CJ Hendry’s Flower Market 2.0 | Rockefeller Center
CJ Hendry transformed Rockefeller Center into a riot of color with Flower Market 2.0 twenty-seven plush flower designs, a rare 28th at the Top of the Rock, and a fleeting garden in the heart of Manhattan.
Last night I watched CJ Hendry and her crew setting up under floodlights on Instagram Live. Fabric blooms piled in the dark, Rockefeller’s granite softened by color before the city woke up. Twelve hours later, I was standing in the middle of it a flower market in the heart of Manhattan, chaos and beauty spilling across the plaza.
There were twenty-seven brand-new plush flower designs, each one offered as a gift to whoever reached for it first. The crowd pressed in, children clutching stems like trophies, strangers comparing colors as if they were rare finds. I picked my own flower and held it tight, part souvenir, part performance.
Nearby I spotted artist KahriAnne Kerr reaching for her own flower. That moment said everything about CJ’s work it spoke not only to the public but to peers in the creative world who understood the language of play and spectacle.
From the plaza I carried my flower upward, climbing to the Top of the Rock. There, the 28th design the rare, exclusive edition waited as the city stretched out in every direction. Steel, glass, and now, a single bloom at seventy stories high.
CJ Hendry doesn’t just create objects. She creates moments. And for three days, Rockefeller Center was no longer just stone and commerce. It was a garden, fleeting and alive, proof that wonder can still grow in the unlikeliest places.
Q: What is CJ Hendry’s Flower Market 2.0?
A large-scale immersive art installation at Rockefeller Center, featuring 27 new plush flower designs and an exclusive 28th edition at the Top of the Rock.
Q: How long did the installation run?
Flower Market 2.0 ran from September 19–21, 2025, transforming Center Plaza into a riot of color and play.
Q: Why is this event significant?
Hendry is known for blurring the line between art and consumer desire. By staging a flower market in one of New York’s most iconic public spaces, she expanded her work beyond galleries into everyday life.
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Alison Blickle: Future Ruins
On the eve of her Chelsea opening, I met Alison Blickle at Kravets Wehby Gallery to talk about Future Ruins. The paintings depict radiant, staged figures set in a dystopian future where nature has vanished and people connect only through digital avatars. At once alluring and unsettling, these works blur beauty, grief, and technology, offering both fantasy and warning.
I met Alison Blickle on the eve of her opening at Kravets Wehby Gallery in Chelsea, NYC. The paintings for Future Ruins were already on the walls, glowing under the lights, the room still hushed before the crowd. In that moment, anticipation thick but the space still private, we spoke about beauty, technology, and grief.
Blickle’s figures are radiant, staged, almost too beautiful. She doesn’t hide from it.
“That’s intentional,” she told me.
The new body of work is set in a dystopian future where nature no longer exists as we know it. People still long for connection to something larger, but the only way they can feel it is through avatars inside digital landscapes.
“You create an avatar of yourself, what you wish you looked like, and swim in oceans that no longer exist, walk through forests that have been erased. These paintings are portraits of those avatars. The beauty is stunning, but it’s also artificial. They’re not real people. They’re curated images of who someone chooses to be.”
This dystopian thread runs through Future Ruins like a warning. Filters, AI-generated faces, bodies shaped digitally, all of it feels uncomfortably close.
“It’s science fiction, but it’s also about right now,” she said.
The Cinematic Image
When I asked about the cinematic quality of her compositions, Blickle traced it back to photography.
“I’ve studied images from the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, and I’m inspired by fashion photographers working today. They’re some of the most inventive artists, even though they’re placed in a commercial zone. Their editorials often echo classical painting, history paintings, big groups enacting narratives, dramatic compositions. They create little worlds. That’s what I admire, and what I try to do myself. I stage the image like a photographer before I paint.”
Her women hold archetypes, muses, goddesses, rebels, but they’re also deeply personal. Blickle admits they’ve often been alter egos.
“They get to do things I wish I could do. I live vicariously through them.”
Isolation and Grief
With Future Ruins, that connection is sharper. She spoke about grief and isolation shaping this work.
“For many years I painted large groups interacting. These figures feel more isolated, and many are sad. That’s where the personal heart comes in.”
The result is a body of work that oscillates between allure and critique. The figures are dazzling, but their perfection is unsettling. They carry both the fantasy of beauty and the dystopia of its collapse.
They are avatars, beautiful, artificial, and haunted by longing.
Exhibition: Future Ruins
Alison Blickle
Kravets Wehby Gallery, Chelsea, NYC
September 4 – October 4
Q: What is Alison Blickle’s Future Ruins about?
A: The exhibition imagines a dystopian future where nature has collapsed and people connect through digital avatars. Her radiant figures are both alluring and unsettling, blurring beauty, grief, and technology.
Q: Where is Future Ruins showing?
A: The show is on view at Kravets Wehby Gallery in Chelsea, NYC, from September 4 to October 4, 2025.
Q: Why is Alison Blickle’s work important?
A: Blickle stages cinematic paintings that draw from photography, fashion, and mythology. Her figures act as alter egos, archetypes, and cultural mirrors, exploring beauty’s allure and its collapse in the digital age.