Ryan McGinley: Night Shift

Night Shift is Ryan McGinley's first solo exhibition in New York in nearly a decade, on view at Jeffrey Deitch on Wooster Street through August 8, 2026. For the series, McGinley revived a method from his earliest projects, shooting only between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. as he moved through all five boroughs, from Coney Island to Lincoln Center. Using slow shutter speeds, a long lens, and radio flash, he turns the after-hours city into luminous, hallucinatory scenes where neon, halogen, and brake lights blur into airy compositions. Nude figures recur throughout, a McGinley signature, lending the dormant infrastructure a charge of vulnerability and manic humor. McGinley made history at 25 as one of the youngest artists to receive a solo show at the Whitney Museum, and over the following two decades his photography has documented queer New York, the protests of 2020, Morrissey fans, and his well-known nudes, edging toward the mainstream without leaving the experimental circles where he started. He studied at Parsons in the late 1990s and has long built his pictures around friends, collaborators, and the energy of the city at night. The work was shot across the seasons of 2025, with McGinley and his team driving the boroughs through the night. Night Shift runs at Jeffrey Deitch, 18 Wooster Street, in Manhattan's SoHo, following an opening reception on June 13, 2026.