right, a focused beam of scorching heat shines through the sculpture’s lens onto the other.