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 stem from a 2024 climb of the Empire State Building, the police said. Mr. Wright said he took the tourist elevator to the 102nd floor, 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.
