Cj hendry fills a new york gallery with beads and lets visitors invent the game
inside the bead pit
Stepping into Cj Hendry’s Pastel begins with a small change in gallery etiquette. Shoes come off, custom socks go on, and visitors climb over the tiled edge of a shallow pool filled with thousands of pastel-colored beads. Some of us sat along the perimeter and sift through them by hand. Others step straight in, pushing through a shifting layer of tiny flowers, smiley faces, characters, objects, and odd little forms. At Salon 94 Design in New York, Hendry has built the installation around physical participation, inviting visitors to collect beads and take part of the experience home.
Pastel starts with a bead hunt, but it watches as everyone invents their own game. A poster beside the pool presents line drawings of selected beads. This way, the installation is turned into a loose search-and-find challenge. Some designs appear everywhere and others take a while to surface. Visitors are given two lengths of string, enough to make a necklace, bracelet or charm, with plenty of room to improvise beyond that. Once we began searching, the scale of the experience becomes apparent. A single sweep of the hand can reveal dozens of possibilities, then bury them again seconds later.
image by Alexis Salas, courtesy the artist and Salon 94 Design © Cj Hendry
everyone invents the game
What begins as a hunt for matches quickly becomes far more personal. designboom visited Pastel ahead of its public opening, and we realized how quickly others developed their own systems. Some searched by color, building strings around pale pinks or translucent blues. Others chased a subject, collecting flowers or New York City motifs like hot dogs and taxis. One person might spend ten minutes searching for a single bead from the poster while the person beside them ignores the checklist entirely and gathers whatever catches their eye.
Artist Cj Hendry supplies a few rules and then leaves plenty of space around them. While the poster offers a possible goal, the room quickly drifts away from completion as curiosity takes over. The bead we suddenly decided we need became more important than the one we were originally searching for, and the experience kept shifting according to whomever happened to be digging beside us.
image © designboom
the installation becomes socially porous
As the pool fills with people, the installation also becomes unexpectedly social. Strangers start asking each other what they are looking for. A bead gets held up across the pit because someone remembers another visitor searching for it. People compare half-finished strings and show off particularly strange finds. The shared search gives everyone an easy reason to speak, and those brief exchanges accumulate into something that feels unusually relaxed for a gallery.
What does it take to make a room full of adults start playing with strangers? The answer at Pastel is surprisingly simple. Give them a shared field to search through and enough freedom to decide what they value. Hendry’s pool becomes socially porous because participation happens sideways as much as it happens between visitor and artwork. The person next to you becomes part of the experience, whether they help locate the bead you want or introduce you to one you had overlooked.
image © designboom
a gallery temporarily changes its rules
The custom socks help set that shift in motion. Pulling them on feels almost ceremonial, a small signal that the usual behavior expected inside a gallery has changed. People crouch and even sit on the floor. They wade through the work with both feet. The physical awkwardness is part of the fun, since moving through thousands of loose beads takes more effort than the pastel surface suggests. Your attention moves between your own hands and everyone else nearby.
Here, the concept of ‘play’ is born from permission and possibility. Cj Hendry gives visitors something tactile to enter, then allows them to determine the pace and purpose of their time inside it. A person can spend five minutes collecting whatever looks good or become fully absorbed in tracking down a rare bead. Both approaches work. The installation accommodates each without assigning greater value to either.
image © designboom
from bead pit to pedestal
Upstairs, Cj Hendry’s familiar visual language returns in drawings and sculptures, including enlarged versions of forms that appear among the beads below. The official presentation brings together her hyperreal drawings with painted bronze sculptures, while the participatory installation extends those motifs into objects visitors can scoop up and collect. The shift in scale changes the relationship to them. Downstairs, a smiley face can disappear beneath your foot while, upstairs, a larger version sits alone and asks to be viewed but not touched.
The artist has spent years building exhibitions around direct audience participation like this. At Pastel, the most memorable part may be what happens between the objects: strangers helping each other search, visitors turning Hendry’s imagery into personal combinations, and a gallery full of adults gradually deciding how they want to play.
image © designboom
image by Alexis Salas, courtesy the artist and Salon 94 Design © Cj Hendry
image by Alexis Salas, courtesy the artist and Salon 94 Design © Cj Hendry
image by Alexis Salas, courtesy the artist and Salon 94 Design © Cj Hendry
project info:
name: Pastel
artist: Cj Hendry | @cj_hendry
gallery: Salon 94 Design | @salon94design
location: 3 E 89th St., New York, NY
dates: August 6th, 2026 — August 16th, 2026
hours: daily, 10am — 7pm
photography: © Alexis Salas / Cj Hendry, © designboom
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