reviews we want.

We’re listing a few shows we’d love a writer to tackle. And if you’ve already pitched, we’ll try and get back to you by end of this weekend.

• Peter Hujar at the Morgan Library. There’s always somewhere in the city to look at an older New York. This might be the most important one on right now. We’d love to hear from you.

• Altoon Sultan, at Hoffman Donahue.

• Huguette Caland at Lisson. She doesn’t seem to have a ton of recognition in New York or the US. Would like for someone to cover her.

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what’s on view

Chelsea & Midtown

• Gerhard Richter, Landschaften, at David Zwirner. Through July 10.

• Peter Hujar, Contact, at The Morgan Library & Museum. Through October 25.

• Anselm Kiefer, Seal My Ears Shut and I Shall Hear You Still, at Gagosian. Through June 27.

• Paul Thek, Dream of Vanishing, at Pace. Through August 14.

• Huguette Caland, My Home, at Lisson. Through July 25.

• New Voices: Design, at Print Center New York. Through August 22.

• Doowon Lee, Doowon Arrives in New York with Too Many Animals, at ACA Galleries. Through June 20.

• Marcel Duchamp, at the Museum of Modern Art. Through August 22.

Uptown:

• Josiane M.H. Pozi, In Pursuit of Feeling, at American Academy of Arts and Letters. Through July 3.

• Articles of Distinction, at American Academy of Arts and Letters. Through July 3.

• Devlin Claro, Crushing, at Donald Ryan. Through June 13. ⏰ Last day is today ⏰

• Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through July 19.

• Eliza Douglas, GHOSTS, at Gagosian. Through July 31.

East Village & Lower East Side:

• Altoon Sultan, at Hoffman Donahue. Through July 17.

• Stefania Batoeva, Before days break, at Company Gallery. Through June 13. ⏰ Last day is today ⏰

• Yves Saint Laurent and Photography, at ICP. Through September 28.

• Stan VanDerBeek, Micro Kosmos, at Magenta Plains. Through June 20.

Tribeca:

• Bruce Nauman, No Mistakes, at Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer. Through June 20. Read our review from Mána Taylor here.

• David Byrne/Saul Steinberg, Influence and Affinity, at 125 Newbury. Through August 1.

• Strip, at P·P·O·W. Through July 31.

• Su Su, Seeing, Being, at The Journal Gallery. Through June 20.

Brooklyn:

• Yehwan Song, at Subtitled NYC. Through August 23.

• Jordan Eagles, Bases Loaded, at Pioneer Works. Through August 9.

about us

We’re making a new home for art writing. You can find Sarah’s writing here and Alexandra’s writing here. If you’d like to join us and help support independent art media, become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. We’ll send you an invite to start tracking and reviewing exhibits in the city and invitations to our events. More about us and how we got started here.

what’s on:

• ✨ Opening Reception Today 6:00-8:00PM ✨ Louche: Sleeping Through the Apocalypse, at Petzel. Through July 17.

• ✨ Opening Today ✨ Yves Saint Laurent and Photography, at ICP. Through September 28.

• ✨ Opening Today ✨ Photobooks USA 2000–25, at ICP. Through September 28.

• Stefania Batoeva, Before days break, at Company Gallery. Through June 13.

• Eliza Douglas, GHOSTS, at Gagosian. Through July 31.

No Mistakes is Bruce Nauman’s twenty-first exhibition at Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer, a gallery in Tribeca (9 White St. New York, NY 10013). It is open through June 20th.

On view: Bruce Nauman

by Mána Taylor

Bruce Nauman is hard to place. The Moma website notes that “for more than 50 years, he has worked in every conceivable artistic medium,” and yet I was still surprised when I entered this exhibit. It was not “Human Nature/Life Death,” the flashing neon work that I saw at the Art Institute of Chicago during my childhood, nor “No, No, New Museum” the video work in which Nauman aggressively jumps up and down in a joker costume. Instead, a recent series of drawings—seemingly abstract and coily scribbles—hang on the walls of the gallery, alongside intimate videos that document their making.

The videos are presented in 3D, and without the glasses offered at the entrance, they appear doubled and out of focus. This echoes the drawings themselves, where two lines trail one another, creating a kind of visual reverberation. Nauman draws simultaneously with both hands, establishing a doubling that runs throughout the work: two screens, two hands, and our two eyes which perceive the image through the glasses.

There are 27 videos total; their screening changing daily at the gallery. Over many visits, I found myself wanting to sit in the cozy, mismatched chairs for a very long time, unbothered by the drawn out pace in which the artist carves out an image. The result becomes immaterial—the artist does not even look at the subject as he draws. Because after all the neon and figuration of his previous work, Nauman presents himself here so slowed down that the essential point becomes his inner workings.

A note from the Raphael show at the Met comes to mind; it’s an anecdote from the wall text about how Leonardo da Vinci advised a young perfectionist Raphael to not draw every detail in his sketches. Instead, he should draw loosely and quickly to capture the essence of the image so that it is more alive in its painted rendition. Nauman seems to be doing exactly this, distilling an image into lines, capturing his life as it is, and even slowing the process down so we have time to catch the image ourselves before it disappears.

Mána Taylor

is a writer based in New York. She has written for The Brooklyn Rail, The Drift, Artsy, Observer, and Hyperallergic, among others. She is the co-founder and editor of The Documentarian and writes a newsletter called Landmarks Everywhere, both of which are an artistic and poetic approach to journalistic documentation.

pitch us!

If you’d like to write for us, send us a pitch using the form below. Reviews are paid at $300-350, depending on length, and, to streamline the pitch process, we use a form system (link below). And if you’re a brand and would like to ✨ sponsor this newsletter of ~20K art people in New York ✨, write Sarah an email for details at sarah@exhibitsinnewyork.com.

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reviews we want.

We released new rates this week and would like to share, in lieu of our typical “what we’re reading” section, a few shows we’d love to cover.

• Ulises Beisso at ISLAA. The first exhibition of Uruguayan artist Ulises Beisso in the United States.

• Leon Kossoff at Luhring Augustine. A show of paintings from the British painter on view through June 20th. Ideally, pitches come in at least ~3 weeks before close so readers have time to see the show after we publish, so we’re coming up on last days to pitch.

• TINMANTIS at Foreign & Domestic. No idea what’s happening here but it’s interesting. Pitch us.

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what’s on view

Tribeca:

• Ulises Beisso, (Hidden) in Plain Sight, at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). Through August 29.

• Yeni and Nan, Genesis, at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). Through August 29.

• Bruce Nauman, No Mistakes, at Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer. Through June 20.

• David Byrne/Saul Steinberg, Influence and Affinity, at 125 Newbury. Through August 1.

• Emily Kraus, In Relation, at Luhring Augustine. Through June 13.

• Martin Wong, Popeye, at P·P·O·W. ⏰ Last day is today ⏰

• Antonia Lucy Gehnrich, Das Parfum, at Alex Berns. Through June 13. No exhibition website. Address is 354 Broadway.

• Gerald Wartofsky, The Song of the Earth, at James Fuentes. Through June 20.

Uptown:

• The Face of Life: Modern Portraits, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through July 19.

• Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through July 19.

• Enrico David, Works on Paper: 1995-2026, at VeneKlasen. Through August 28.

• Eliza Douglas, GHOSTS, at Gagosian. Through July 31.

• Karla Black, at Rodder. Through June 18.

Chelsea:

• Andy Warhol Family Album, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Through October 19.

• Huguette Caland, My Home, at Lisson. Through July 25.

• Mao Ishikawa, ROGUE, at Alison Bradley Projects. Extended through June 13. Read our contributor review here.

• Katharina Fritsch, at Matthew Marks. Through June 27.

East Village & Lower East Side:

• Michele Cesaratto, Journey to the West, at 56 Henry. Through June 28.

• TINMANTIS, Elite Fine Art, at Foreign & Domestic. Through June 28.

• Aineki Traverso, de profundis, at Half Gallery (Annex). Through June 10.

• Ceija Stojka, Making Visible, at the Drawing Center. Through June 7. ⏰ Last days ⏰

Brooklyn & Queens:

• Sheila Pinkel, Early Works 1974-1977, at Higher Pictures. Through June 27.

