Upcoming International Art Events
GALLERY SHOWS
Opens Feb. 8.
Frida Kahlo’s Style and Substance
The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is too often reduced to a pop-culture cliché—her likeness appears on products from tote bags to cake toppers. Starting Feb. 8, the Brooklyn Museum…READ MORE »Brooklyn MuseumBrooklyn
Opens Jan. 25.
Robert Mapplethorpe Returns to the Guggenheim
The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who died in 1989, at the age of forty-two, cast a classicizing eye on subjects both conventional (calla lilies) and controversial (the underground S & …READ MORE »Guggenheim MuseumUptown
Through Oct. 27.
Spin Through Outer Space on the Roof of the Met
The Polish-German sculptorAlicja Kwade makes art out of stone and steel, but her real materials are time and space. One past project was inspired by wormholes, and “ParaPivot,” her…READ MORE »Metropolitan MuseumUptown
Through June 15.
“The Value of Good Design”
The simple flask of the Chemex coffeemaker, the austere fan of aluminum tines on a garden rake, and the airtight allure of first-generation Tupperware exemplify the democratic promise of the…READ MORE »Museum of Modern ArtMidtown
MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
Through Oct. 27.
“Atea: Nature and Divinity in Polynesia”
Installed in a small gallery with midnight-blue walls, this fascinating exhibition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century religious and ritual objects is named for a moment of tremendous cosmological significance;atea refers…READ MORE »Metropolitan MuseumUptown
Through May 27.
“Betye Saar”
Decades of trawling yard sales yielded the haunting raw material—American artifacts of domestic labor and racist caricature—for a stinging group of assemblages by the venerated African-American artist. Aunt…READ MORE »New-York Historical SocietyUptown
Ongoing.
“Epic Abstraction”
A desire to shake up received art history is more than admirable today—it’s urgent for a future of pluralist values. But this wishfully canon-expanding show of painting and…READ MORE »Metropolitan MuseumUptown
Through Oct. 4, 2020.
“In Praise of Painting”
How great are the Met’s holdings in the Dutch golden age? Very. This long-term installation rings the lower level of the Lehman Wing with scores of lesser-known gems from…READ MORE »Metropolitan MuseumUptown
Through June 9.
“Jeffrey Gibson”
The incomparable Johanna Burton recently left her curatorial perch at the museum to become the director of the Wexner Center for the Arts, in Ohio. Her knack for harmonizing visual…READ MORE »New MuseumDowntown
Through June 15.
“Joan Miró”
This enchanting show draws on the museum’s immense holdings of Miró’s work, along with a few loans. Its star attraction is “The Birth of the World,” painted in…READ MORE »Museum of Modern ArtMidtown
Through June 23.
“Nancy Spero”
On the front lines of the feminist art movement, Spero, who died in 2009, at the age of eighty-three, pushed against patriarchal conventions and art-world exclusion. Her political convictions were…READ MORE »MOMA PS1Queens
Through May 26.
“Nari Ward”
In Ward’s best-known installation, “Amazing Grace,” from 1993, some three hundred scavenged baby strollers and perhaps as many yards of fire hose are arranged in a shape that…READ MORE »New MuseumDowntown
Through Dec. 30.
“She Persists”
Last month, a record-breaking hundred and twenty-seven congresswomen were sworn in on the floor of the House of Representatives. Now forty-four women take over the walls of “the people’…READ MORE »Gracie MansionUptown
Through June 2.
“Siah Armajani”
This Iranian-American sculptor, Conceptualist, and political philosopher is the subject of a fascinating retrospective of paintings, drawings, sculptures, architectural models, charts, computer printouts, a video, a slide show, and more….READ MORE »Met BreuerUptown
Through June 16.
“The Tale of Genji”
To detail the rich history of a Japanese literary epic, this stunning exhibition assembles artifacts and art works spanning nearly a millennium. Written in the early eleventh century by the…READ MORE »Metropolitan MuseumUptown
Through May 4.
Victoria Cabezas/Priscilla Monge
This exhibition, titled “Give Me What You Ask For,” pairs two Costa Rican artists who are a generation apart. The earliest work on view, by the wry Cabezas,…READ MORE »Americas SocietyUptown
GALLERIES—UPTOWN
Through May 4.
