Watch out for our “closing soon” tag. Many of the gallery shows—such as Paul Chan, Nicola Tyson, Doron Langberg, and Yuval Pudik—will close before the cherry blossoms shed their petals. And note that we did occasionally venture out of the city: Scroll to the end for bonus coverage of exhibitions in Philadelphia and Warsaw. As always, to map our picks and plan your route, enter the Critic’s Table hashtag #TCT in the search bar of the See Saw app. Easy!
UPTOWN
“Carol Bove”
Guggenheim Museum | 1071 Fifth Avenue
Through August 2
No one has really killed it on the museum’s central ramp since Hilma af Klint, whose paintings, commissioned by the spirit guide Amaliel, were, as luck would have it, meant for a spiral-shaped temple—not until Carol Bove likewise answered the call from another realm (let’s imagine) to do the rotunda up again, similar palette more or less, but this time in supple monuments and missives in pinched and draped steel.—Johanna Fateman
Joan Semmel
Jewish Museum | 1109 Fifth Avenue
Through May 31
To the left, upon entering the gallery, three paintings from the 1970s show Joan Semmel holding the sexual revolution to its word. As the women’s movement sought to level the playing field, she rotated the picture plane to deal with the horizontal space of sex and self-observation, presenting the POV of the reclining nude. Through the Object’s Eye, 1975, as it’s titled, is a radically foreshortened view of Semmel’s own body, cropped, from the collar bone down. The composition can be seen as a lush and nervy turning-of-the-tables, with something like Courbet’s Origin of the World, 1866, in mind. Ten of the 16 paintings on view are from this breakthrough early period, but the others show Semmel’s fiery rigor vis-à-vis the nude (her own unclothed body in various positions) undimmed throughout the subsequent decades… —Johanna Fateman
Read more from our critics’ Upper East Side guide here. And watch Fateman’s video tour of the Joan Semmel exhibition here.
Jessi Reaves, “process invented the mirror”
Arts and Letters | Audubon Terrace Broadway between West 155 and 156 Streets
Through July 3
The tomette floor pairs so well with the celadon curtain, it’s hard to imagine both that this show was at the Walker without it and that Reaves’s Frankenstein furniture won’t forever excite me.—Whitney Mallett
“Afterlives: Contemporary Art in the Byzantine Crypt”
The Metropolitan Museum | 1000 Fifth Avenue
Through January 10, 2027
Staged as a literal underbelly to what is sure to be a ticket- and money-printing exhibition of the great 16th-century “influencer”—the museum’s words, not mine—Raphael, upstairs, contemporary works spanning the last few decades, including the recently late Melvin Edwards’s welded steel evocation of lynching and Michael Aschenbrenner’s blown-glass bones bound into splints with cloth and twigs, are densely clustered with artifacts of late Roman, Byzantine, and Coptic origin, forming an almost injuriously compact yet conceptually weighted exhibition stashed in a solemn brick gallery unearthed during the museum’s structural renovation.—Paige K. Bradley
Rachel Rose, “The Rest”
Gladstone | 130 East 64th Street`
Through April 25 *Last Chance*
I hunched to peer into these small, capacious paintings that enchant the Hudson Valley by blurring representation with expressivity and myth—the world seen through a devotional tear.—Brian Droitcour
CHELSEA / MEATPACKING / WEST VILLAGE
![kekahi wahi (Sancia Miala Shiba Nash and Drew K. Broderick), 20-minute workout [WIP], 2023/26](https://culturedmag.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/uploads/2026/03/04133755/WMAA98097_kekahiwahi_01_lpr-1024x576.jpg)
“Whitney Biennial 2026”
Whitney Museum of American Art | 99 Gansevoort Street
Through August 23, 2026
The “Whitney Biennial 2026” is incoherent. Across the 56 participating artists and collectives, the curators—Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer—don’t even attempt a unifying theme or title (unlike in the past two iterations). And this is for the better, as if the curatorial team has rightly posited: America itself is an abstraction—irrational, violent, and unable to adhere to its own boundaries or act civilized within the international order. Why should the country’s longest-running art survey, especially now in war time, pretend to be any different? Let the crowd offer its many voices. Or so the thinking seems to go…—John Vincler
Read Vincler’s ultimately enthusiastic review of the unruly and heterogeneous group show here.