• Ellen Pau, She Moves, at Sculpture Center. Through August 16.

• Iris van Herpen, Sculpting the Senses, at The Brooklyn Museum. Through December 6.

about us

We’re making a new home for art writing. You can find Sarah’s writing here and Alexandra’s writing here. If you’d like to join us and help support independent art media, become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. We’ll send you an invite to start tracking and reviewing exhibits in the city and invitations to our events. More about us and how we got started here.

write for us

We’re coming up on our 150th issue since we started this newsletter back in December 2024. To celebrate, we’re raising rates for guest writers. Tell us in ~350 words why a recent show you saw matters and why this audience (of nearly 20,000 people) should leave their apartment to go see it. Don’t worry if you’re not an “art writer”. People from all disciplines are welcome, provided you can tell a short, compelling story about your time with a piece of art.

Reviews are paid at $300-350, depending on length, and, to streamline the pitch process, we’re moving to a form system (link below). Looking forward to hearing from you and happy art writing from Exhibits in New York.

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upstate exhibitions we’ve bookmarked for summer

Birds, Bees, Flowers, And Trees, Images of Nature’s Past and Present, Through September 20. The Clark.

“Birds, Bees, Flowers, and Trees pairs historical illustrations from the age of scientific inquiry with contemporary artists’ books featuring similar themes. From delicate wildflowers to high-tech dragonfly drones, this installation explores our ever-evolving relationship with the natural world.”

Upstate Art Weekend, Many locations, June 25-29

“UAW’s flagship annual event brings together artists, organizations, and audiences across the Hudson Valley and Catskills, inviting exploration of exhibitions, programs, and cultural spaces throughout the region.” It’s like a gallery crawl but you’ll need a car.

Upstate Gnarly, June 26-28, Ashley Garrett & Brian Wood’s Studio.

“Upstate Gnarly returns for its third iteration as an evolving, artist-run exhibition in Ashley Garrett and Brian Wood’s studio in East Chatham, NY. Encompassing sculpture, photography, painting, and mixed media, the show is a cross generational conversation of artists in the Hudson Valley region and beyond.”

Modus Operandi, Through November 28. The School | Jack Shainman Gallery.

​”Bringing together work by nearly twenty artists across painting, sculpture, textile, photography and video, the exhibition considers method not simply as process but as a way of thinking.”

Yoichi Ohira: Japan in Murano, Magazzino Italian Art

“Yoichi Ohira: Japan in Murano showcases the work of Yoichi Ohira (1946–2022), a Japanese artist who became a leading figure in designing Venetian glassworks on the island of Murano, Italy. The exhibition unfolds through clusters of works that illustrate aesthetic resonances, chromatic contrasts, and formal affinities, creating dialogues across different periods of the artist’s career.”

what we’re reading

• Delia Cai wrote a short review of the New Museum show that we found insightful and inspired Sarah to head back and give the exhibition a second look.

• We’re heading into summer (some day trip guides to come!) which is typically the time of year when Sarah makes a point of putting down the art reading—or really anything nonfiction—and getting into some fiction. On deck is ’s The Future Was Color and James Baldwin’s Another Country.

what’s on view

East Village & Lower East Side:

• Taro Masushio, GOLDFISH, at Ulrik. Through June 13.

• Ceija Stojka, Making Visible, at the Drawing Center. Through June 7.

• New Humans: Memories of the Future, at the New Museum. Ongoing.

• Pia Dehne, Smiling Faces Sometimes, at Dashwood Projects. Through June 13.

• TINMANTIS, Elite Fine Art, at Foreign & Domestic. Through June 28.

Uptown:

• Eliza Douglas, GHOSTS, at Gagosian. Through July 31.

• Robert Rauschenberg, Important Early Works from the Cy Twombly Foundation, at Gagosian. Through July 31.

• Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through July 19.

• David Hammons and Jannis Kounellis, at White Cube. Through June 13.

• Sophie Rivera, Double Exposures, at El Museo del Barrio. Through August 2.

• Nobuyoshi Araki and Roe Ethridge, at Anton Kern. Through July 1.

• Gustav Klimt, Women, at Gladstone. Through June 17.

Tribeca & Soho:

• Vaughn Spann, (All) Americans, at Almine Rech. Through June 13.

• Gerald Wartofsky, The Song of the Earth, at James Fuentes. Through June 20.

• Nina Hartmann, Actualization Machine, at Silke Lindner. Through May 30. ⏰LAST DAY ⏰.

• Walter Robinson, Let the Music Play, at Jeffrey Deitch. Through June 6.

• Yeni and Nan, Genesis, at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). Through August 29.

Brooklyn & Queens:

• Ellen Pau, She Moves, at Sculpture Center. Through August 16.

• Akinsanya Kambon, Soul Sessions, at Sculpture Center. Through August 16.

• Noguchi’s New York at The Noguchi Museum. Through September 13.

• Jordan Eagles, Bases Loaded, at Pioneer Works. Through August 9.

• Office of War Information (O.W.I.), at Pioneer Works. Through August 9.

Chelsea & Midtown:

• Peter Hujar, Contact, at The Morgan Library & Museum. Through October 25.

• Gerhard Richter, Landschaften, at David Zwirner. Through July 10.

• Daniel Gordon, Objects at Hand, at Olney Gleason. Through June 6.

• Huguette Caland, My Home, at Lisson. Through July 25.

about us

We’re making a new home for art writing. You can find Sarah’s writing here and Alexandra’s writing here. If you’d like to join us and help support independent art media, become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. We’ll send you an invite to start tracking and reviewing exhibits in the city and invitations to our events. More about us and how we got started here.

what we’re reading

• Sarah revisited Iris van Herpen’s new show at the Brooklyn Museum this week—historically, she’s found that this museum more reliably puts on the standout fashion exhibition of the season. She’s considering writing a review and is particularly curious about how Herpen might view herself in relation to traditional Dutch art history. The show mentions Hieronymus Bosch in particular which has gotten Sarah to reach for an old biography she found years ago on her neighbor’s stoop. It’s an easy, introductory read she’s tackling while en route to California this weekend for a weeding.

• We’re releasing a new pitch process soon, but one show Sarah would love for someone to tackle is this exhibit of paintings from Leon Kossoff at Luhring Augustine. Apart from some basic name recognition, she was not too familiar with his work and has been spending time with old exhibition reviews and catalogs of his shows.

what’s on view

East Village & Lower East Side:

• Women Across America: 1945 to 1979, at Eric Firestone. Through July 11.

• Taro Masushio, GOLDFISH, at Ulrik. Through June 13.

• Mirrors Within Mirrors, at Derosia. Through June 13.

• John Hee Taek Chae, Third, at D.D.D.D. Through June 20.

• Greg Parma Smith, Things in the Air, at Hoffman Donahue. ⏰ Last day is today ⏰

• Maï Lucas, New York Days, at Dashwood Projects. ⏰ Last day is today ⏰ Read Alexandra’s review here.

Uptown:

• Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through July 19.

• Ruffles & Ribbons: Fashion Plates from the Time of Marie Antoinette, at The Frick. Through August 3.

• Sophie Rivera, Double Exposures, at El Museo del Barrio. Through August 2.

• Don Nice, Early Works, at Craig Starr. Through August 21.

• Gustav Klimt, Women, at Gladstone. Through June 17.

Tribeca & Soho:

• Jane Yang D’Haene, Love Letter, at Bienvenu Steinberg & C. Through June 6.

• Eileen Agar, Leaves of the World, at Andrew Kreps. Through June 20.

• Angelo Vasta, at Tappeto Volante. Through June 27.

• Seung Ah Paik, Suspended Landscapes, at Bortolami. Through May 30.

• Nina Hartmann, Actualization Machine, at Silke Lindner. Through May 30.

• Antonia Lucy Gehnrich, Das Parfum, at Alex Berns. Through June 13. No exhibition website. Address is 354 Broadway.

Chelsea & Midtown

• Celia Paul, Innervisions, at Gladstone. Through June 13.

