Featured Events in New York in January, 2025 (June Updated)

Over the last several decades, Gillian Wearing’s work has chronicled confessions, taboos, and voyeuristic inclinations. Her videos and photographs often confront separations between private and public realms. Shot in a southeast London shopping mall, Dancing in Peckham depicts the artist freely dancing alone, without headphones and unaccompanied by music. Wearing’s camera also positions passersby as unwitting participants in the performance.

For a handful of decades at the end of the last century, one of the most popular ways for a superstar professional athlete to cement their iconic status was to have their persona memorialized on a Nike poster. It became a right of passage, and the posters’ popularity peaked as the Nike brand ascended to the pinnacle of its industry. In an age where athletes’ images are much more accessible and down to earth, these posters may seem quaint—but they’re also larger-than-life and undeniably entertaining, just like the stars they depict.Chronicling the many professional sports promoted by Nike, from basketball and football to tennis and golf, as well as the myriad athletes who worked with the brand, this exhibition showcases how one company paved the way for modern sports advertising.

Schütte considers his subjects and selects his materials while contextualizing them in a time and place: Germany at the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st. Since his student days at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Schütte has approached art with a critical eye. Exploring, then rejecting, Minimal and Conceptual art, his work “brought the story in again.” These stories encompass the personal and the historical. Schütte’s work challenges established artistic norms by revitalizing genres rooted in past traditions and making them relevant in the present and for the future.

This groundbreaking exhibition explores the everyday clothing of ordinary women, from worn-out housecoats to psychedelic micro miniskirts and modern suits to the uniforms of fast-food workers. On view in the Joyce B. Cowin Women’s History Gallery and featuring objects from Smith College’s Historical Costume Collection on display for the first time in a museum, the exhibition traces how women’s roles have changed and evolved across race and class over the decades. Each garment holds a rich story about the women who wore it and made it, the materials used, and the context of place and time. Whether homemade or ready-made, many of the garments on display are modest and inexpensive, rarely preserved or displayed in a museum setting. Some are one-of-a-kind pieces; others are examples of clever makeshift pieces, and many were influenced by the popular styles and trends of their day. Visitors to Real Clothes, Real Lives will learn about the "real" women who worked and dressed in America for two centuries.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has launched its first-ever major museum exhibition to examine the career of influential 20th-century architect Paul Rudolph, a second-generation Modernist architect who came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s alongside peers such as Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei. Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolphexhibits the full breadth of Rudolph’s important contributions to architecture—from his early experimental houses in Florida to his civic commissions rendered in concrete, from his utopian visions of urban megastructures and mixed-use skyscrapers to his extraordinary immersive New York interiors. The exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to experience the evolution and diversity of Rudolph’s legacy and to better understand how his work continues to inspire ideas for urban renewal and reconstruction around the world. The exhibition features more than 80 artifacts of varying scales, ranging from small objects collected throughout his life to a wide range of materials produced in his office, including drawings, models, furniture, material samples, and photographs.

Two Drag Houses, both alike in indignity, vie for supremacy in a wig-snatching, diva-licious journey of fashion, family, and forgiveness. Leave the lip syncs at the door, darling. Get ready for Drag realness: REAL singing, in a REAL theater, with REAL DRAMA. After their bitter split, fishy queen Alexis Gilmore opened her club, The Fishtank, as glamourpuss Miss Kitty established The Cathouse. Heels click and tensions rise as old wounds are opened and the two clubs fight to survive.

For her first museum exhibition in New York City, Lebanese American artist Nour Mobarak presents a large-scale installation reinterpreting the first opera, Dafne, which was staged by Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini in 1598 and inspired by Ovid’s myth of Apollo and Daphne. In Mobarak’s reimagining of Dafne, 15 singing sculptures—encasing a multichannel sound installation within mycelium structures—recount the tale in some of the world’s most phonetically complex languages. Building on histories of avant-garde sound, Mobarak’s most ambitious work to date draws on a longstanding interest in mechanized voice and memory across her practice, which ranges from sculpture to performance, moving image, poetry, and music. In Dafne Phono, Mobarak draws analogies between linguistic structure and the biological processes of mycelium, exploring how both are governed by systems of repetition, decomposition, and regeneration, and relate to wider forces of political power. Bringing new perspectives to a key antecedent in the history of performance, Dafne Phono joins nature and technology in an exploration of the voice’s ability to endure cycles of life and death, bridging histories both ancient and present.

