When four men dressed like police officers showed up at a gallery opening in Manhattan on Thursday night and handcuffed the star of a solo exhibition, the photographer Isaac Wright, many in the crowd assumed it was some kind of stunt — a wry, Banksy-esque nod to the fact that Mr. Wright had been arrested many times for illicitly climbing buildings to make photos.
It wasn’t a stunt.
Plainclothes officers from the New York Police Department had been working the gallery in Chelsea for hours. The uniformed officers they called in were all too real. The police were pursuing Mr. Wright, who goes by the name Drift, after he recently climbed the Empire State Building. They put him in the back of a squad car and booked him for misdemeanor criminal trespass.
Mr. Wright, who is Black, had hoped the opening of his first solo gallery show would be a coda ending years of legal turmoil. He had started climbing buildings and making photos in 2018 as a way to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder from serving in the Army, and had scaled famous structures all over the world. At the time, police had pegged him as a dangerous criminal, went after him with weapons drawn — they once shut down miles of interstate highway to arrest him — and filed felony charges that could have put him in prison for decades.
Those cases had been resolved. His art career had blossomed. The night of the opening at the Robert Mann Gallery, Mr. Wright had put on a tuxedo and was working the crowd — a mix of wealthy art collectors and ragtag urban explorers — when a plainclothes officer told him to put his hands behind his back.
“I really thought it was a joke,” said Mr. Wright, 29, in an interview on Friday after he was released from jail. “At least this time they didn’t point a gun at my chest.”
The charges likely stem from a recent climb, Mr. Wright said, when he took the tourist elevator to the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building, then slipped past security cameras and a locked gate that led to the skyscraper’s spire. He climbed hand over hand until he was straddling the blinking red light at the top, 1,250 feet above the pavement.
The evidence was on the wall: A vertigo-inducing photo from that climb hung in the gallery.
Its owner, Robert Mann, was standing near it, chatting with collectors when he said police came in and left with his artist.
“I was just completely stunned,” said Mr. Mann, who has represented seminal photographers, including Robert Frank and Ansel Adams. “Ansel Adams probably trespassed in his day to get a great photo, plenty of photographers did. But in all my years, I have never seen an artist taken out of an opening in cuffs.”
The police department confirmed the arrest but did not respond to requests for additional comment.
After the police left, a small crowd of fellow building climbers who had shown up for the opening were similarly dumbfounded, according to a video shot by one of them.
“It’s crazy,” a well-known climber named Vitaliy Raskalov who has held similar gallery exhibits of his photography in Europe, told the others, shaking his head. “Sixteen years of exploring, so many exhibitions, I’ve never seen anyone get arrested at an exhibition. It’s nonsense.”
In a perverse way, though, Mr. Wright said on Friday that his latest arrest is progress.
“I had always been treated as some sort of dangerous weapon for what I do, even though I had never hurt anyone,” he said Friday. “This time, the cops were very respectful. In the cop car, they even told me they liked the art.”
He said the police had told him their initial plan was to arrest him as soon as he showed up at the gallery. But once they were there, and saw the room of vivid prints, and the gathering of friends, family and admirers, they held off for an hour, then another.
“The waited until the night was pretty much over. They gave me that,” he said. “For the first time, someone tried to understand who I was and show some humanity. I was never offered that before, and I really appreciate it.”