• Virginia Chihota, Kutera mutsara / Hearing Inner Lines, at Nicola Vassell. Through June 13.

• Erwin Wurm, Double Dream, at Lehmann Maupin. Through June 6.

• Love & Fury: New York’s Fight Against AIDS, at Poster House. Through September 6.

• Joan Brown, The Golden Age, at Matthew Marks. Through June 27.

• Helen Frankenthaler, The Moment and the Distance, at Gagosian. Through July 2.

about us

We’re making a new home for art writing. You can find Sarah’s writing here and Alexandra’s writing here. If you’d like to join us and help support independent art media, become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. We’ll send you an invite to start tracking and reviewing exhibits in the city and invitations to our events. More about us and how we got started here.

what’s on:

• Lisa Yuskavage, at David Zwirner. Through June 26. Chelsea.

• Iris van Herpen, Sculpting the Senses, at The Brooklyn Museum. Prospect Park. Through December 6.

• Gustav Klimt, Women, at Gladstone. Through June 17. Upper East Side.

• Useless Machines, at Luxembourg & Co. Through July 10. Midtown.

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Treasures from the Mozarteum Foundation of Salzburg, at The Morgan Library. Through May 31. Midtown.

New York Days, Maï Lucas’s first solo exhibition in New York, is on view at Dashwood Projects (63 E 4th St, New York, NY). ⏰ Closing Saturday ⏰

On view: Maï Lucas

It was searingly hot this week, the year’s first taste of summer in New York. While some (Sarah) are mourning the onset of smelly streets and stifling subways, these months will always be my favorite time of year so long as I live here. City summers, with all their drawbacks, remind me too much of my first years in New York.

The Franco-Vietnamese photographer also came to New York in the summer. To read curator Philo Cohen’s retelling, Lucas was meant to meet an aunt uptown in 1986; the woman never materialized, and the artist ended up couchsurfing with strangers downtown instead. It’s a story with edges of danger, intimacy, and bravado, as though, on her first night here, she had already registered the enduring elements of this city into her system.

New York Days contains images that Lucas took throughout the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. The photos are mostly of people, and, since Lucas returned to many of the same neighborhoods and blocks throughout the decades, they mark an earned closeness. This registers in gentle smiles towards the lens, but also in a literal closeness of the camera’s frame on her subjects. Lucas is chronicling the lives of people working and living outside of what is prescriptive, people inventing new cultural paths forward (specifically around hip-hop) when what was available seemed too reductive, too commercial, or too authoritative.

You can tell that the photos are taken in summer. Not just because of the obvious clues — scant clothes, leaves on trees. It’s the light. It’s the energy. It’s knowing that you may be sweating on the curb now, but there will be a cool payoff once the sun starts to go down.

In another life (aka ten years ago), I lived in the East Village, between 4th and A. I worked in restaurants late into the night, would go out with coworkers even later, and then sit on my fire escape watching the 24-hour grocery store across the street load in supplies as the sun came up. During the day, I started working as a bike delivery person, bringing lunches to fancy offices in SoHo and Wall Street. All afternoon, my bike and I baked in the heat; but everything was worth it by nighttime, when the air was still warm but the sun was sleeping. To be out and around during these illicit hours felt revelatory, and I spent my early twenties almost pitying anyone who had to adhere to a normal routine.

That last feeling has since quieted — partly because (and this will come as a shock if you knew me then) I’ve come to respect the value of a long-term career, and partly too because, today in New York City, it’s hardly tenable not to fall in line. But looking at Lucas’s photographs, I felt a return to the desire to create your own space beyond the obvious one that is outlined for you. This small assemblage of photographs (found also in the much larger catalogue that accompanies the show) brought me back to that reckless but wonderful time when I thought that more worlds were right at my fingertips. Maybe they still are.

New York Days is on view through May 23.

about us

We’re making a new home for art writing. You can find Sarah’s writing here and Alexandra’s writing here. If you’d like to join us and help support independent art media, become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. We’ll send you an invite to start tracking and reviewing exhibits in the city and invitations to our events. More about us and how we got started here.

what we’re reading

• It’s fair week in New York! A few reviews caught our eye this week, but we particularly liked this piece from Hyperallergic on the cost of attending fair week across NYC. It’s worth understanding the price of admission, and thinking through how cost factors into what’s on view.

• One of Alexandra’s favorite past shows at Neue Galerie was this 2024 retrospective of German Expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker. Modersohn-Becker died at only thirty-one, just after childbirth, but the portraits she made of herself during pregnancy would become some of the most striking 20th-century representations of the female nude. This week’s news that Neue would be merging with the Met prompted her to revisit some old writing on her bookshelf about the artist.

what’s on view

Chelsea:

• Frieze New York. Last minute tickets here.

• 1-54. Last minute tickets here.

• Lisa Yuskavage, at David Zwirner. Through June 26.

• Mark di Suvero, Avanti!, at Paula Cooper. Through July 17.

• Philip Guston, Life with P., at Hauser & Wirth. Through July 10.

• Mao Ishikawa, ROGUE, at Alison Bradley Projects. Extended through June 13. Read our contributor review here.

• Vik Muniz, Brushstrokes, at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins. Through June 20.

Midtown:

• Paul Thek, at Galerie Buchholz. Through July 25.

• Mohammad Omer Khalil, Common Ground, at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Program. Through May 31.

• Marcel Duchamp at the Museum of Modern Art. Through August 22. Read Sarah’s review here.

Brooklyn & Queens:

• Iris van Herpen, Sculpting the Senses, at The Brooklyn Museum. ⏰ Opens today⏰

• Greater New York 2026 at MoMA PS1. Through August 17.

• Noguchi’s New York at The Noguchi Museum. Through September 13.

Uptown:

• Enrico David, Works on Paper: 1995-2026, at VeneKlasen. Through August 28.

• Gustav Klimt, Women, at Gladstone. Through June 17.

• Set in Stone, at David Zwirner. Through June 26.

• George Morrison, The Magical City, at the Met. Through May 31. ⏰ Closing soon ⏰. Read Alexandra’s review here.

• Self-Made: A Century of Inventing Artists, at the American Folk Art Museum. Through September 13.

Downtown:

• Independent Art Fair. Last minute tickets here.

• Lucia Hierro, Moving Day, at Marc Straus. Through June 28.

• Peter Cain, The Los Angeles Photographs, at American Art Catalogues.

• Aineki Traverso, de profundis, at Half Gallery (Annex). Through June 10.

• New Humans: Memories of the Future, at the New Museum. Ongoing.

about us

We’re making a new home for art writing. You can find Sarah’s writing here and Alexandra’s writing here. If you’d like to join us and help support independent art media, become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. We’ll send you an invite to start tracking and reviewing exhibits in the city and invitations to our events. More about us and how we got started here.

a note on summer 🎓

Longtime subscribers of this newsletter might remember that it originally started as an app waitlist to keep a journal of what you’re seeing in the city. We’ve kept that experience mostly private, but with spring fairs behind us, we wanted to share that we plan on spending the summer opening the app up to the art students of New York. More on this to come but if you’re an art student or recent grad (congrats!), you’ll be able to get in soon—no paywall or bespoke invite necessary. Be sure to subscribe to this newsletter so you’re notified when we launch.

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what’s on:

• ✨ Opening tomorrow ✨ Peter Cain, The Los Angeles Photographs, at American Art Catalogues. West Village.

• ✨ Opening tomorrow ✨ Set in Stone at David Zwirner. Through June 26. Upper East Side.

• Ana Kraš, Svila, at Emma Scully Gallery. Through June 13. Upper East Side.

• David Armstrong, Portraits, at Artists Space. Through May 23. Tribeca.

• Spring fairs are on this week. Last-minute tickets to Frieze are here.

ROGUE, a collection of four series of photographs by Okinawan artist Mao Ishikawa, is on view at Alison Bradley Projects (526 W 26th St #814, New York, NY).