Public Art Fund partnered with The Studio Museum in Harlem to advise Lincoln Center on the selection of artists for this first iteration of the art program. Two prominent sites were identified for the site-specific commissions: the 50-foot Hauser Digital Wall in the lobby, which Jacolby Satterwhite has animated with a richly layered and inclusive celebration of performance that brings into dialogue the past, present and future; and the Hall’s 65th Street façade, which Nina Chanel Abney has transformed into a captivating tribute to the vibrant history and culture of San Juan Hill. Both artists undertook extensive research to develop their works. They emerge as gifted visual storytellers, committed to a more inclusive understanding of the past while giving us all a sense of future potential at a moment of reopening and reinvention.

Abstract art has evolved significantly over the years. Since our inception in 1982, the Anita Shapolsky gallery has been dedicated to showcasing and supporting artists who work in abstraction. We are excited to present a compelling blend of historical and contemporary abstract art in our upcoming exhibition Abstract Art Yesterday and Today.

This exhibition selects more than 200 artworks from KAWS's private collection, and is personally curated and designed by the artist. The exhibition explains KAWS's unique appreciation of art to the audience and reveals the inspiration for his public sculptures, multimedia art, commercial products and interactive exhibition projects. KAWS began to cultivate his hobby of collecting art in the mid-1990s, and has collected more than 3,000 works on paper from different artists around the world, most of which are cartoonists, graffiti painters and self-taught artists.

The first US survey of artist Sohrab Hura (Indian, b. 1981) showcases more than fifty works from the last two decades of his experimental practice. Sohrab Hura: Mother weaves together bodies of work across photography, film, sound, drawing, painting, and text that have never before been shown together. Renowned for capturing remarkable everyday moments that give form to systemic political forces, Hura brings into focus colonially imposed borders, the trauma of partition, and the changing ecosystem of the Indian subcontinent. This survey includes a selection of key works such as Pati (2010), a film that explores the rural Indian region of Madhya Pradesh and its role in the movement to pass the 2005 National Rural Employment Guarantee Act; The Coast (2019), a book project, series of photographs, and film that use India’s coastline as a lens to examine the nation’s changing politics; and a selection of pastel drawings and gouache paintings from Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed (2022–ongoing) and Ghosts in My Sleep (2023–ongoing), his new series depicting familial memories both experienced and imagined. Through cathartic strategies of personal and political introspection, the exhibition traces Hura’s shifting existential concerns around the ethics of image-making as a documentary act. Sohrab Hura is a photographer and filmmaker who lives and works in New Delhi, India. Recent solo and group exhibitions have been presented at Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Amsterdam; Liverpool Biennial 2021; Kunstmuseum Bonn; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; and the Cincinnati Art Museum. His films have been shown in film festivals such as the Berlin International Film Festival and the 66th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Hura has self-published five books under the imprint Ugly Dog. His work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai; and the Cincinnati Art Museum, among others.

