Drift: coming home
may 15 - june 28, 2025
Tuesday-Friday, 10AM-4PM
Saturday, 12-5pm
SUite 209
PRESS RELEASE | IMAGES
Isaac “Drift” Wright Featured in The New York Times
First-Ever NYC Exhibition Opens Thursday at Robert Mann Gallery
New York, NY - May 11, 2025
Just days before the opening of Coming Home, the debut New York City exhibition by photographer Isaac “Drift” Wright, The New York Times has published a major profile on the artist, written by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Phillips. See here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/arts/design/isaac-wright-photographer.html
The article traces Wright’s extraordinary path from military service and incarceration to his emergence as one of the most distinctive and daring urban photographers working today.
Wright is known for climbing and photographing from the highest points of cities across the globe. His work - captured from spires, girders and rooftops - is defined by stillness, scale and solitude. Offering a perspective most people never see, his photographs are grounded in risk and shaped by personal transformation period.
“In some ways, I feel safer up there than I ever did on the ground, Wright told The New York Times. It's the only place I've ever felt completely free.”
Coming Home marks Wright's first-ever solo gallery exhibition in New York City. It includes the first public display of his now legendary image, taken from the Spire of the Empire State Building, as well as large format works from across New York and beyond. The show reflects the intimacy, isolation and intensity that define his practice.
To fully capture the scale of Wright's vision, Robert Mann Gallery has expanded its Chelsea exhibition space for this show. The result is an immersive presentation that allows visitors to engage deeply with the boldness and depth of his prints.
“From the first time I saw Isaac’s work, I knew it carried more than visual power,” says gallerist Robert Mann. “The New York Times piece gives language to what his photographs already suggest: that behind every image is a life reclaimed and a story still unfolding.”
With national media attention and artist attended opening reception, Coming Home launches this Thursday as one of the most anticipated exhibitions of this season.
Exhibition Dates: May 15 to June 28, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 15, 5:00 to 8:00 PM (Artist in attendance)
Hours: Tuesday - Friday, 10AM-4PM, Saturday 12-5PM
Location: Robert Mann Gallery
508 West 26th Street. Suite 209, New York, NY 10001
He Faced Decades Behind Bars for His Art. Now He Has a Show in N.Y.C.
BY The New York Times
Something about sneaking up to the summits of skyscrapers and bridges, feeling the rush of the wind, the grip of the heights and the awe of the view, then making photographs that tried to capture the sensation, gave Isaac Wright an overwhelming sense of joy and freedom. But not far into his photo career, the pursuit threatened to do the opposite.
Wright, who goes by the name Drift, is known for his dizzying images, often showing his legs dangling over thousands of feet of air. The photos are equal parts illicit Gen Z selfie and timeless barbaric yawp.
But when the police in his hometown, Cincinnati, saw them, they decided that he wasn’t an artist, but a menace — and a potentially violent one. They hunted him across several states, closed an interstate highway to trap him and jailed him. He was charged with multiple felonies that could have added up to 50 years in prison.
Visit The New York Times for the full article.
Isaac “Drift” Wright: Coming Home
By Brooklyn Rail
After nearly two centuries and shelves of commentary miles long, we in the art world do not have a clear idea about photography. We know what it is, AI notwithstanding, but we have not been able to say who is looking and why. Or, rather, we have not been willing to acknowledge what we know about those things, so that we might actually begin to appreciate what is in front of us. Most vivid case in point: the photographs of Isaac “Drift” Wright.
Wright’s first exhibition in New York City introduced dramatic photographs into the white cube that usually have no place there but are tremendously popular, for a variety of reasons. Wright positioned himself high atop significant landmarks, including the New York Times Building and the Queensboro Bridge, and while elevated, also directed drones to capture views that reflect his feeling of awe and transcendence. That sense of photography as a purely personal and highly occasional repertoire of views, with apparently little formal premeditation, links his work to an entire generation whose primary outlet is social media, which prioritizes the sharing of experience in real time. Museums and galleries don’t know how to judge such work, distrust the pleasure it gives and, so, largely ignore it. In Wright’s case, the work’s spectacular character can blind them not just to its emotional imperatives, but more importantly to its artistic ambitions.
Visit Brooklyn Rail for the full article.
Drift: Coming Home
BY Musée Magazine
In his first-ever New York exhibition, Isaac “Drift” Wright trades anonymity for authorship, bringing his once-illicit sky-high visions into the white walls of Robert Mann Gallery. What it means to come home, for Wright, is not a return to familiarity but a reckoning with vulnerability, control, and the sheer will to exist on one’s own terms. Across towering skylines and dizzying perspectives, this exhibition reclaims visibility for someone who has long been marked by disappearance—disappearance into war, into incarceration, and into the margins of legality and art. In Coming Home, Wright steps into the center of the frame, not as a subject, but as a steady eye above the world.
Visit Musée Magazine for the full article.