On view: Mao Ishikawa

BY MICHAEL FORBES

Mao Ishikawa was nineteen in 1972 when the Reversion Agreement — signed in Tokyo and D.C., returning the Okinawan Prefecture to Japanese rule while leaving U.S. military bases intact — took effect. Instead of buying the coming-of-age kimono her parents intended for her, Ishikawa took that money, enrolled in photography school, and returned to Koza, Okinawa, to work at 777, a bar serving Black GIs and the Okinawan women who chose them. Red Flower (Akabana), a series of black & white photographs taken from 1975 to 1977, is the record of that room.

The chemistry inside 777 had little to do with simple desire across differences. Both groups stood south of the centers that defined them, and they knew it. Okinawa was not Tokyo — it was occupied, peripheral, condescended to by mainland Japan. The Black GIs were not white America — they carried American power and American anti-Blackness at once. The bar held this shared displacement in one room; inside, Black is Beautiful, the rising ethos at the time, could operate as a transferable refusal, an idea that Okinawan women on the wrong side of Japanese hierarchy could also take up.

In one photograph (above), a Black GI leans against a jukebox, floral shirt open. The daisies on his chest echo the roses cascading around the Black Rose poster behind him. The masculinity here is not the hard, stoic independence of a Marlboro Man; it is the ornamented Black 1970s of Sly Stone and George Clinton, a masculinity that incorporates the feminine without apology. The androgynous figure on the poster extends the claim: hair, flowers, softness — none of it disqualifying. A taped sign reads, “Don’t [lean here].” The man in the image coolly leans anyway. The photograph is composed, balanced. Each element supports the next. This is 777 at full coherence.

A second photograph (below) breaks that coherence. At left of a tightened frame, an Okinawan woman’s afro dominates the foreground, her face nearly lost to the shadow of her hair — a look created more by recognition than by proper styling. Behind her, another woman stands facing the camera, fully visible, her midriff exposed beneath a striped top. At the lower right, a Black man sits turned away, already leaving the scene. The compositional order that held the first image together gives way in the second — figures are cut off, crowded, pushed against the edges of the frame. Ishikawa has described the central woman as “ugly.” The photograph centers her anyway.

The first image feels like payday Friday night; the second, Saturday afternoon. 777 reflected a late stage of segregation, a post-reversion limbo where the bases remained, and the bars continued as separate worlds just as a certain kind of racial separation began to run its course. Ishikawa admired the women in this bar; she photographed them, named them Akabana — the red Okinawan flower, resilient and trampled — without knowing their futures. She loved these Black US soldiers, even if she hated the US military. She knew that “ugliness and beauty coexist,” and she would “forever love that about humans.”1 These two photographs crystallize an argument about who gets to be beautiful, and on what terms.

ROGUE is on view through June 6.

Michael Forbes

holds a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst and taught for a decade at DePauw University and the College of Wooster. His scholarship focuses on Black popular culture, film studies, and modern visual art. He currently teaches English at the Dalton School in Manhattan.

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exhibits in new york (for iOS)

about us

We’re making a new home for art writing. You can find Sarah’s writing here and Alexandra’s writing here. If you’d like to join us and help support independent art media, become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. We’ll send you an invite to start tracking and reviewing exhibits in the city and invitations to our events. More about us and how we got started here.

take our map 💫

If you’re an iOS user and would like to take our recommendations with you, download our app below. Paid subscribers of this newsletter can also add shows to their itinerary and write reviews of what they’re seeing.

exhibits in new york (for iOS)

what we’re reading

• Alexandra has been taking dance classes for the last two years (shout out Ballet Academy East), so she was excited to find this interview in Urban Omnibus that emphasizes dance and urban architecture’s inherent connection. In the interview, Maxwell Neely-Cohen interviews Rennie McDougall — both of whom are writers and dancers — about McDougall's recent book Nonstop Bodies: How Dance Made New York City. The conversation makes the case that, while it's widely understood that a city can influence an artistic movement, it's less rigorously chronicled how artistic movements, like dance, actually remake the physical landscape of a city. The interview opens with this (brilliant) Martha Graham quote: “This is an important facet of any city: that of the millions of rooms, there is at least one in which some person is willingly falling to the floor like a plank, believing — and rightly so — that in doing so they’re changing the history of art.”

• Spring fairs start next week! A useful primer for the uninitiated on all that’s going on in the city here. Sarah has plans to be at Frieze, Independent, and 1-54 and will report back.

what’s on view

Uptown:

• Sophie Rivera, Double Exposures, at El Museo del Barrio. Through August 2.

• Self-Made: A Century of Inventing Artists, at the American Folk Art Museum. Through September 13.

• Sigmar Polke, The Dream of Menelaus, at VeneKlasen. Through May 9. ⏰ Last day and must-see ⏰

• Useless Machines, at Luxembourg & Co. Through July 10.

• Kitchen Table Imagery at the Czech Center Gallery. Through May 20.

• Dalí: The Great Years, 1929-1939 at Di Donna. Through June 13.

Chelsea & Midtown:

• Aura Rosenberg and Egon Schiele, at Meredith Rosen. Through May 23.

• Daniel Gordon, Objects at Hand, at Olney Gleason. Through June 6.

• Danielle Mckinney, Forest for the Trees, at Marianne Boesky. Through June 13.

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Treasures from the Mozarteum Foundation of Salzburg, at The Morgan Library. Through May 31.

• Katharina Fritsch, at Matthew Marks. Through June 27.

• Joan Brown, The Golden Age, at Matthew Marks. Through June 27.

• RugLife, at Pratt Manhattan Gallery. Through May 23.

East Village & Lower East Side:

• Stan VanDerBeek, Micro Kosmos, at Magenta Plains. Through June 20.

• Greg Parma Smith, Things in the Air, at Hoffman Donahue. Through May 23.

• Lewinale Havette, I Love It When You Beg, at Palo Gallery. Through June 13.

• Jiajia Zhang, Domestic News, at Swiss Institute. Through July 5.

Tribeca & Soho:

• Statics of an Egg, at David Zwirner. Through June 27.

• June Leaf, Early Prints, Drawings, and Sculptures, at George Adams Gallery. Through June 27.

• Disappointment, at Jenny’s (114 Greene Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY). Through May 16. ⏰ Only open on Saturdays ⏰

• Martin Wong, Popeye, at P·P·O·W. Through May 30.

• Renée Green, Secret, at Bortolami. Through May 16.

about us

We’re making a new home for art writing. You can find Sarah’s writing here and Alexandra’s writing here. If you’d like to join us and help support independent art media, become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. We’ll send you an invite to start tracking and reviewing exhibits in the city and invitations to our events. More about us and how we got started here.

what’s on:

• ✨ Opening Thursday ✨ June Leaf, Early Prints, Drawings, and Sculptures, at George Adams Gallery. Through June 27. Tribeca.

• ✨ Opening Thursday ✨ Joan Brown, The Golden Age, at Matthew Marks. Through June 27. Chelsea.

• ✨ Opening Thursday ✨ Jasper Johns, Copy/Trace, at David Zwirner. Through June 26. Chelsea.

• Kitchen Table Imagery at the Czech Center Gallery. Through May 20. Upper East Side.

• Vija Celmins, Prints 1983 to 1985, at Matthew Marks Gallery. Through June 27. Chelsea.

In the Flesh, a survey of career artist Joan Semmel, is on view at the Jewish Museum (1109 5th Ave and E 92nd Street, New York, NY).

On view: Joan Semmel

BY DAN SCHINDEL

The Jewish Museum’s ground-floor gallery isn’t small, but it isn’t so large that one would think it could house a full-career survey — much less that of an artist who, over five decades, has defined a particular mode of perspective in painting. Reviewing press notes to write this piece, I was surprised to read that In the Flesh incorporates just sixteen of Joan Semmel’s paintings; based only on my memory of my visit, I would have sworn there were more. (For comparison, Skin in the Game, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ 2021 retrospective, had more than fifty.) But the show generates a rich encounter with Semmel’s work through its presentation rather than its size.

