Hashimoto Contemporary is pleased to present The invisible dog goes for a walk, a group exhibition featuring artists and the collection of The invisible dog, co-curated by Lucien Zayan, founder-director of The invisible dog and Risa Shoup.

“Ideas don’t belong to a place. They are never rooted, only found, and belong only to the mind that’s willing to see and embrace them.

Now that The invisible dog has closed its doors on Bergen Street, and it has decided to go for a long walk, many of the artists have been reminded the important lesson of anyone who moves away from their childhood home; that a house is just bricks and mortar, but home is memories in the mind and the continuation of living breathing family wherever they may be. It is an idea. In the early days of The invisible dog, when the building still felt like a secret—raw floors, dusty ceilings and shifting light, a small group of us were trying to understand what we were becoming together. Over the years, more artists arrived. Some stayed, some circled through, some left pieces of themselves in the rooms we shared. Slowly, what began as a space became a community, and what felt temporary became something lasting.

Now, as The invisible dog steps into a new life without a fixed place, we gather together again with an exhibition that brings this wide and layered family back into one moment. It gathers the artists who kept studios there (some still do), the ones who drifted in and out of its realm, and the ones whose work remains part of its permanent collection—all the threads that wove the place into what it was, all curated and within the orbit of Lucien, whose idea gave birth to the place that is no longer fixed.

Presented by Lucien Zayan at Hashimoto Contemporary, this show is not a farewell to the building we once called home. It is a recognition that the true center of The invisible dog -the heart of the place -was never the place at all. It was the people. It was the noticing. It was the sharing. It was an idea that kept moving, even when we didn’t realize we were moving with it. This exhibition is a map drawn from memory. It is a reunion of wanderers. It is a tribute to the new nomadic existence of a legacy stretching its legs. In the words of another wandering dog “Maybe tomorrow I’ll wanna settle down, until tomorrow, I’ll just keep movin’ round.”

(Text by Oliver Jeffers)