Sanxingdui is one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of mankind in the 20th century. The Sanxingdui site is a Bronze Age civilization of about 3,600 years ago. It was accidentally discovered by a farmer in Guanghan City, Sichuan Province, China in 1927 and is a treasure trove of cultural relics. With large-scale excavations in 1986 and 2021, more than 30,000 pieces of gold, jade, ivory, stone, pottery, and the most unique bronze objects have been unearthed so far. These mysteriously patterned bronze objects, including the 2.62-meter-high "Bronze Standing Man", the 1.38-meter-wide "Bronze Mask" and the 3.95-meter-high "Bronze Sacred Tree", are unprecedented and sublime masterpieces. "Sanxingdui Encounter: A 12K National Treasure Micro-Viewing Global Journey" is an immersive digital exhibition, the first of its kind produced in collaboration between the Sanxingdui Museum and the Memor Museum, which will open in October 2024 on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, New York. This exhibition, which has been shown in Beijing, Shenzhen, Paris and Doha, is now on display in New York for the first time, using one-to-one replicas of the Sanxingdui Museum's collections and ultra-high-definition technology to showcase precious artifacts unearthed from the Sanxingdui site. For the first time, through the immersive 12k digital hall, VR and AI interactive activities, you can experience Sanxingdui up close digitally and appreciate the mysterious ancient Shu civilization.

Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350 examines an exceptional moment at the dawn of the Italian Renaissance and the pivotal role of Sienese artists—including Duccio, Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and Simone Martini—in defining Western painting. In the decades leading up to the catastrophic onset of the plague around 1350, Siena was the site of phenomenal artistic innovation and activity. While Florence is often positioned as the center of the Renaissance, this presentation offers a fresh perspective on the importance of Siena, from Duccio’s profound influence on a new generation of painters to the development of narrative altarpieces and the dissemination of artistic styles beyond Italy.

Harry Potter™: The Exhibition is a groundbreaking touring exhibition that celebrates the iconic moments, characters, settings, and beasts as seen in the Harry Potter™ film series and the Wizarding World through best-in-class immersive design and technology. Celebrate your favorite moments, props, costumes, characters, and locations from the Harry Potter film series, as well as experience the expanded Wizarding World including iconic moments, creatures, and stories from Fantastic Beasts™ and Harry Potter and The Cursed Child.

Barbie®: A Cultural Icon charts the 65-year history of Barbie and the doll’s global impact on fashion and popular culture through an expansive display of more than 250 vintage dolls, life-size fashion designs, advertisements, and other ephemera, along with exclusive video interviews with the doll's designers. Visitors to the exhibition will trace the evolution of Barbie from a child’s toy to a global icon, exploring the style trends, careers, and identities that Barbie has embodied and popularized since her debut in 1959.

Following a sell-out show in Milan in 2023, Robilant+Voena presents an exhibition of new paintings by Cuban-American artist Cesar Santos. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States since moving beyond figuration in 2022, and presents his unique and intuitive aesthetic approach to abstraction. In R+V’s new gallery space on East 66th Street, the exhibition features over twenty of the artist’s signature paintings that show his mastery of form, harmony and colour.

Lisson Gallery is proud to mount an ambitious exhibition exploring one of Sean Scully’s breakthrough bodies of work, incorporating loans of historic pieces from the early 1980s. They include a legendary, 11-panel work entitled Backs and Fronts, which was last exhibited in New York at MoMA PS1 in 1982, a year after it was made. This monumental composition was extended from an earlier work, known as Four Musicians (painted after Picasso’s Three Musicians of 1921), which Scully combined using reclaimed wooden struts, in the loft space of an old textile warehouse on Duane Street, in the then unfashionable and run-down neighborhood of Tribeca. Seven such constructions from this period, all made at the Duane Street studio, are included in this show, marking a significant break from Scully’s earlier, tighter striped canvases, as well as from the strictures of mainstream, hard-edged Minimalist painting of the 1970s. A tripartite work, Araby (1981), named after a short story by James Joyce, represents a midway point between his use of masking-taped lines and the removal of such aids in favor of more fluid gestures, leading Scully to describe this piece as being “in a fight with itself.” This move, towards a freer, rougher and more architectural series, enabled him, as the artist has said himself, to slice and cut through the staid field of abstract art and allowed these works to literally “stand up for themselves”.

What do you get when you pair a semi-neurotic, New York comedy writer with two music superstars from Nashville? A hilarious and audacious farm-to-fable musical about the one thing Americans everywhere can’t get enough of: corn. Shucked is the new musical comedy that proves sometimes tearing down a few walls, rather than growing them, is one way to preserve our way of life.