A central wall divides the gallery into a ring shape, encouraging our natural tendency to explore an exhibit clockwise, following paintings arranged roughly chronologically. At noon on the clock is Semmel’s 1978 painting “Sunlight,” possibly her most well-known work and emblematic of her style during that time. Within this central space, the dividing wall opposite “Sunlight” bears a host of pieces from the museum’s collection that Semmel herself selected — paintings and photographs from Marc Chagall, Nan Goldin, Alice Neel, and more that she considers inspirations or otherwise in conversation with her oeuvre. The artist’s curation becomes the heart and brain of the exhibition; taken together with her own work, In the Flesh is a panoply of ways of seeing.

Curators Rebecca Shaykin and Liz Munsell have picked only large-scale works from Semmel, and these monumental, painted humans fill the outer ring of the gallery, while the works that Semmel curated are clustered so tightly that there’s no room for labels (a reference pamphlet identifies the selections). This spurs frequent movement between the outer and inner rings: a visitor will stand back to take in the immensity of a painting like “Through the Object’s Eye,” then step forward to view the smaller pieces. Navigating these varied perspectives reconfigures one’s relationship to body and scale, like Alice shrinking and growing in Wonderland. Visitors are hemmed in, their bodies in a continuum with the two-dimensional ones on the walls.

Decades before the internet, Semmel anticipated a relationship between self and body that would permeate the 21st century — “Tilted Mirror” looks like a pre-cellphone selfie, for instance. But the technology and platforms that mediate communication today encourage us to think of ourselves from a disconnected standpoint; the self is often scrutinized, as if by an outsider. In the Flesh requires real effort from our off-screen bodies to take in Semmel’s paintings and the images made by her peers and predecessors. Semmel has spent her career fixated on raw depictions of unidealized bodies, and the show cajoles us to imagine a different relationship with our corporeal selves than one of dulled dissociation. Through its presentation, In the Flesh grants a welcome reminder of our tender physicality.

In the Flesh is on view through May 31.

Dan Schindel

is a freelance critic and a former associate editor at Hyperallergic. He has a Substack called It's Been Said.

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exhibits in new york (for iOS)

about us

We’re making a new home for art writing. You can find Sarah’s writing here and Alexandra’s writing here. If you’d like to join us and help support independent art media, become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. We’ll send you an invite to start tracking and reviewing exhibits in the city and invitations to our events. More about us and how we got started here.

about this list

As mentioned in our Thursday review, we’re experimenting a bit with putting up a paywall. Just the first neighborhood is free this week, and subscriptions will go toward ⭐️ raising rates for writers and speakers ⭐️. Have a great weekend, and go see something.

what we’re reading

• Sarah mostly tries to not mention that she once went to business school, but one of the last vestiges of that phase of her life is her habitual listening to Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast. Joe Weisenthal, one of the co-hosts, has become obsessed with Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, a classic work in academia that looks at how writing impacts human consciousness and the differences between written and oral cultures. Much of that thinking worked its way into her recent review of the Morgan Library’s Come Together exhibit, closing this Sunday.

• Sarah has a wine exam coming up, so, in addition to reading the technical stuff, she’s been revisiting some old works of wine writing, including David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste.” The essay argues for the possibility of standards in criticism, beginning with wine as an example.

what’s on view

Chelsea:

• Leon Kossoff at Luhring Augustine. Through June 20.

• Celia Paul_, Innervisions, at Gladstone. Through June 13.

• N. Dash, Geophilia, at Hill Art Foundation. Through July 31.

• Leonor Fini, Menagerie, at Olney Gleason. Through May 2.

• Philip Guston, Life With P., at Hauser & Wirth. Through July 10.

• Giuseppe Penone, The Reflection of Bronze, at Gagosian. Through July 2.

• KING COBRA, Heathens, at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins. Through May 2. ⏰ Last day ⏰

Read more

what’s on:

• Helen Frankenthaler, The Moment and the Distance, at Gagosian ✨Opening today✨ April 30, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm. Chelsea.

• Akwasi Brenya-Mensa, Tatale Provisions, at Hannah Traore ✨Opening today✨ April 30, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm. Lower East Side.

• Hayden Dunham, NEVER IS OVER, at Company Gallery ✨Opening today✨ April 30, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm. Lower East Side.

• David Hammons & Jannis Kounellis, at White Cube ✨Opening today✨ April 30, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm. Upper East Side.

• Merryn Omotayo Alaka and Sam Frésquez, at Jane Lombard ✨Opening tomorrow✨ May 1, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm. Tribeca

Come Together: 3,000 Years of Stories and Storytelling, a show exploring the history of storytelling and curated mostly from the museum’s permanent collection, is closing this Sunday at the Morgan Library & Museum (225 Madison Ave, New York, NY).

On view: Cy Twombly

This charming show about human storytelling begins with a recognizable piece from Cy Twombly. Placed next to a thousand-year-old pen box and a minimalist sculpture of a book, the exhibition’s opening makes me think that the curator, like me, has a bias toward the written word. But not all stories emerge from written tradition, a fact this show acknowledges by leading with our most impactful oral narratives, including the ancient Greek myths, stories from America’s indigenous cultures, and rituals from the Old Testament.

The era of mass literacy comes later. Literature lovers will find plenty of treasures to observe, including an early draft of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the first collected edition of William Shakespeare’s plays, and a letter from Lewis Carroll. And just beyond these rooms comes the rise of an image-based culture, populated with work from Roy Lichtenstein, Maurice Sendak of Where the Wild Things Are, and an early film featuring Charlie Chaplin.

Walking through this dense exhibition, I’m struck by the show’s serene depiction of the transitions between these media. Historically speaking, changes in how information is shared and stored are difficult for societies to metabolize: the rise of the printing press led famously to chaos in Europe; Walter Benjamin’s most quoted writing untangles the relationship between the new media of his age and the rise of fascism that he would die fleeing in 1940. I worry about similar convulsions today in response to artificial intelligence, a technology that, at minimum, wishes to centralize our relationship to stories through their now-ubiquitous chatbots (someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house on the same day I last visited this show).

But at the Morgan Library, there’s a sanguine optimism, an earnest (no shade) your-average-New Yorker subscriber-would-love-this belief in the power of stories to bring us together. I don’t begrudge the sentiment, nor the show’s limited scope (this feels more like an engaging way to show off an impressive permanent collection, not a conclusive, sweeping survey); but it’s critical to mention that while you will have a good time here, an exhibition with the exact opposite narrative is just as possible to design. Stories weave us together, but they have also reliably torn us apart — Radio Rwanda comes to mind. That stories wield such power is part of why museums (along with newspapers, universities, etc.) exist in the first place. It’s also a power, extrapolating the show’s themes to our imminent future not yet on view, I suspect tech companies are vying to usurp.

Come Together: 3,000 Years of Stories and Storytelling is on view through May 3.

-Sarah

a note from us

We’ve been chatting lately about how we would like to grow this email list. We’re going to be running some experiments over the next few newsletters about what makes sense to put behind a paywall. Money will go to raising rates for writers and putting on more events. If you’d like to support us in the meantime, subscribe button below.

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about us

We’re making a new home for art writing. You can find Sarah’s writing here and Alexandra’s writing here. If you’d like to join us and help support independent art media, become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. We’ll send you an invite to start tracking and reviewing exhibits in the city and invitations to our events. More about us and how we got started here.

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If you’re an iOS user and would like to take our recommendations with you, download our app below. Paid subscribers of this newsletter can also add shows to their itinerary and write reviews of what they’re seeing.

exhibits in new york (for iOS)

what we’re reading

• It was/is Milan Design Week this week (April 19-26); images of design and architecture have been pouring in, and the New York art world may be looking for some intentional overlap — Salon 94 on the UES just opened Tom Sachs’ FURNITURE and Pace at 125 Newbury is running CHAIR SHOW. Monocle’s summary of their experience in Milan was curious, suggesting that a fracturing of the zeitgeist made more exhibitions lean more “intellectual” and “existential” than ever before — arguably, then, shrinking the ever-porous gap between design and visual arts.

• The New York Review has expanded its art coverage, and the current May 2026 issue has Ben Davis on Ceija Stojka, Dawn Chan on Paul Chan, and Coco Fusco on Wifredo Lam, among others. We, unsurprisingly, love to see (and read) more long-form arts writing in the city.

what’s on view

Tribeca & Soho:

• Orkideh Torabi, Kings and Conquerors, at Asya Geisberg Gallery. Through May 16.

