Blade Study

The gallery's name comes from an internet meme: "While you were partying, I studied the blade." The energy is nerds being self-aware about being nerds, taking seriously what everyone else dismisses.

Most of the artists shown here grew up on Tumblr, Reddit, and Discord. They make work about grief, memory, isolation, and what makes human connection matter. The same questions people have always asked, just asked with different tools.

Walk in and you might see art made from welded metal, pharmaceutical equipment, circuit boards, paint. Topics range from anime theory and physics to the origin of the universe. Or how humans find patterns in chaos through conspiracy thinking and memes.

The ancients told stories around fires. At Blade Study, they're telling stories in group chats. Same impulse, different infrastructure.

Blade Study was founded in 2022 by Brooke Nicholas and Ian Glover to celebrate real-life digital adventurers. Brooke holds a Master’s degree in curatorial studies from Bard, and Ian is a coder-designer specializing in animation. Every show incorporates events, performances, or other programming that expands its reach like nodes in a graph.