“Édouard Vuillard: Early Interiors”
Skarstedt | 547 West 25th Street
Through April 25 *Last Chance*
The show includes one of the painter’s most famous, most deeply influential and profound works: like the Gersaint shop sign is for Watteau, The Flowered Dress, 1891, is for Vuillard, “advertising” another little big revolution: Intimism.—David Rimanelli
“Art (by) Dealers”
White Columns | 91 Horatio Street
Through April 25 *Last Chance*
Charity pages: 93 works by dealers; blind buy, 500; name revealed @ purchase; polymarket af; I asked Gia if Anatoly was the sneakers.—Whitney Mallett
Nicola Tyson, “NEED”
Petzel | 520 West 20th Street
Through April 25. *Last Chance*
The artist happened to be at the gallery when I came by, and she remarked that my dog, whose pale head was peeking from a dark bag, looks like she might have stepped out of one of the big works on paper on the walls around us, I think because of their shared black-and-white palette (the drawings are done with charcoal and white conté crayon, mostly), but also, maybe, because Tyson’s semi-abstracted, sometimes comic, totemic figures—odd couples, conjoined families, a self-portrait—are animalian, not strictly humanoid, unknowable and wild beneath their housebroken charm.—Johanna Fateman
Paul Chan, “Automa Mon Amour”
Greene Naftali | 508 West 26th Street, 8th Floor
Through April 25 *Last Chance*
In one standout work from his “Breathers” series, installed high on a wall, the neo-conceptualist creates a quasi-religious tableau akin to the Four Evangelists bringing the Good News from electric fans and vinyl fabric.—David Rimanelli
Watch John Vincler’s video tour of the exhibition here and read his profile of Paul Chan from our print issue.
Torbjørn Rødland, “Bones in the Canal and Other Photographs”
David Kordansky | 520 West 20th Street
Through April 25th *Last Chance*
In a number of the artist’s images here, his subjects (slender women, naked bodies, clowns) are lit from behind as if standing in front of a train or car headlights; their silhouettes’ shimmering edges make the photos seem to glow from within and lend them a beautiful, eerie drama.—Gracie Hadland
Elizabeth Peyton
David Zwirner | 533 West 19th Street
Through May 2
The painter’s New York solo debut with David Zwirner, “mountains in my heart (the death of Sarpedon),” fills—or rather, doesn’t fill—the gallery’s airy rooms on West 19th Street. There is plenty of space here, both between the works on the walls and the brushstrokes that compose the small-scale and exquisite, but not delicate, pictures. Peyton has always, since her early shows with Gavin Brown in the 1990s, followed her heart in choosing her subjects, drawing from a pop pantheon (among them, famously, Kurt Cobain and Liam Gallagher) and historical figures (such as Napoleon), as well as from her own circle of friends, capturing each in her lovingly observed, deceptively fey, very serious figurative work. Decades later, the earnest essence of her project and her commitment to it remain unchanged. And, this time, a Trojan hero is her marquee name.—Johanna Fateman
Read more from our critic’s interview with the artist.
SOHO / TRIBECA
Doron Langberg, “Landscapes”
Deitch | 18 Wooster Street
Through April 25 *Last Chance*
With triangulating sites—in Israel, Ukraine, and Fire Island—painted at the scale of Pollock and Delacroix, the artist, once and maybe forever a darling of queer figuration, now turns to landscape, exorcising the settler-colonial sublime in a nervy mix of registers: from the heart and the pit of the stomach, a searching illogic of reduction and distortion that stuns.—Johanna Fateman
Sometimes a tipping point is reached when an artwork cannot bear the weight of the story told about or around it. In other words, the narrative constructed around the work causes it to become diminutive and embrittled, even causing it to collapse before our eyes…—John Vincler
A show so interesting, both of our critics covered it (and reached different conclusions). Read Vincler’s full review here.