“Behind this mask, another mask; I will never be done with removing all these faces,” wrote artist and poet Claude Cahun in 1930. Throughout the 20th century, artists have imagined the body and ideas of the self as fluid and open to ongoing transformations. Vital Signs includes over 100 works by artists who question what it means to be an individual within a larger society—and how socially sustained categories such as gender, race, and sexual identity are rooted in abstraction. Much of the work in Vital Signs was made by women or gender-expansive artists. The exhibition suggests fresh perspectives on celebrated works from MoMA’s collection by artists such as Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, Louise Bourgeois, and Senga Nengudi, as well as works on view at the Museum for the first time by artists including Belkis Ayón, Ted Joans, and Rosemary Mayer. Some artists explore how we project, distort, and create identities through acts of play, empathy, or control. Others focus on the body’s interior—both real and imagined—or look to the world outside, forming newly imagined combinations of the human and the non-human. Full of life, Vital Signs illuminates some of the ways that artists reflect on abstraction in its broadest social senses while expanding ideas around what it means to be alive and to connect with others.

Over the past four decades, critically acclaimed, Los Angeles-based artist Henry Taylor has created a vast body of highly personal work that combines figurative, landscape and history painting, alongside drawing, installation and sculpture. For his first exhibition at our New York, 18th Street location, Taylor moves into a new technical realm, debuting a series of limited-edition etchings and hand-painted monoprints, all produced in collaboration with Paulson Fontaine Press in Berkeley CA. Spanning from the humorous to the contemplative, this intimate collection of new works both distills and expands Taylor’s practice.

Luhring Augustine presents Ayiti Toma II: Faith, Family, and Resistance, an exhibition of Haitian art organized by artist Tomm El-Saieh in partnership with El-Saieh Gallery, Port-au-Prince, and CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach. This project marks the first collaboration between Luhring Augustine and El-Saieh Gallery, and is a continuation of the collaboration between Luhring Augustine and CENTRAL FINE.

Beginning 2 November, we will present an exhibition of large-scale paintings and assemblages by late American master Thornton Dial (1928 – 2016). The exhibition features major works from each period of Dial’s extraordinary career and draws upon a history of critical literature shaped by insights from such preeminent writers as Toni Morrison and Amiri Baraka. As its title implies, this presentation highlights Dial’s accomplishments as a maker of powerfully physical works (‘the visible’), while illuminating the often-obscured patterns of systemic trauma and exclusion (‘the invisible’) that drove his life and his prodigious artistic project.

With ‘Earth & Sky,’ Lorna Simpson debuts a new body of work exploring our relationships—physical and metaphysical—to unseen forces that work upon us individually and generationally, alternately challenging and empowering our sense of our own humanity. The exhibition encompasses a series of massive paintings inspired by a 1929 textbook ‘Minerals from Earth and Sky,’ along with a pair of monumental paintings depicting the impact of fired bullets.

When Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis at the age of forty, in 1924, few could have predicted the influence his relatively small body of work would have on every realm of thought and creative endeavor over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. This exhibition will present, for the first time in the United States, the Bodleian Library’s extraordinary holdings of literary manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, and photographs related to Kafka, including the original manuscript of his novella The Metamorphosis. Other highlights include the manuscripts of his novels Amerika and The Castle; letters and postcards addressed to his favorite sister, Ottla; his personal diaries, in which he also composed fiction, including his literary breakthrough, the 1912 story “The Judgment”; and unique items such as his drawings, the notebooks he used when studying Hebrew, and family photographs. In addition to presenting unique literary and biographical material, the exhibition examines Kafka’s afterlife, from the complex journeys of his manuscripts, to the posthumous creation of a literary icon whose very name has become an adjective, to his immense influence on the worlds of literature, theater, dance, film, and the visual arts. Drawing on institutional holdings and private collections in the United States and Europe, the Morgan will show a selection of key works, among them Andy Warhol’s portrait of Kafka, part of his 1980 series Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century.

