Man Makes Plans

Man Makes Plans is a curatorial project for SPRING/BREAK Art Fair.
Artists: David Howe and Jesus Benavente

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Man Makes Plans is a boardroom populated with outsiders responding to decisions already made. Artists David Howe and Jesus Benavente use political spectacle, disaster imagery, humor, and social exchange to explore the fragility embedded within power, the strength found in resourcefulness, and how nature can unravel even the most carefully laid plans.

Curated by Michele Jaslow, this space seeks to examine what is concealed within systems of power: the fragility hidden beneath authority, the often-unseen effects of judgements made elsewhere, and the resilience and ingenuity of those who seek to rebuild and redefine normalcy in its wake.

A large-scale wallpaper reproduction of David Howe’s The Beloved Leader and The Heroic General Stand Vigilant Against the Ever-Looming Threat occupies the entire back wall. A color-matched carpet extends the image into the exhibition space, inviting viewers to step into the scene. The painting depicts a staged gathering of political and corporate figures assembled before a glowing map of the Earth. Borrowing from political theater, media imagery, and history painting, the scene projects confidence and control. The longer viewers spend with it the less certain it becomes. Relationships remain ambiguous, motives are difficult to read, and authority begins to feel more like performance than fact.

This exploration continues in Howe’s Thumbnail Disasters, a grid of small paintings derived from photographs of flooding and disaster imagery found online cropped by an algorithm. Cars disappear beneath rising water. Figures carry belongings through submerged neighborhoods. Familiar places become difficult to recognize. By translating these widely circulated images into paint, Howe slows them down, transforming news images into scenes of reflection. Together with his Cold Comfort floor pillow, which invites visitors to sit among the works, the paintings encourage viewers to consider how people adapt when carefully laid plans give way to circumstance.

Jesus Benavente approaches related questions through language, performance, and everyday cultural forms. The neon and video works Cry Now and Cry Later cast a colored glow across the wall, transforming familiar phrases into declarations that can be read as warnings, jokes, coping mechanisms, or coping strategies. Beneath them hangs an installation of La Pulga Fresca (open-air flea market), shirt prints suspended like street-market merchandise, laundry, or banners. The works blur distinctions between artwork, personal expression, and everyday life, accumulating into a visual record of labor, memory, humor, and persistence. Visitors move through the installation piecing together meaning from fragments, stories, and repeated images.

Jesus Benavente’s art practice is founded in performance. For SPRING/BREAK Benavente creates a performance rooted in his series La Pulga Fresca, centered on marketplace as means of engaging audiences in a shared, immediate economy of presence.

In Benavente’s Peso Pesado series piñata forms lie beneath cinder blocks. Built from materials associated with celebration yet weighed down by physical burdens, they balance humor and hardship. Drawing on rasquachismo and traditions of resourcefulness within Chicano and Mexican culture the works embody the ability to endure pressure without surrendering to it.

While Howe examines the fragility hidden beneath political authority and environmental catastrophe, Benavente looks at the ways people respond, how they carry on and build informal networks of support when existing systems fall short. Their work reveals how power often masks vulnerability, and how individuals respond when certainty gives way to circumstance.

SPRING/BREAK Art Show Fair
September 24-28 2026
Regular Show Days 12PM – 7PM

Wednesday, September 23, 2026
Collectors First Look + Press Preview 12PM – 5pm
VIP Opening Night 5PM – 8PM
VIP Preview Day 12PM-7PM

PRESS RELEASE | TICKETS

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

David Howe is an artist, entrepreneur, and businessman, in New York City. He has had multiple careers—in cinema, in investment, and as an artist for more than 20 years. He is also founder of not-for-profit gallery 601Artspace in New York City, and served as Board Chair of Art21. Howe’s interest lies in investigating hierarchies of power, which he has encountered while investing in corporations, participated in while overseeing a gallery (601Artspace), and recently explored in his paintings that suggest a connection between tech giants and traditional political dictatorships. His artwork dives into the meaning of freedom, and in particular the conflicting human needs for both freedom and stability. He wrestles with this elemental contradiction, humankind’s never-ending oscillation between open and closed systems. His work is conceptually based, usually requires extensive research, and is realized across multiple media. He started with photography, then focused on sculpture and installation, before diving headfirst into painting. davidhowestudio.com

Jesus Benavente is an amazing and attractive visual artist. Jesus earned an MFA from Rutgers University and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent exhibitions and performances include Whitney Museum, New York, NY; Queens Museum, Queens, NY; Reception Rome, Rome, Italy; LTD Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; Performa 13, NY; Acre Projects, Chicago, IL; Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX; Neuberger Museum of Art, NY; Shin Museum of Art, South Korea; Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY and Austin Museum of Art, TX. Born in San Antonio, TX, Jesus Benavente lives/works in Brooklyn, NY. San Anto es donde está mi corazón. jesusbenavente.net

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Michele Jaslow is a Brooklyn-based independent art curator, writer, advisor, and USPAP-compliant appraiser. Through collaborations with institutional and alternative spaces, she champions thought-provoking artists who resonate with diverse audiences. Michele holds an MFA from Cranbrook and a BFA from Purchase, and post-graduate studies in New Media at NYU. Recent curatorial efforts include projects for Mana Contemporary (Jersey City), Spring/Break Art Fair (NYC), and palladium/Athena Project associated with The Landing Gallery (Los Angeles). Recent writings include artist interviews and exhibition reviews for Tussle Magazine and Art Spiel. Michele is also the co-founder of ThinkFiner, an arts platform with recent exhibitions in New York City, the Loire Valley, France, and Budapest, Hungary that ask you to slow down, to look, and to fight against our collective habit of swiping and scrolling. more…