Announcing the New York City Premiere of Kinlaw’s ‘FALL RISK’

Kinlaw, FALL RISK, 2025. Performance documentation. Courtesy of the artist and Art Omi. Photo: Christina DeFonte.

Presented by Times Square Arts and originally commissioned by Art Omi, artist Kinlaw will suspend 150 feet above New York’s most iconic public square.

October 13, 2026 | 8pm
Times Square | Duffy Square & Broadway Place between 46th & 47th Streets

Times Square Arts is thrilled to present the New York City premiere of FALL RISK, a one-night-only performance and public art intervention by artist Kinlaw. The performance will take place in the center of Times Square, one of New York’s most iconic and highly-visited public spaces, on October 13, 2026 at 8pm. Kinlaw will be suspended 150 feet above Duffy Square between 46 and 47 Streets. FALL RISK is the artist’s most extreme and personal action yet, centered on the question: what happens when survival is staged as a monument?

Nearly a century after Harry Houdini suspended himself from a crane in Times Square, Kinlaw returns with a different proposition: not escape, but endurance. The work draws from Kinlaw’s experience navigating the insurance and financial systems that determine access to care for aging and disabled parents. A 150-foot crane arm lifts the artist high above the street while a microphone amplifies her breathing as she utters words under the extreme physical pressure of the action.

“FALL RISK sits in a contradiction. I’m making this work within a set of conditions—caregiving, aging family, precarity, and survival—and staging it in Times Square, a space built on spectacle and capital. I’m not interested in representing these conditions; I’m putting them under pressure in real time.In its most raw form, FALL RISK is my body and voice meeting the force of 40,000 pounds of aluminum and steel,” said Kinlaw.

Originally commissioned for Art Omi by curator Sara O’Keeffe, FALL RISK was first performed by Kinlaw and boom truck operator Mark Moeske in June 2025 with creative direction by Kathleen Dycaico. The Times Square Arts iteration marks only the second presentation of the work and the most public staging to date.

Whether speeding through the Los Angeles River while strapped to the bed of a pickup truck or scaling car lifts in a New York City parking lot, Kinlaw is known for staging durational, endurance-testing performances in unconventional, high-risk environments.

“Confrontational and tense, Kinlaw’s FALL RISK continues a lineage of performance in which the body is placed on the line in negotiation with structural forces. A direct address to ever-escalating conditions of our time, in FALL RISK Kinlaw ratchets up the stakes into a clarifying jolt,” said Sara O’Keeffe, Director and Curator of Public Engagement & Research at ICA Philadelphia.

“Times Square has always been the site of spectacle, but with FALL RISK, that spectacle is reoriented around the human body and its limits, resilience, and exposure. Kinlaw transforms the plaza’s towering skyline and flashing billboards into a stage for bringing deeply personal and physically demanding performances to the fore. At Times Square Arts, we are committed to presenting work that engages the public in unexpected and urgent ways, and Kinlaw’s FALL RISK does exactly that,” said Anna Starling, Director of Times Square Arts and Vice President, Development & Partnerships at Times Square Alliance.

ABOUT KINLAW
Kinlaw is a New York–based performance artist and composer whose work examines visibility, endurance, and public exposure. Raised in a working-class family in the American South, they stage high-pressure conditions using movement, sound, and industrial structures that place the body under sustained strain. Their project FALL RISK forces a confrontation with care, survival, and collapse at monumental scale. Their practice draws from four years of psychoacoustic research at Bell Labs. Selected works have been presented at MoMA PS1, the New Museum, MOCA, and the Park Avenue Armory.

ABOUT ART OMI
Art Omi is a not-for-profit arts center in the Hudson Valley that is home to a gallery, the 120-acre Sculpture & Architecture Park with more than sixty works on view, international residencies, and arts education for all ages. Art Omi’s exhibitions program is a laboratory for artists and architects to challenge conventions, take risks, and shape urgent cultural conversations.  Championing artists and architects at critical moments of their careers, Art Omi offers a platform to test new ideas through exhibitions, publications, and events.

ABOUT TIMES SQUARE ARTS
Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, collaborates with contemporary artists and cultural institutions to experiment and engage with one of the world’s most iconic urban places. Through the Square’s electronic billboards, public plazas, vacant areas and popular venues, and the Alliance’s own online landscape, Times Square Arts invites leading contemporary creators, such as Charles Gaines, Joan Jonas, Jeffrey Gibson, Pamela Council, Mel Chin and Kehinde Wiley, to help the public see Times Square in new ways. Times Square has always been a cultural district and place of risk, innovation and creativity, and the arts program ensures these qualities remain central to the district’s unique identity.