Last chance to see Joey Frank's Fatherhood Notes at Drama Gallery

Joey Frank, Untitled (Caption Contest Welcome), 2026. Machine-cut cardboard on cardstock and mixed media drawings on paper.

*Last chance to see Joey Frank's humorous show "Fatherhood Notes for Nick Jorgensen" at Drama, an apartment gallery in Bushwick in its fourth year. Frank operates in a colorfully chaotic register of his private grapple of observing himself becoming a father. There’s a quiet poetry in the fact that four young men live tucked away in the one room gallery show about fatherhood.

By SIVAN LAVIE May 5th, 2026

Exhibition Link

Joey Frank is an active character in the New York art scene, whose generous oeuvre spans exuberant performance and interdisciplinary visual art. This year alone Frank enacted performances like jumping out of a cake at a gala, being tattooed while guest lecturing in a class about drawing machines and singing a Pagliacci-themed song at both the former and current locations of the Sunview Luncheonette in Greenpoint. Alongside his performative range, Frank maintains a deeply multidisciplinary studio practice that is equally playful and humorous, encompassing sculpture, drawing, painting, glass, video, artist books, and digital and 3D-printed work. Fatherhood Notes for Nick Jorgensen at Drama is emblematic of this expansive visual language.

Frank recently became a father, and the show reads as an amalgamation of doodles, sketches and thoughts transformed into installation, made to process this shift in his life. Frank has remained prolific in his public-facing practice through this time, and Fatherhood Notes is first show reflecting this more private, reflective register.

Drama is an understated apartment gallery, unassumingly located in a fourth floor walkup in Bushwick. Four young men sleep in tiny drywall enclaves that are surrounded by the main space, serving as gallery. Despite its humble setting, Nick Jorgensen, the gallery’s founder and curator, puts on a great show. The gallery has been running for four years, putting on experimental and thoughtful exhibitions. For Fatherhood Notes for Nick Jorgensen, Joey Frank has created a site-specific installation that responds to its proportions, measuring the six paints of the large windows to create his glass work accordingly. Works of various media are mounted with a mix of thumbtacks and aluminum brackets with a mix of amateur and professional clarity that elevates the apartment to white cube status. 

“Don’t think too hard, this show is stupider than you think,” Frank says with a smile, less as dismissal and more as a compass to approach the work through an embodied state, feeling its textures, gestures and ideas from the inside, rather than through intellect.

Joey Frank, Six Mirrored Notes, 2026. Silvered glass. Arranged in the shape and size of the dimensions of the Drama Gallery windows. Individual titles from top left : A Christina’s World Note; Found Bedside; Sitting Up Note; Pee Stream Observer Note (Green); Pee Stream Observer Note (Blue); Finger in the Bedside Table Note.

As our eyes hungrily traverse the bountiful exhibition, we land on the six mirrored glass works. The panels are individual works, but arranged in an imposing two-by-three grid formation to echo the gallery’s own industrial windows, perpendicular to them catching that Bushwick fourth floor light. The arrangement evokes church stained glass windows, imbuing fatherhood with a sense of holiness. Yet across the surfaces, boldly colored, viscous, smeared marks read as childlike, finger-painted gestures. The material though, glass on glass. These images depict funny, intimate scenes of home life; a man urinating as a baby clings to his legs, a sexual encounter interrupted by a child’s cries, a baby crawling toward a basket. An umbilical cord-like drawn line (made of urine stream, yarn, and baby cries) threads through the compositions, suggesting the constant, inescapable presence of the child, the main character, interrupter, leader, and observed, and the artist’s ongoing grapple with his new reality. 

Joey Frank, pee Stream Observer Note (Blue), 2026. Silvered glass.

The umbilical thread of the show continues in a beautiful floor-to-ceiling dibond mounted inkjet print, 11x11, Bilateral Man in the Mirror, depicting a reincarnation cycle: a snowflake that is reborn as a gummy bear, then as a fly, an elephant, butterfly, Beethoven, a cheetah, reborn as Jesus, a pigeon, a walnut, a tardigrade, a Chevy, and more, ending in a hissing snake. These animal, historical and capitalist images give birth to the next through their noses, snot-rocketing each other into existence. 

The centerpiece of the show is Untitled (Caption Contest Welcome), a large machine-cut cardboard line drawing. The cardboard depicts a gestural line drawing of a man pushing a baby in a stroller passing another man pushing a shopping cart. The figures, similar in age and build, meet one another in surprise, a comical confrontation with their own pathetic, Sisyphean life choices. The work’s cartoonlike sensibility recalls Saul Steinberg in its economy of line and psychological wit. 

Joey Frank, Baby Pictures, 2026. Pencil drawings on paper. 

The comical nature of the piece continues, surrounded by dozens of process drawings on printer paper, enlarged notes to be sharpied, touched with highlighter, colored pencil, pastel, printed with silver-foiled bits. These are drawings on the way from taking small notes and translating them into vectors. Some of the pieces are collaborations with the artist’s child, with vigorous scribbles in various office supplies and crude coloring gestures. The grouping show the artist in his daily life, screen printing in his studio, eating dinner with a friend, and clipping his toe nails, always with the presence of his child. Frazzled lines, incoherent gestures, alongside the baby’s expressive, often uncanny, adult-like face and emotional charge, make these drawings a humorous ‘useless father trying to fulfil his duties’ depiction. In one drawing, the child laughs at a dinner plate; in another, it points accusingly at a father mid-task. The father appears at times surprised at the baby’s reactions, at other times guilty, annoyed, and most often as a childlike accomplice.

Joey Frank, Installation view of Joey Frank's show Fatherhood Notes for Nick Jorgensen at Drama Gallery

One drawing on printer paper in the installation features scrawled lyrics of Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, reworked as a kind of mathematical notation. Its poetic meter and structure were deeply considered when I asked Frank who concluded the song threads into itself, allowing it to loop forever. The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round has a similar motion, according to the artist, “possibly the best children’s song ever made,” noting how deeply satisfying the circular motion of the sound and mouth shape reflect the content of moving through town on a set of wheels in a vehicle gathering more people as you sing. This is all to say that music and its inherent cyclical nature is a key structural and emotional thread in the show. The fluid motion between abundant mediums, the smooth, easy pencil line recurring through the pieces, the cacophonic baby cries depicted in messy abstracted gestures, echo the chaos and improvisation of parenthood and free jazz alike, all serving the infinite circle of life.

A small 3D-printed self-portrait sits on a shelf nearby, glittering. The nude Joey, positioned on all fours, is covered in mirrored alphabet across his body. This piece distills the lyrical core of Joey Frank’s show, rolling play, humor, song and embodiment into one. Fatherhood Notes for Nick Jorgensen doesn’t resolve much, but it does throw parenthood in our faces as yet another part of adulthood we need to accept, like doing laundry or paying our taxes, and how we can play with it and allow it to climb all over us, find our own margins within it, and relinquish into its infinitely larger-than-life meaning. We’re all just giant kids playing, forever crawling around and learning our A, B, Cs. 

Joey Frank, 11x11, Bilateral Man in the Mirror, 2026. Inkjet print.

Fatherhood Notes for Nick Jorgensen is showing at Drama Gallery until May 11, 2026