D’Angelo Lovell Williams
The young photographer’s intimate, improvised surrealism makes for images as jarring as they are elegant. In one deadpan double portrait, a long string of red chewing gum connects the…READ MORE »Higher PicturesUptown
Through May 11.
“Perilous Bodies”
Just outside this scattershot, if deeply felt, nineteen-person show is a ten-foot-long wooden boat by the Cameroonian sculptor Barthélémy Toguo, encircled by wine bottles. A nod to Homer’s wine-dark…READ MORE »Ford Foundation for Social JusticeMidtown
GALLERIES—CHELSEA
Through May 14.
Beau Dick
White Columns is New York City’s oldest alternative gallery, founded in 1970 by a cohort of downtown experimentalists. Its current director, the incomparable Matthew Higgs—a British-born curator,…READ MORE »White ColumnsDowntown
Through July 28.
Gretchen Bender
Bender was a pathbreaker who emerged in the Reagan era, using the apparatus and imagery of advertising and news to underscore the seductive, numbing effects of mass media. This revelatory…READ MORE »Red Bull ArtsChelsea
GALLERIES—DOWNTOWN
Through May 12.
Jessi Reaves
The artist’s ingeniously makeshift furniture-sculpture hybrids rely on scavenged materials. Deconstructed (disemboweled?) chairs, sofas, shelves, and cabinets are recombined into colorfully appealing monstrosities. In the past, the American…READ MORE »DonahueDowntown
OUT OF TOWN
PAID POST
MURAL Festival, Montréal
Montréal’s world-famous MURAL Festival showcases the best in street art from across the globe, alongside music, food, parties, artist talks, and…READ MORE »
Through May 11.
ANOHNI
Black walls and elegantly dim lighting establish an appropriately elegiac mood for this powerful exhibition, which is, in part, a memorial to the mathematician, performer, and trans activist Julia Yasuda,…READ MORE »The KitchenChelsea
Through May 12.
Barbara Ess
The New York artist has long depicted a spectral parallel world, mining the pinhole camera’s tendency to distort, blur, and abstract. In this show, Ess, who is also well…READ MORE »Magenta PlainsDowntown
Through May 18.
Martin Kersels
This widely beloved L.A. sculptor and performance artist, who stands six and a half feet tall and weighs north of three hundred pounds, uses his body to bemuse and…READ MORE »Mitchell-Innes & NashChelsea
Through May 12.
Peter Blake
The English Pop artist, now eighty-five years old, has bitterly boycotted New York since 1962, when a show of his frolicsome whimsies hit an iceberg of local cool and sank….READ MORE »GreenanChelsea
Through June 8.
Vivian Suter
See this show, be happy. Dozens of big, blowsy abstract paintings on unstretched canvas—some vaguely Abstract Expressionist or color-fieldish, but all nonchalant as to style—hang helter-skelter…READ MORE »GladstoneChelsea
Through May 12.
Dash Snow
The title of Dash Snow’sfirst show, in 2005, was, sadly, prophetic: “Moments Like This Will Never Last.” Four…READ MORE »Participant, Inc.Downtown
Through May 5.
Julia Rommel
From afar, the large geometric abstractions by this New York painter look energetically nonchalant. But get close and you’ll discover that they are actually the products of a laborious…READ MORE »BureauDowntown
Through Sept. 8.
“Leonard Cohen”
Cohen’s death, on November 7, 2016, may not have fully registered for many people, given the rush of bad news that immediately followed (notably, the results of the American…READ MORE »Jewish MuseumUptown
Through Oct. 27.
“Simone Leigh”
Imagine living for seven years in the crawl space of an attic, as an enslaved woman self-sequestered in the pursuit of her freedom. Leigh’s spare, impressive exhibition—three…READ MORE »Guggenheim MuseumUptown
Through May 12.
“The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey”
Some hundred and twenty daguerreotypes seem to float in this dramatic, beautifully designed exhibition. They represent just a fraction of the output of Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, a nineteenth-century French…READ MORE »Metropolitan MuseumUptown
Indian Art Gallery 