• Renée Green, Secret, at Bortolami. Through May 16.

• Youngju Joung, Pause and Flow, at Almine Rech. Through April 25. ⏰ Last day ⏰

• Edwin Schlossberg, Unseen Layers, at Ronald Feldman. Through May 21.

• Jong Oh, THE EARTH IS FLAT, at Marc Straus. Through May 9.

• Stephanie Monteith, Wild Flower, at Isabel Sullivan. Through May 16.

• Syd Krochmalny, A Hard & Soft Poem for the Night, at Locker Room. Through April 26. ⏰ Last days ⏰

Uptown:

• Richard Artschwager / Gary Hume at Sprüth Magers. Through May 22.

• Sophie Rivera, Double Exposures, at El Museo del Barrio. Through August 2.

• Josiane M. H. Pozi, In Pursuit of Feeling, at Arts and Letters. Through July 3.

• Tahnee Lonsdale, Walk With Us Into the Forest, at Alexander Berggruen. Through May 13.

Chelsea & Midtown:

• Mao Ishikawa, ROGUE, at Alison Bradley Projects. Through June 6.

• Benefit Exhibition for the Foundation for Contemporary Arts at Paula Cooper. Through April 25. ⏰ Last day ⏰

• Anthony Falcetta, Understories, at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts. Through May 16.

• Martín Ramírez, Silent Dialogue, at Ricco/Maresca. Through May 2.

• Sebastiaan Bremer, Super Modern Things, at Edwynn Houk Gallery. Through June 6.

Brooklyn & Queens:

• Molly Bounds, The Light That Loses, The Night That Wins, at Mrs. Through May 2.

• Salt, Sulfur, Mercury at A.I.R. Through May 3.

• Kim Gordon, Count Your Chickens, at Amant. Through August 16.

• Greater New York 2026 at MoMA PS1. Through August 17.

Lower East Side & the East Village:

• Erin Armstrong, Untethered, at Hashimoto Contemporary. Through May 2.

• Arlina Cai, Dreamkeeper, at Hannah Traore. Through May 30.

• Keith Haring at The Brant Foundation. Through May 31. 🎟️ Tickets required 🎟️

• Vestige at Slip House. Through May 2.

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exhibits in new york (for iOS)

what we’re reading

• After her first of many visits to the new Marcel Duchamp show this past week, Sarah made the financially irresponsible decision to purchase Thierry de Duve’s Duchamp’s Telegram in the gift shop and spend the rest of her afternoon reading it in the Bar Room next door. The book ended up powering her review. Published in 2023, Duve contextualizes Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) as the piece that marked art’s transition from the the old Beaux-Arts system into what he calls the “Art-in-General” system that we inhabit now. You can purchase the book here.

• Sarah has been working on a review of the Come Together show at the Morgan Library, an exhibition that focuses on the history of storytelling and has gotten her to think about the different mediums in which stories are told (written vs oral vs screens). With that in mind, she’s ordered veteran arts writer Martha Schwendener’s recent book entitled The Society of the Screen. It takes a look at Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser’s engagement with the experimental art practices of his time and how it impacted his thinking in media studies.

what’s on view

Uptown:

• Henri Matisse, The Pursuit of Harmony, at Acquavella Galleries. Through May 22.

• Viollet-le-Duc, Drawing Worlds, at Bard Graduate Center. ⏰ Tickets required ⏰. Through May 24.

• Dalí: The Great Years, 1929-1939 at Di Donna. Through June 13.

• Sigmar Polke, The Dream of Menelaus, at VeneKlasen. Through May 9.

• Raphael, Sublime Poetry, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through June 28.

Chelsea & Midtown:

• Robert Mapplethorpe at Gladstone Gallery. Through April 18. ⏰ Last day ⏰

• Emmet Gowin, Baldwin Street: Photographs 1966-1994, at Pace Gallery. Through April 25.

• Sam Gilliam, Stitched, at Pace Gallery. Through April 25.

• Sheida Soleimani, Forest of Stars, at Yancey Richardson. Through May 22.

• Caravaggio’s “Boy with a Basket of Fruit” in Focus at the Morgan Library. Through April 19. ⏰ Last days ⏰

• Marcel Duchamp at the Museum of Modern Art. Through August 22. Read our review here.

Brooklyn & Queens:

• Greater New York 2026 at MoMA PS1. Through August 17.

• Noguchi’s New York at The Noguchi Museum. Through September 13.

• CFGNY, Puddles into Pond, at Amant. Through August 16.

Lower East Side:

• Matthew Pang, LOOKING IN THE BOTTLE, at Ulrik. Through May 2.

• Chris Dorland, Latent Stack, at Lyles & King. Through May 9.

• Aneta Grzeszykowska, Daughter, at Lyles & King. Through May 9.

• Jo Messer, Speed Stick, at 56 Henry. Through May 17.

• William Scott, Science Fiction Master Plan: Wholesome Encounters, at David Peter Francis. Through May 2.

Tribeca:

• Joan Semmel, Continuities, at Alexander Gray Associates. Through May 30.

• Martin Wong, Popeye, at P·P·O·W. ✨ Opening reception tonight at 6 PM ✨

• Isa Genzken, VACATION, at David Zwirner. Through April 18. ⏰ Last day ⏰

• Sophie Reinhold, Echo, at Bortolami. Through April 18. ⏰ Last day ⏰

about us

We’re making a new home for art writing. You can find Sarah’s writing here and Alexandra’s writing here. If you’d like to join us and help support independent art media, become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. We’ll send you an invite to start tracking and reviewing exhibits in the city and invitations to our events. More about us and how we got started here.

what’s on:

• Henri Matisse, The Pursuit of Harmony, at Acquavella Galleries. Through May 22. Upper East Side.

• Dalí: The Great Years, 1929-1939, at Di Donna. Through June 13. Upper East Side.

• Armig Santos, Baladas, at Lévy Gorvy Dayan. Through June 13. Upper East Side.

• Robert Mapplethorpe, at Gladstone Gallery. Through April 18. ⏰ Last days ⏰ Chelsea.

• Afterlife, at Andrew Edlin Gallery. Through April 25. Tribeca.

Marcel Duchamp, the first US retrospective of the French-American artist in fifty years, is now on view at the Museum of Modern Art (11 W 53rd St, New York, NY) through August 22.

On view: Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp’s best-known gesture, the urinal he unsuccessfully submitted to a new, “democratic” arts exhibition back in 1917, does not lead you into this show. I don’t know why I expected it to. Instead, the first piece is a painting entitled “The Chess Game” made in 1910 that would be right at home on the museum’s fifth floor, where giants of modern art like Paul Cézanne hang in the permanent collection. The exhibit’s opening reflects the curator’s choice to structure this show chronologically, and instantly situates you in the specific milieu Duchamp was born. He was just six years younger than Picasso, and his “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)” could sit easily beside the latter’s “Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier).”

In the back galleries comes the break, where Duchamp’s experiments with the many new media that would, over the course of the twentieth century, assimilate into art institutions become visible. His creative partnerships with noted photographers Man Ray and Alfred Stieglitz are on view; his most famous transgression, found objects called “readymades” that he would valorize as art, are given generous placement. Astute observers will note, though, that these are almost all reproductions — the aforementioned urinal, “The Fountain,” is from 1917, but the original object was lost after it was first rejected by exhibitors. What’s on view here is from the 1950s, commissioned by New York art dealer Sidney Janis who wanted it included in a group show. That lag between the introduction of his ideas and its eventual canonization reflects the relative disinterest in Duchamp while he was working through his now most impactful ideas. It’s an indifference that would begin to reverse in the post-war period, when, as scholar Thierry de Duve notes in his recent (excellent) Duchamp’s Telegram, younger artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg looked to Duchamp as a way to rebel against an art world they viewed as too restricting and self-important.