“Ceija Stojka: Making Visible”
Drawing Center | 35 Wooster Street
Through June 7
Curator Lynne Cooke introduces the mesmeric genius of Ceija Stojka—self-taught artist and survivor of the Romani Holocaust—whose work, including images recalled from internments at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Ravensbrück, transforms unspeakable atrocities into emanations of pure life force.—Margaret Sundell
“Claudio Perna: Idea Como Arte”
ISLAA | 142 Franklin Street
Through May 2
This show’s reticent wall labels prove that—without knowing the precise rules of Claudio Perna’s game—you can still relish the late Venezuelan Conceptual artist’s photos, collaged maps, and scribbled notes, which together start to form an intriguing portrait both of a man and of his home country.—Dawn Chan
David Armstrong, “Portraits”
Artists Space | 11 Cortlandt Alley
Through May 23
Of course he shot with a medium-format Rolleiflex at the chest, the eyes tell it: let’s look a moment longer, now at David, no, at Boris, Monica, Andrew, Ethan, Eduardo, Marcus; I still have your picture on my wall.—Devan Díaz
Eli Hill, “Internal Weather”
Harkawik | 88 Walker Street
Through April 25 *Last Chance*
The painter’s melancholic portraits, drenched in cool blues and haunting reds, capture gay boys running on trails and slouching in chairs before mirrors, the works lovingly depicting the fraught competition of perception played out on sun-kissed Fire Island or in chilly Brooklyn apartments.—Grace Byron
LOWER EAST SIDE
“New Humans: Memories of the Future”
New Museum | 235 Bowery
Ongoing
I liked the old New Museum, actually, architectural awkwardness and all, and I didn’t particularly think it needed to double in size (I wistfully recall its even scrappier incarnations, before its 2007 move to the Bowery). But, while it definitely feels like a different kind of museum now, I’m into it. Perhaps I’d be more hesitant to embrace the luxe expansion if the institution did not, right out of the gate, assert its proud traditions of adventurous, thematic shows and unconstrained, theoretically minded wall text. In “New Humans,” some 800 objects by more than 200 artists (as well as scientists, designers, and so on) span the three, now-bigger main exhibition floors, variously demonstrating how concepts of the human are transient and morphing, locked in a restless feedback loop with technological innovation. “New Humans” is a centennial debriefing of sorts, staged at the cusp of the A.I. epoch, the end of the platform era, the start of yet another war. —Johanna Fateman
Read Fateman’s entire kaleidoscopic review here.
Yuval Pudik, “Time Takes a Cigarette”
Palo | 21 East 3rd Street
Through April 25 *Last Chance*
In the front space, by the window, is a little cut-out graphite drawing of novelist Yukio Mishima peering down from a three-dimensional recreation of the brutalist balcony where he gave his failed speech to overthrow the Japanese government moments before committing seppuku in 1970, mounted to the wall like a puppet theater, high up, impotently addressing the rest of the works in the exhibition, which include a life-size drawing of Eugène Delacroix’s tomb beneath a snaking cursive line (the David Bowie lyric that gives the show its title), in between a number of collaged objects and drawings of collaged objects that mine the thornier problems of “queer history,” a precarious fantasia of which this artist is an elegant, hard-bitten analyst.—Jarrett Earnest
Victor Van, “Great Expectations”
Open Studio | 127 Henry Street
Through April 24. *Last Chance*
With titles like Unforgettable Thanksgiving Surprises at Walt Disney Resort, IHOP Mexican Churro Pancakes, and Wheel of Fortune 7000th Episode – New!, Victor Van’s peppy paintings on paper have the power to really turn your day around.—Sam McKinniss
Brock Enright, “I AM SO PRETTY”
Club Rhubarb | 3 Prince Street
Through May 19, by appointment
Come, be led up the stairs and through two floors of this townhouse “gallery” (someone lives here) to see a wide range of works by this immersion-oriented, multimedia bowerbird of an artist: things-embedded-in-fabric paintings, all manner of assemblages (free standing, hanging from the ceiling, tucked into drawers), environmental works, and don’t miss the videos in the bathroom, where one highlight is a Jackass-meets-Vito Acconci performance related to Enright’s previous business venture, a boutique kidnapping-roleplay service.—Johanna Fateman
