06/23/2026
“In the closing of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, protagonist Milkman Dead, ‘surrenders to the air,’ confronting his family’s ruptured legacy while embracing the possibility of freedom. He does not succumb to broken realities; he reclaims them as a means to ride toward liberation. This project begins here.”
–Zoë Pulley
Every Tuesday at noon, look through the windows of SFAC from West Broadway to experience “If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it”—a site-specific installation that grows throughout “At the Edge.”
Each week over the course of ten weeks, Zoë Pulley (Zoë Pulley) prompts an AI language model to compile the top ten news headlines from around the world. The artist then rearranges the generated words into declarations that carry new insight while retaining their original intent. The results are printed on nylon flags and hung one by one at SFAC, accumulating into a haphazard archive of a ten-week news cycle.
The work responds to Lorraine O’Grady’s 1977 “Cutting Out NYTIMES,” revisiting the late artist’s act of cutting and rearranging words imbued with power for the age of algorithmic media. Pulley asks: what does AI’s aggregation—its selections, omissions, and incoherencies—reveal about the media ecosystem it draws from?
Suspended from PVCs and cables that evoke societal infrastructure, the flags raise more questions than they answer. A free zine accompanies the installation, documenting each flag alongside its source headline.
Rooted in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Pulley’s project asks us to consider not just where information comes from—but where it might carry us. In her own words: ”To surrender to the air is not defeat. It is the condition of flight.”
“If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it” is on view in the Shirley Fiterman Art Center, 81 Barclay Street. Free and open to the public 12pm-5pm, Wednesday-Saturday.
