10 Museum Shows to See in New York This Week

April 30, 2024

May is undoubtedly a market-oriented art month in New York, with Frieze quickly followed by another fair, Independent, and then a succession of big-ticket auctions to boot. But even as moneyed dealers and collectors flex their might, the city’s museums have plowed forward, mounting some of their most high-profile shows planned for this year.

The polarizing Whitney Biennial continues its run at the Whitney Museum; the debate over its curatorial framework is sure to be a mainstay at gallery dinners and fair booths this month. Meanwhile, sizable exhibitions devoted to the Harlem Renaissance and Joan Jonas, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, respectively, will also be widely seen.

Adding to all the excitement are some new shows: a survey of Paul McCartney’s photography at the Brooklyn Museum, an Amalia Mesa-Bains retrospective at El Museo del Barrio, and Petrit Halilaj’s rooftop commission for the Met.

Below, a look at 10 museum shows to see during Frieze week in New York.

‘Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm’ at Brooklyn Museum

Image Credit: ©1964 Paul McCartney

If Paul McCartney is known for producing some of the greatest music of all time as a member of The Beatles, this show aspires to situate him as a noteworthy visual artist as well. The focus here is specifically McCartney’s photographs—namely, the ones he shot using a Pentax camera during the band’s first US tour, as the group discovered a vast and passionate following beyond the UK. The show assembles some 250 of McCartney’s pictures, attesting to how The Beatles each fashioned their identity until they were camera-ready.

May 3–August 18
‘The Roof Garden Commission: Petrit Halilaj, Abetare‘ at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Image Credit: Courtesy the artist; ChertLüdde, Berlin; kurimanzutto, Mexico City and New York; Mennour, Paris/Photo Hyla Skoptiz

Petrit Halilaj, a closely watched Kosovar-born sculptor, has made a splash on the international biennial circuit, but he has astoundingly only had one other New York solo show, and that was in 2017. This time, he’s taken over the Met’s rooftop, showing an array of new sculptures inspired by kids’ drawings lifted from desktops in Albania and the surrounding region. Where most Met rooftop commissions tend toward excess, Halilaj’s latest creations are shockingly minimal, save for a smiling spider that looms over one deck. Do not miss the cat-human hybrid that hangs from a pergola.

Through October 27
‘Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory’ at El Museo del Barrio

Image Credit: Photo Daria Lugina

Amalia Mesa-Bains’s work has proven notoriously difficult to curate, given that a gathering of disparate parts, from flags to jewelry to others’ art, comprise her most famous pieces, her ofrenda-style installations. The difficulty of keeping their elements together is, in part, her point: Mesa-Bains has sought to honor the very nature of history itself, showing that it is rarely a stable, changeless discipline. The artist, who has frequently focused on the Chicanx community, is at long last receiving a retrospective, which has been truncated for the New York exhibition from its acclaimed initial version in Berkeley, California.

May 2–August 11
‘Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning’ at Museum of Modern Art

Image Credit: Photo Jonathan Dorado

There are arguably few better-known video artists in the world than Joan Jonas, whose tapes from the ’60s and ’70s are considered crucial works about the relationship between one’s body and the environment, often with a feminist undercurrent. Having represented the United States at the 2015 Venice Biennale, Jonas has been written into art history of the past half-century, and her MoMA retrospective only cements her place within the canon. Included in the exhibition are a number of her video installations contending with hard-to-pin-down psychological states, natural phenomena, Japanese theatre traditions, and, of course, her beloved pet dogs.

Through July 6. Read our review.
Käthe Kollwitz at Museum of Modern Art

Image Credit: ©2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Käthe Kollwitz is a hero for many artists now for the way she dealt head-on with social issues of her day, working in a manner that was blindly direct—even by the standards of the current moment. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Kollwitz crafted paintings, drawings, and prints that responded to a war-torn, chaotic Germany, often directing her attention specifically to plight of women and workers. Crucially, she worked in a figurative mode, even as others around her turned to abstraction, and for that reason, these pieces are just as piercing now as they were then. Many of them have not been seen frequently in New York, making this retrospective an important one for audiences in the city.