Luhring Augustine presents Ayiti Toma II: Faith, Family, and Resistance, an exhibition of Haitian art organized by artist Tomm El-Saieh in partnership with El-Saieh Gallery, Port-au-Prince, and CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach. This project marks the first collaboration between Luhring Augustine and El-Saieh Gallery, and is a continuation of the collaboration between Luhring Augustine and CENTRAL FINE.

Opening this November, ‘Annie Leibovitz: Stream of Consciousness’ presents a group of works by the distinguished American artist. Foregoing a linear timeline or conventional thematic constraints, the exhibition is conceived to reveal glimpses into Leibovitz’s highly associative thought processes, creating a fluid visual dialogue among photographs that aren’t anchored in the moment they were made. ‘Stream of Consciousness’ will include landscapes, still lifes and portraits.

The exhibition “Tintoretto, The Power of Opposites” is a significant cultural event taking place in Domodossola from November 8, 2024, to June 1, 2025. This immersive and digital experience delves into the art of Jacopo Tintoretto, one of the masters of the Venetian Renaissance, offering an unmissable opportunity for art lovers and those eager to deepen their understanding of this extraordinary artist.

White Cube is pleased to present ‘The Newspaper Ecritures, 2022–23’, an exhibition showcasing the final body of work by the late master of Dansaekhwa, Park Seo-Bo. Completed shortly before his passing in 2023 at the age of 91, the works in this exhibition stand as a culmination of the artist’s lifelong creative practice – one profoundly influenced by Daoist and Buddhist philosophies and driven by the radical pursuit of emptiness. Interspersed with ‘Black and White Ecriture’ paintings from the 1990s, the exhibition highlights Park’s formal and ideological concerns across the two bodies of work, as well as his artistic innovations in the medium of paper. Through the harnessing of discipline and methodology, the artist’s work likewise became a personal process of self-cultivation, spiritual enlightenment and a means to nullify an inner dissonance. ‘I want to reduce the idea of emotion in my work to express only that’, he once stated. ‘I want to reduce and reduce – to create pure emptiness.’

Encapsulating 100 years of moving-image history, Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) is a 24-hour montage composed from thousands of film and television clips depicting clocks and other references to time. James Bond checks his watch at 12:20 a.m.; Meryl Streep turns off an alarm clock at 6:30 a.m.; a pocket watch ticks at 11:53 a.m. as the Titanic departs. With each clip synchronized to the local time, The Clock collapses the fictional time presented on screen with the actual time of each passing minute. The work is both a cinematic tour-de-force and a functioning timepiece. Building on his background as a musician in Boston and New York’s underground scenes of the late 1970s and 1980s, Marclay has for five decades combined visual and sonic fragments to explore the complex relationships between image and sound. His resulting works have taken form across a wide range of mediums: sculpture, painting, photography, print, performance, and video. With the help of assistants searching for footage, Marclay spent three years meticulously editing The Clock—the culmination of his innovative approach to looking at the world anew through found material. The Clock speaks to cinema’s rich history as both a mirror of and escape from reality, a paradox that is ever more central to daily life in today’s era of instant broadcast, streaming services, and artificial intelligence. Marclay’s assemblage of carefully selected clips takes us on a journey through the past in order to heighten our awareness of an ever-elusive and unfolding present. By editing together fragments from cinema’s vast archive to tell the current time, Marclay reframes our collective memory of movies as an uncanny confrontation with ourselves.

David Zwirner is pleased to present a selection of works on paper by American artist Noah Davis at the gallery’s East 69th Street location in New York, the first exhibition to focus on this significant and generative area of the artist’s practice. Curated by Davis’s widow, the artist Karon Davis, this intimate grouping of works provides insight into the wide-ranging interests, influences, and ideas that equally informed his paintings and curatorial activities.