Sunlit Shadows: An Alphabet City Summer, 2019
Ink, graphite, colored pencil, and soft pastel on paper
9 × 14 inches
© Aurélie Bernard Wortsman —

Downtown Palimpsest extends Aurélie Bernard Wortsman’s ongoing portrait of a city in flux through three interconnected sites. The series opens in Alphabet City, where a vacant lot, overgrown and sunlit, marks the city in a moment of pause. Neither abandoned nor renewed, the space holds a quiet suspension and frames the city through what lingers rather than what dominates.

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Checks Cashed: Moments in the City, 2024
Ink and watercolor on paper
11 x 8.5  inches
© Aurélie Bernard Wortsman

The focus then shifts to the social surface of downtown. A corner luncheonette advertising “Checks Cashed” evokes New York City in the 1980s, capturing a rhythm of urban life shaped by commerce, survival, and neighborhood routines. The city appears active and provisional, formed through everyday exchanges and daily necessity.

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Flatiron: A Glimpse from the City’s First Skyscraper Era, 2026
Ink and graphite on paper
14 x 9 inches
© Aurélie Bernard Wortsman

The series concludes with an early twentieth century view of the Flatiron Building, once the city’s lone skyscraper. Tiny figures are nearly absorbed into the architecture, underscoring the tension between human scale and monumental form. For Wortsman, the site also carries personal history. Her paternal grandparents, Jewish refugees from Vienna after World War II, found their first jobs nearby, linking private memory to the city’s broader historical record.

Together, these scenes present downtown New York not as a fixed place, but as a layered palimpsest. Vacant spaces hold memory, active sites already contain traces of the past, and what was once monumental becomes intimate over time. The drawings convey accumulation rather than nostalgia, remaining open to what has passed and what is still to come

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Aurélie Bernard Wortsman is a New York–based artist and illustrator whose work centers on urban memory, architecture, and place. A member of the Society of Illustrators, she is the illustrator of Odd Birds & Fat Cats: An Urban Bestiary (Turtle Point Press, 2024), created in collaboration with her father, writer Peter Wortsman.

Alongside her illustration practice, Wortsman is also a curator and scholar. She is the director of Andrew Edlin Gallery and is currently organizing a major survey exhibition on Beverly Buchanan, accompanied by the first comprehensive monograph, Ruination and Regeneration: The Art of Beverly Buchanan (DelMonico Books, 2026), which she compiled, co-authored and edited.