What Will You See at Ouattara Watts’s New Show at Karma in Chelsea?

Short answer

Karma opens a new solo exhibition of Ouattara Watts on Thursday, November 5, 2026, at 549 West 26th Street in Chelsea, with a reception from 6 to 8 PM. The show presents new mixed-media paintings by the Abidjan-born, New York-based artist, and runs through December 19.

Key facts

• Who: Ouattara Watts (b. 1957, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire), an American artist who has lived in New York since 1988.
• What: Ouattara Watts — new large-scale mixed-media paintings; the gallery lists the exhibition under the artist’s name.
• Where: Karma, 549 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001.
• When: November 5 – December 19, 2026; opening reception Thursday, November 5, 6–8 PM.
• Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM. Admission is free.

What will you see?

New paintings in Watts’s signature format: vast canvases that can stretch past 140 inches wide, such as Untitled (2025), an 84 × 144-inch mixed-media work reproduced on the gallery’s announcement. Watts builds his surfaces from found artifacts, fabric, collage and traditional painting and drafting methods, working both on the floor and on the wall. The results are dense fields of brilliant color, dynamic patterns and symbols — numbers, maps, musical and scientific notations — that read like a cosmology written in several languages at once.

Who is Ouattara Watts?

Watts grew up in Côte d’Ivoire, studied at Paris’s École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (graduating in 1984) and moved to New York in 1988 at the urging of his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat. From those three cities he assembled what Karma’s biography calls a visual lexicon of quantitative, geographic, musical and scientific forms. His own summary is shorter: “My vision is not bound to a country or continent . . . I am painting the Cosmos.”

The résumé behind that claim includes Documenta 11 (2002), the Whitney Biennial (2002), the Venice Biennale (2017), the Gwangju Biennale (2021) and the Shanghai Biennale (2023), as well as a two-person exhibition with Basquiat at the Currier Museum of Art in 2024. His paintings are held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Hood Museum, among others.

Why now?

This is Watts’s first New York gallery show since ’90s Paintings at Karma in 2024, which revisited his early New York decade; the new exhibition answers it with work made now. A show like this is also a reminder of what a commercial contemporary art gallery does at its best: sustain an artist across decades and frame each new chapter.

How do you visit?

Karma’s Chelsea space is at 549 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM; entry is free. The opening reception on Thursday, November 5, from 6 to 8 PM, is the liveliest moment — and the most crowded. For a slower reading of what the symbols on these canvases carry from one culture to another, our glossary entry on cultural mediation gives that reading a name.

FAQ

When does the Ouattara Watts show open?

Thursday, November 5, 2026, with a reception from 6 to 8 PM. It runs through December 19.

Does it cost anything?

No. Entry to Karma is free.

What are the hours?

Tuesday through Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM.

How is Watts connected to Basquiat?

They were friends: Basquiat urged Watts to move to New York in 1988, and the Currier Museum of Art paired their work in the 2024 exhibition A Distant Conversation.

About Antre

Antre is building an app that gives artworks their context, starting with New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Join the waiting list at antre.art.

Sources

• Karma, exhibition page for Ouattara Watts: dates, reception, address and hours.
• Karma, Ouattara Watts artist biography: life, exhibitions, collections and the artist’s statement.

More context: our guides to Gordon Parks’s Voices in the Mirror at Jack Shainman, in its final days and Ai Weiwei’s Illumination at Vito Schnabel Gallery.