That’s the core of Duchamp that intrigues me. The French-American artist has a dyschronous relationship with the movements of his time. He comes of age squarely at the start of the twentieth century, recognizes what might be required to lead its art movements, and opts to leave the work to others. You can see this abdication as early as the 1920s when, the curators explicate, he stopped calling himself an artist and spent the next few decades tinkering as a chess player, “inventor,” and prolific ephemera contributor. During this time, many of his initial peers in painting built momentous careers while Duchamp languished a bit as an artist’s artist; that is until his core idea that “art can be made from anything” was found and reinvigorated by a younger generation.

You can see such reverence by his juniors in the exhibition’s final room, where Duchamp stars in a very sweet screen test filmed by Andy Warhol. And sixty years later, the paradox of Duchamp, visible to anyone who has seen the Whitney Biennial or even just this very museum’s post-war rooms, is that the patron saint of subversion has become the indisputable hegemon.

Marcel Duchamp is on view at the MoMA through August 22.

-Sarah

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about us

We’re making a new home for art writing. We publish exhibit reviews and itineraries for shows in the city, plus we created our gallery guide app that lets paid subscribers track and review exhibits around town. More about us and how we got started here.

what’s on:

• Marcel Duchamp, at the Museum of Modern Art. ⏰ Opens tomorrow, member previews are today ⏰

• Maï Lucas, New York Days, at Dashwood Projects. Through May 23.

• Caravaggio’s “Boy with a Basket of Fruit” in Focus, at the Morgan Library. Through April 19.

• Come Together: 3,000 Years of Stories and Storytelling, at The Morgan Library & Museum. Through May 3.

from friends:

Max Pearl

Max Pearl is an independent critic based in NYC. You can read Separator, his newsletter about books, here.

This exhibit at the sculptor’s studio-turned-private-museum in Queens focuses on his public art and architecture projects, most of which never got off the ground. Its centerpiece is the design for “Play Mountain” (1933), a children’s playscape resembling an ancient alien pyramid that got him laughed out of a meeting with Robert Moses, the urban planner everybody loves to hate. I loved seeing the dialogue between these biomorphic blueprints and the hanging planar sculptures like “Yellow Landscape” (1943), but don’t miss the Noguchi chess set and table, the real showstopper for me.

• Noguchi’s New York at The Noguchi Museum. Through September 13.

Julia Harrison

Julia Harrison is a commerce writer at Architectural Digest, living in Brooklyn. She is also the founder of saloon, a curated creative community & networking hub.

While we call most portraits “intimate,” I really mean it here—these works from Éduoard Vuillard are about as candid as a painting can achieve (Vuillard is famously quoted as having said: “I don’t paint portraits, I paint people in their homes”). His subjects are nearly always mid-movement, distracted—and his characteristic brushstroke style (“stitching”) relates a sense of memory rather than a sense of the present. The exhibit feels a bit like traveling through the reflections of a child observing adults, trying to recall the characters and colors from a long time ago. There’s something about the strokes and the palette, too, that depict the presence of sound: vibrant, loud, busy chatter. It’s a funny thing to see such spirited and resonant paintings in the reverent quiet of a green room, nothing but the sound of boat shoes shuffling on the stone floors.

• Édouard Vuillard, Early Interiors, at Skarstedt. Through April 25.

Sean Tatol

Sean Tatol is an art critic based in NYC, best known for his work at The Manhattan Art Review, a website he started in 2019.

Paul Klee is one of the most eclectic and distinctive artists of the early avant-garde, associated with Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Bauhaus, Blue Rider, and Futurism. But none of those labels adequately characterizes the inventiveness of his imagery or his prodigious capacity for experimentation. This is the first American museum exhibition to focus on his late work (from 1930 to his death, at sixty, in 1940), after the onset of the autoimmune disease scleroderma forced him to simplify his previously complex, spindly forms into broader quasi-hieroglyphic figures. His wit and imagination remained undaunted, however, and his last years were among his most fruitful. The show includes many of his most important late paintings, but I particularly like the hilarious and scathing parodies of human folly in his economical line drawings.

• Paul Klee, Other Possible Worlds, at the Jewish Museum. Through July 26.

Terry Nguyen

Terry Nguyen is a poet, essayist, and critic based in NYC. An MFA candidate in poetry at Columbia, she has recent work in IMAGE Journal, Art in America, and Ocula. You can find her newsletter here.

At first glance, the dancers in Maya Man’s StarPower appear to be ordinary (albeit extremely flexible) young girls with a hyper-competitive streak. But a closer look at their dance sequences reveals errant limbs and eerie head swivels— AI-generated distortions that bring attention to their staged reality. Drawing from Man’s history in competitive dance, StarPower simulates the glitzy aesthetics and superficially-charged stakes of Lifetime’s Dance Moms to comment on the mechanized nature of digital performance. StarPower’s cast of AI dancers is reminiscent of early 20th-century automata ballerinas, though updated to perform both choreography and emotion.

• Maya Man, StarPower, at bitforms. Through May 2.

Mána Taylor

Mána Taylor is a writer based in New York. She has written for The Brooklyn Rail, The Drift, Artsy, Observer, and Hyperallergic, among others.

Most of the artists in Afterlife, curated by Paul Laster, lived in obscurity. Considered “Outsider Artists” — self-taught individuals who have no formal relations to the art world — they were often outsiders in both art and life. The show is accompanied by a detailed description of each artist’s biography and the circumstances around the discovery of their work, which was frequently posthumous. Frames of different sizes hang on the wall, every object a portrait of a mysterious individual (one work, for instance, is visibly drawn behind a paper with the header “State Hospital No. 3”). I found a sense of comfort in the works being in the same room, as if the artists finally had some company among each other.

• Afterlife, at Andrew Edlin Gallery. Through April 25.

Michael Forbes

Michael Forbes holds a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst and taught for a decade at DePauw University and the College of Wooster. He currently teaches English at the Dalton School in Manhattan.

Fashion photography has traditionally depended on clarity. A body, clearly visible, stabilizes the image, allowing garments to be understood, admired, and desired. Lillian Bassman’s photographs work within this tradition but loosen its logic — faces blur, bodies melt into shadow, garments hover without clear structure. In Bazaar and Beyond at the Met, what’s on view is somehow never fully available to the eye. Images preserve a figure’s silhouette while dissolving detail. The exhibit proves Bassman’s work is not a rejection of fashion photography, but a reorientation of it on her terms.

• Lillian Bassman, Bazaar and Beyond, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through July 26.

Bodhi Landa

Bodhi Landa is a wine and culture writer. You can find his newsletter here and his recent writing on wine allocation for Caper Media here.

I found myself at the new New Museum last Easter Sunday. The first piece you encounter is Anicka Yi’s hovering aerobes — translucent, drifting bodies that behave as if they are alive. They sense, they respond, they circulate through the space with a kind of ambient intelligence. Not quite organisms, not quite machines, they set the terms for New Humans, a show that traces the evolution of our anxious projections about humanity’s future from the postwar period through the present day.

• New Humans: Memories of the Future at New Museum. Ongoing.

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If you’re an iOS user and would like to take our recommendations with you, download our app below. Paid subscribers of this newsletter can also add shows to their itinerary and write reviews of what they’re seeing.

exhibits in new york (for iOS)

about us

We’re making a new home for art writing. You can find Sarah’s writing here and Alexandra’s writing here. If you’d like to join us and help support independent art media, become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. We’ll send you an invite to start tracking and reviewing exhibits in the city and invitations to our events. More about us and how we got started here.

take our map 💫

If you’re an iOS user and would like to take our recommendations with you, download our app below. Paid subscribers of this newsletter can also add shows to their itinerary and write reviews of what they’re seeing.

exhibits in new york (for iOS)

thank you so much.

We had so much fun meeting you all this past week. We’ve been writing this newsletter for over a year, but this was the first time we got to see some of you in-person. More on events to come, but we just wanted to say thank you to all that came out to listen, Lauren Kane for speaking, and to Book Club Bar for hosting.

what we’re reading

• , the literary journal (with impeccable art direction) that has been exploring “history, pop culture, literature, and art through sweets” is publishing their first savory-centered issue with Steak Zine. It’s up for pre-order now, but they’ve published a preview at their newsletter which you can read here.

• Also in indie publishing, our friends at the Mutt Art Review just launched their third issue, which Sarah will likely be reading in a park by the time you receive this newsletter. You can get your copy here.

