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“Where The I Settles” by Che Lovelace
Where: Nicola Vassell
When: Through July 25
Why It’s Worth a Look: Che Lovelace explores the local history, customs, and post-colonial identities of his native Trinidad through richly hued four-quadrant paintings. In this exhibition, the artist visualizes the island as beautifully at-odds with itself—a push-pull of wildlife, historical tensions, and personal narratives.
Know Before You Go: Lovelace works from a reclaimed U.S. Army base located just outside of Port of Spain. The surrounding foliage, like heliconias and breadfruit trees, have repeatedly served as influences in the artist’s work.

“Redistribution” by Seth Price
Where: 15 Orient
When: Through Aug. 2
Why It’s Worth a Look: The longform video collage exhibited here began as a PowerPoint presentation for a lecture Seth Price gave at the Guggenheim Museum in 2007. Each time the piece has been exhibited—10 times to date, including its most recent week-long run at Metrograph in 2019—the artist has added and removed footage, in order to create what he calls “a box to hold anything.”
Know Before You Go: The video showcases Price’s omnivorous lens: The video’s concerns range from the Paleolithic to the Renaissance, modern menswear, Thomas Edison, plastic production, and even a conversation with his daughter about moodboarding.

“See-saw” by Carrie Yamaoka
Where: Anonymous Gallery
When: Through Aug. 9
Why It’s Worth a Look: Carrie Yamaoka’s latest show is heavily focused on surfaces: mirrored, tarnished, sticky, and liquid. Working across painting and sculpture, especially utilizing reflective mylar and resin, Yamaoka scoured her studio for works that were unfinished, damaged, or unresolved in some way, and reworked them into new pieces bearing the marks of their histories.
Know Before You Go: The artist’s investment in open-ended artworks and the residue of the past is an extension of a larger political practice. Yamaoka is a founder of the early 1990s lesbian feminist art collective fierce pussy, which is still active today.

“Dear Cobalt Monsters” by Kati Heck
Where: Bortolami
When: Through Aug. 8
Why It’s Worth a Look: Although rendered in a lush realist style, the subjects of Kati Heck’s large-scale figure paintings dwell in the world of mythology where the familiar, fantastical, and freaky collide. The monsters of her show are not corrupted beings but hybrid forms: a puppy sprouting wings, a toucan pangolin, a collection of circus performers rallying at death’s bedside, or a truncated limb growing a face.
Know Before You Go: Merging portraits of real-world figures like a well-known Antwerp fashion designer or a prominent German singer with medieval gates and a Greek chorus of disembodied heads, the focus is on the collapse of the real and the fictional, seeming to tease viewers with the question: What could be more modern than this?

“Into the Dimensional Corridor” by Lutz Bacher
Where: Galerie Buchholz
When: Through July 25
Why It’s Worth a Look: Lutz Bacher was an enigma, and her legacy extends in a delightfully perplexing, Star Trek-forward light installation at Galerie Buchholz. Awash in blue light are an array of mysterious characters (of the aforementioned TV series) with piercing, guarding stares—not unlike the defiant artist—who trounced classification at every turn.
Know Before You Go: For Bacher, explaining her art became such a chore that she once distributed a recipe for butterscotch pudding in lieu of a press release for her 2008 Radio 3 exhibition in San Francisco.

“If a bird’s nest is nature, what is a house?” by Dustin Yellin
Where: Almine Rech
When: June 26—August 1
Why It’s Worth a Look: Like a fossil in amber or a hunk of ancient onyx, Dustin Yellin’s hulking glass tableaux compress thousands of years of human civilization into just one moment. The large-scale sculptures, which can weigh several tons, bridge time and space: ancient Etruscans colliding with alien astronauts, particle accelerators, and rocket ships.
Know Before You Go: Yellin’s interest in systems, interdependence, and community doesn’t stop at art-making. He’s also the founder of Red Hook’s Pioneer Works, the celebrated multidisciplinary space which funds shows and fellowships at the intersection of art and science.

