“Social Works,” a group exhibition that opened this week at New York’s Gagosian gallery on West 24th Street, explores space—and the myriad ways it can be used to build and strengthen communities—through the lens of art. On view through August 13, the show marks critic and curator Antwaun Sargent’s first presentation for the global art conglomerate (which added him to its roster of directors earlier this year), and features 12 Black artists, including Zalika Azim, Linda Goode Bryant, Theaster Gates, and Carrie Mae Weems, who engage with their respective locales through humanitarian projects such as food banks, mentorship programs, and neighborhood revitalization efforts. “We live with this notion of land art, and we’ve established a sort of canon around a certain type of land artist,” Sargent says. “This show tries to help us rethink that notion, and [consider] how [other] artists have used land and are thinking about space,” be it public, institutional, metaphysical, or otherwise.

Los Angeles artist Lauren Halsey’s treatment of the subject is personal, as she considers her hometown’s South Central region through sculptures—large wooden boxes covered in graffiti, advertisements, and commercial signage—that celebrate the distinctive visual language its residents have etched into the neighborhood. (Last summer, she launched Summaeverythang, a community center that delivers fresh produce to underserved areas of the city for free.) Architect David Adjaye, whose design for a new building at the Studio Museum in Harlem is currently under construction, contemplates space through “Asaase” (2021), his first large-scale sculpture. A maze of curved earthen walls informed by important works of West African infrastructure, including Burkina Faso’s Cour Royale de Tiébélé (the community chief’s official residence) and the walled city of Agadez in Niger, the work invites visitors to walk through it, forming a connection with the Black spaces it references.

Other works occupy and interrogate space as an abstraction, as a part of our psychic worlds. Spare allegorical paintings, for example, by Alexandria Smith, a co-organizer of the collective Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter from 2016–18, use memory, history, and autobiography to explore the Black identity in relation to the female body. “She was thinking about her own dreamscapes, and what it might mean for Black femininity to exist in a space that’s outside of this space and time,” Sargent says.

Ultimately, the show demonstrates the powerful ways in which spaces serve people, and the consequent need for societies to give them equal value. “How do we retool these spaces to be effective for all communities, and not just the ones that we have been told to privilege and prioritize?” Sargent says. With this exhibition, he offers the beginnings of an answer.