• In between event planning and her day job, Sarah was not the most optimistic about getting to see any actual art this week, but she managed to get to the Met for one (too short) look past the Raphael show. She will be back, but in the meantime, enjoy this review from Jason Farago at the NYT.

what’s on view

Uptown:

• Raphael, Sublime Poetry, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through June 28.

• Lillian Bassman, Bazaar and Beyond, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through July 26.

• Sigmar Polke, The Dream of Menelaus, at VeneKlasen. Through June 27.

• Jasper Johns, Flags, at Craig Starr. Through June 27. ⏰ NEW ⏰

Lower East Side:

• dean erdmann, Vitrum, at Company Gallery. Through April 18.

• Matthew Pang, LOOKING IN THE BOTTLE, at Ulrik. Through May 2.

• Alexander Noel, 999, at Derosia. Through April 25.

• Hans Haacke and Louise Lawler at Maxwell Graham. Through April 18.

• Brice Guilbert, Foc Foc, at Gratin. Through April 18.

Tribeca & Soho:

• Doron Langberg, Landscapes, at Jeffrey Deitch. Through April 25.

• Isa Genzken, VACATION, at David Zwirner. Through April 18.

• JM Howey, With Drawing, at Bureau. Through April 11.

• Michael Maul & Tim Maul, at Kerry Schuss. Through April 25.

• Elizabeth Neel, In the Guts of the Living, at Jack Shainman. Through April 4. ⏰ Last day is today ⏰

• Yu Ji, Origin of the Tiger, at P·P·O·W. Through April 11.

Chelsea & Midtown:

• Leonor Fini, Menagerie, at Olney Gleason. Through May 2.

• Paul Chan, Automa Mon Amour, at Greene Naftali. Through April 25.

• Édouard Vuillard, Early Interiors, at Skarstedt. Through April 25.

• Isa Genzken, Projects for Outside, at Galerie Bucholz. Through April 25.

• Analog, at Anton Kern. Through May 1.

about us

We’re making a new home for art writing. You can find Sarah’s writing here and Alexandra’s writing here. If you’d like to join us and help support independent art media, become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. We’ll send you an invite to start tracking and reviewing exhibits in the city and invitations to our events. More about us and how we got started here.

take our map 💫

If you’re an iOS user and would like to take our recommendations with you, download our app below. Paid subscribers of this newsletter can also add shows to their itinerary and write reviews of what they’re seeing.

exhibits in new york (for iOS)

see you soon.

We sold out our first event (thank you all so much!) If you managed to get a ticket and know that you won’t be able to make it, please let us know so we can free up space. Any last openings will be sold at the door. Looking forward to seeing you all this coming Thursday.

what we’re reading

• Noted writer Lynne Tillman is releasing a collection of her arts and culture essays this week, entitled Paying Attention and published by David Zwirner Books. Sarah just bought hers and was reminded of this close reading she did last year with The Yale Review on Kafka’s Double Portrait. It’s part of a series where the magazine asks a writer or critic to provide a close reading a piece of art or archival object. You can find other examples here.

• Amant has a new show up featuring artist musicians which has gotten Sarah on a bit of a research dive into the past history of musicians with a serious practice in the visual arts (more on this to come). To start, she’s re-reading past reviews of Daniel Johnston shows—his show of drawings last year at Pioneer Works were a standout of Sarah’s year.

what’s on view

East Village:

• Peter Doyle, Silt, at Half Gallery (Annex). Through April 25.

• Sacha Ingber, Two, at Uffner & Liu. Through May 9.

• Jule Korneffel, In Search of Lost Light, at Spencer Brownstone. Through May 2.

• Brice Guilbert, Foc Foc, at Gratin. Through April 18.

• Tiran Willemse, Dweller, at Swiss Institute. Through April 12.

Chelsea:

• Robert Mapplethorpe, at Gladstone Gallery. Through April 18.

• Nicola Tyson, Need, at Petzel. Through April 25.

• Renée Miller, The Devil’s Snare, at Hollis Taggart. Through April 4th.

• Martine Gutierrez, Lottery, at Ryan Lee. Through April 4.

• Alexander Varvaridze, In Bloom, at AP Space. Through May 31.

Tribeca:

• Isa Genzken, VACATION, at David Zwirner. Through April 18.

• Zarina, Beyond the Stars, at Luhring Augustine. Through March 28. ⏰ Last day is today ⏰

• Claudio Perna, Idea como Arte, at The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). Through May 2.

• Sophie Reinhold, Echo, at Bortolami. Through April 18.

Uptown:

• Cinga Samson, Ukuphuthelwa, at White Cube. Through April 18.

• Theaster Gates, All My Relations, at Gagosian. Through May 2.

• Raphael, Sublime Poetry, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ⏰ Opens tomorrow ⏰

• Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ⏰ Closing soon ⏰. Through April 5.

Brooklyn & Queens:

• Molly Bounds, The Light That Loses, The Night That Wins, at Mrs. Gallery. Through May 2.

• Folded Group. at Amant. Through May 17.

about us

We’re making a new home for art writing. You can find Sarah’s writing here and Alexandra’s writing here. If you’d like to join us and help support independent art media, become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. We’ll send you an invite to start tracking and reviewing exhibits in the city and invitations to our events. More about us and how we got started here.

GET YOUR TICKET

what’s on:

• David Armstrong, Portraits, at Artists Space. Through May 23. Tribeca.

• Paul Klee, Other Possible Worlds, at the Jewish Museum. Through July 26. Upper East Side.

• ⏰ Final days ⏰ Zarina, Beyond the Stars, at Luhring Augustine. Through March 28. Chelsea.

• Manuel Neri, Selected Works by Rubi Neri, at Salon 94. Through April 11. Upper East Side.

• Sam Gilliam, STITCHED, at Pace. Through April 25. Chelsea.

On view: LIVE! with Lauren Kane on Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele had a modern face. The art critic Arthur Roessler, a friend and patron, recorded it so: ‘Even in the presence of well-known men of imposing appearance, Schiele’s unusual looks stood out…. The features of his face were unusually fixed in an earnest, almost sad expression, as though caused by pains which made him weep inwardly.’ His look was distinctive but by today’s standards unremarkable. Pick any of Schiele’s portraits and you will find there the malaise of modern life. - Lauren Kane, “How Egon Schiele saw the world.”

Welcome to Exhibits in New York’s first in-person event. On April 2, Lauren Kane, managing editor of The New York Review of Books, will give a talk on renowned Austrian artist Egon Schiele at Book Club Bar in the East Village. Born in 1890, Schiele lived to be only twenty-eight years old. Yet in that time, he enjoyed mentorship from Gustav Klimt, produced countless paintings and sketches, and developed a distinctive style that still captivates us today. That legacy includes wry, grotesque, often sexual portraits that stood out for their novelty and edge. But in 1910, Schiele painted an intimate likeness of a close friend, Dr. Erwin von Graff. This talk will look closely at this particular portrait, on view at the Neue Galerie until May 4. It will also consider Schiele’s wider career and touch on the figure of the doctor in art history as a way of understanding Schiele’s portrait.

GET YOUR TICKET

We are delighted to kick off this series of events. At Exhibits in New York, we’ve always prioritized singular, gut responses to shows, anchoring our reviews in a writer’s experience and subjectivity. When we moved into events, we knew we’d want to maintain that sense of intimacy, asking just one knowledgeable person to share an artist they can’t get out of their head. We’re also thrilled to host these at Book Club Bar. Neither of us comes from a traditional art background, and we’re excited to present these in such informal, welcoming settings. That’s a huge part of our mission, and we can’t wait to see you there.

Lauren Kane

is the managing editor at The New York Review of Books and was previously an editor at The Paris Review. You can find her past her writing on Egon Schiele here, and more of her work here.

about us

We’re making a new home for art writing. We publish exhibit reviews and itineraries for shows in the city, plus we created our gallery guide app that lets paid subscribers track and review exhibits around town. More about us and how we got started here. Pitch us your exhibit reviews after reading our pitch guidelines at pitches@exhibitsinnewyork.com.