Harlem is changing faster than memory can keep up with. Storefronts turn over, legendary rooms go dark, and a sign that hung for generations is taken down overnight. In Art, Space, and Change, Richard Yumang uses the camera as a field notebook and the brush as an act of preservation. He records the places that define everyday Harlem, then rebuilds them in thick, sculpted paint.

Each work begins as a photograph made while walking the neighborhood: a subway platform late at night, a club facade in afternoon light, a block of tenements and corner businesses. In the studio, those images are translated into dense layers of paint applied with a knife. The surfaces are cracked, built up and scraped back, the way the city’s own walls are. The heavy texture is a deliberate choice. These places are being smoothed over, and the paintings refuse to let them go flat.