Through July 20
‘The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism’ at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Image Credit: ©2023 Estate of Archibald John Motley Jr./Bridgeman Images/Howard University

It has been more than three decades since the Harlem Renaissance has been surveyed by a New York museum—the Studio Museum in Harlem was the last one to do so, in 1987—and with this show, the Met aims to take a fresh look at the movement, which kicked off in the ’20s and has influenced many generations afterward. As writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes were reshaping literary prose to account for new Black subjectivities, artists like Jacob Lawrence, William H. Johnson, and Meta Warrick Fuller were revolutionizing painting and sculpture, producing images of African Americans in ways they had rarely been depicted before. The movement produced a litany of memorable works, some 160 of which are assembled here, with many on loan from museums operated by historically Black schools. Among them are photographs of stylish Harlemites by James Van Der Zee, whose vast archive was recently acquired by the museum in collaboration with the Studio Museum.

Through July 28
‘Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo (feat. Takashi Murakami)’ at Brooklyn Museum

Image Credit: Brooklyn Museum

Among the Brooklyn Museum’s crown jewels is its complete set of Utagawa Hiroshige’s “100 Famous Views of Edo” (1856–59), a group of woodblock prints depicting the Japanese city across the seasons: snowy bridges, the bay at sunset, trees in bloom. But for 24 years, it has been impossible to see all of the Brooklyn Museum’s prints—until now. This show brings together the complete set, complementing it with a contemporary flourish in the form of works by Takashi Murakami, who is known for his extravagant paintings and sculptures that bring traditional Japanese imagery into a new age.

Through August 4
Whitney Biennial

Image Credit: Christopher Garcia Valle for ARTnews

The most important biennial held in the United States demonstrates its might once more with this year’s edition, the storied show’s 81st. As usual, a pair of curators—Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, in this case—have been appointed to provide a broad picture of American art as it stands right now. Iles and Onli’s vision of the scene is a sedate affair filled with art that does not broadcast its politics, even as many artists advocate for female liberation, trans rights, and other just causes. The curators’ 71-person list is dotted with beloved artists, from the esteemed abstractionist Mary Lovelace O’Neal to the up-and-coming sculptor Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio; it was assembled with the help of artists Korakrit Arunanondchai and asinnajaq, musician Taja Cheek, and filmmaker Zackary Drucker. And, for those looking to take home a piece of the Whitney Biennial (in a sense), it is this year possible to do so: the Whitney is also presenting certain moving-image offerings on the streaming platform Mubi.

Through August 11. Read our review.
Pacita Abad at MoMA PS1

Image Credit: Photo Kris Graves

The remarkable Filipina artist Pacita Abad stuffed and sewed her canvases, bringing her empathetic portraits of immigrant life and marginalized communities off the wall, into the third dimension. Having traveled the country over the past few years, Abad’s posthumous retrospective has finally touched down in New York, the city she sometimes called home. Unfortunately, the show has shrunk in the process; fortunately, her art, which also features in the current Venice Biennale, still shines brightly, bursting as it is with bright hues and busy compositions.

Through September 2
‘Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within’ at Noguchi Museum

Image Credit: ©Family of Toshiko Takaezu/Photo Nicholas Knight/Courtesy Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum/Private Collection

The gorgeous, elegant ceramic forms Toshiko Takaezu crafted sometimes contain a secret: hidden within are objects that produce pleasing sounds, if their holders are shaken gently. But their containers have largely remained motionless, lending them a stilled, muted quality. Their intrigue is evident in this long-overdue retrospective for Takaezu, an artist born in Hawai‘i to Japanese parents. The show seeks to expose unseen parts of Takaezu’s art, including her little-known paintings, and will also play up the importance of sound to her art, with a dedicated concert program designed by Leilehua Lanzilotti, who also curated the exhibition with art historian Glenn Adamson and the Noguchi Museum’s Kate Wiener.

Through July 28