QUEENS
“Greater New York”
MoMA PS1 | 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City
Through August 17
My first impression of the 53-artist show is that, notwithstanding the fantastic paintings to be found here and there (such as Janiva Ellis’s grand, drably dynamic cropped view of the Brooklyn Bridge, Taína Cruz’s urban-elfin scenes, and Julia Wachtel’s hypnagogic altarpiece-like distillations of Internet flotsam), the strongest work seems to be modestly-scaled photography; low-tech expanded-cinema works or very simply presented (rather than slick, “immersive”) video; and budget-friendly readymade or scavenged sculpture. That is to say, it’s art that doesn’t necessarily require industrial-loft studio space, and that isn’t necessarily geared to the warehouse-cathedral architecture of major museums or Chelsea and Tribeca mega-galleries… —Johanna Fateman
Read more from our critic’s take here.
Pat Oleszko, “Fool Disclosure”
Sculpture Center | 44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City
Through April 27 *Last Chance*
Walking in, one immediately devours Pat Oleszko’s colorful blow-ups, which tickle and delight; anthropomorphic bulldozers and missiles, with playful puns scrawled on them, turn the barren concrete rooms into a carnival.—Grace Byron
PHILADELPHIA
“A World in the Making: The Shakers”
ICA Philadelphia | 118 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA
Through August 9
Last week I was served ads for “sustainable fly tying” and a digital “improv quilting” workshop—a small data point in a broader return to handicraft and renewed attention to skill sharing. There’s an urge to build things together right now, but we’re trapped in the singular, online performance of it. Against this backdrop, “A World in the Making: The Shakers” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia arrives less as historical survey than contemporary interface. The exhibition sets up a relay between Shaker material culture and seven contemporary artists’ interdisciplinary work, asking what happens when communal structures are encountered through objects, archives, and bodies. Here, calm translates most easily while discipline, belief, and labor resurface more unevenly. How does this interest in traditional handmaking sit within the sticky Venn diagram of the trad wife, the MAHA mom, and the curation of the homemade for public consumption or aspiration? —Blakey Bessire
Read more from Bessire’s review here.
WARSAW
“The Woman Question 1550–2025”
Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw | Marszalkowska 103
Through May 3
The exhibition is high-key, seductive, profoundly accessible in its commitment to figuration and variety, and guided by pop—or punk—savvy. The film 3 Minute Scream, 1977, by Gina Birch (of the Raincoats!), which very simply and ingeniously features the artist screaming for the duration of a Super 8mm cartridge, is the welcoming cri de coeur, looping at the entrance. In the small room, capacity 10, where Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders, 1610, is on view (visitors queue to get in), the proximity of a 2013 film by Chiara Fumai, for which the artist reads aloud from SCUM Manifesto (Valerie Solanas’s 1967 argument for the elimination of the male sex), makes the vivid polemic a soundtrack for the Baroque painter’s bible scene. The visceral disgust in the then 16-year-old Gentileschi’s depiction of the lecherous elders, attempting to extort sex from the bathing Susanna, syncs well with Solanas, establishing an all-too-credible transhistorical through line in this story of feminism avant la lettre: rage. —Johanna Fateman
Read more from our critic’s Warsaw diary.
More of our favorite stories from CULTURED
How The Pitt’s Patrick Ball Went From Role-Playing Corporate Trainings to Starring on Broadway
13 Art Shows You Don’t Want to Miss During Milan Design Week
The 2026 CULTURED Power Advisor List: Meet the Art Advisors Shaping the World’s Top Collections
A New Book Unearths the Heated Rivalry Between Artists Peter Hujar and Paul Thek
Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.
in your life?