“Prehistory” by Randy Wray
Where: Karma
When: Through July 3
Why It’s Worth a Look: Sample the primordial soup of life with Randy Wray’s globular abstractions, which evoke the peaceful life cycle of an amoeba, or perhaps the soft entanglements of mosses and fungi. The artist aims to bring his imagery to vivid life through these visualizations, with tendrils curling, cells multipyling, and hearts pumping.
Know Before You Go: Wray’s protean forms are amorphous, moving between the realms of the living, dead, and mutating. The artist challenges viewers to contemplate the long-term lifespans of the works, which he has developed during ten years of studio experimentation.

“Theodora Allen: Oak”
Where: Kasmin Gallery
When: Through July 25
Why It’s Worth a Look: Everything looks blue from far away: the mountain, the sea, and the skies. Theodora Allen’s blue-soaked oil paintings of shattered altars, tombs, and glaciers contain a celestial sadness in their crumbling forms. However, one must take a beat to reckon with the crystalline oak leaves crawling up through the fissures in the Rise Up series, which satisfyingly position the works as an investment in the regenerative and the eternal.
Know Before You Go: The artist’s work echoes the motifs of William Blake, the 18th-century poet and painter who shared Allen’s interest in the visualization of utopia and metaphysical ideals.

“How to Win” by Sadie Barnette
Where: Sean Kelly
When: June 27—August 1
Why It’s Worth a Look: With her new exhibit, Sadie Barnette adopts the lexicon of the how-to guide to explore who has “it all” figured out, who doesn’t, and how far people will go to achieve power and impact. She extracts observations of societal functioning from public and private spheres, as well as the machinations of a society constantly in creative motion.
Know Before You Go: While Barnette’s most recognizable work draws from government files and archival materials related to her father’s Black Panther past, this show juxtaposes drawings and rather contemporary smartphone snapshots.

“Nocturnal Music” by Varda Caivano
Where: Mendes Wood DM
When: June 27—August 15
Why It’s Worth a Look: For her first New York solo show, Varda Caivano centers the material in her large-scale abstractions. Working with charcoal wash, oil, and velvet, her paintings can be at once dusty, fluid, waxy, or metallic. The Argentinian artist’s decision to always name her pieces Untitled returns the viewer to the formal aspects of abstraction: gesture, shape, and light.
Know Before You Go: Caivano often works on multiple canvases simultaneously in a process she compares to thought—incidental and intuitive, gestures ricocheting off each other in a process that allows for a symphony of creative output to be produced with practiced synergy.

“Self-Portraits While Buried” by Jenny Calivas
Where: Yancey Richardson
When: Through July 3
Why It’s Worth a Look: Jenny Calivas began the photo series that makes up this show in 2019. The resulting images of her body under layers of silt, soil, sand, and grass strike a primal, slightly uneasy chord, evoking everything from Ophelia and Laura Palmer, to the playfulness of piling handfuls of sand over a friend on a beachside day.
Know Before You Go: The series, which began in coastal Maine where Calivas grew up, was in part an attempt to heal past wounds from sexual trauma. While there is a stressful pain to “Self-Portraits While Buried,” there is also a pleasure in intermingling with the landscape: the freedom to be at rest, to be disjointed, or to not be a body at all.

“Paintings & Photographs” by Billal Baruk Taright and Myles Oxenford
Where: McGrath
When: June 25—July 31
Why It’s Worth a Look: For McGrath’s second show since its opening earlier this month, French-Algerian photographer Billal Baruk Taright and Cornwall-based painter Myles Oxenford both make their New York debuts. Taright will showcase an exploration of one’s connection to their lived environment and identity, while Oxenford will pull characters from various cultural realms into tender narrative paintings.
Know Before You Go: Drawing on centuries of references ranging from pre-Raphaelite art and the 1990s rave scene, Oxenford’s figure paintings reflect the uneasy interiority of domestic life. Taright’s photography, which focuses largely on interiors and design, probes similar questions about security, comfort, and pleasure.

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