We didn’t need the Knicks to show us that we’re a city of champions, but it sure doesn’t hurt. This has been a major year in New York’s art world — we saw the reopening of the Studio Museum and the expansion of the New Museum, and the stars aligned with marquee exhibitions like the Whitney Biennial and MoMA PS1’s Greater New York landing at the same time. You might even say that The Met’s hard-hitting group show on Orientalism probes the empire state of mind.
And then, of course, there are the wildcards that make this city such a haven for the weird, the experimental, the magical. Can’t really get freakier than Pierre Huyghe’s brain activity-inspired dreamscapes at MoMA. How about an exhibition at Subtitled NYC — a little artist-run Brooklyn project space — that recasts the internet as a water system? Or an ark-full of animals at Powerhouse Arts, and a menagerie of mythical creatures at the Cloisters? We say chase the unicorn this summer — New York’s a wonderland, as an exhibition of New Deal-era murals of Alice and her crew zooming around NYC at the Museum of the City of New York shows us. You need only open your eyes to it.
— Lisa Yin Zhang, associate editor
Pierre Huyghe: UUmwelt
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan
July 1–Nov. 29
Generative artificial intelligence is dependent on human output, but can it interpret our own thoughts before we externalize them? Pierre Huyghe investigates AI’s potential to realize the human imagination in an interactive, multimedia body of work. Born from an artificial neural network’s interpretation of recorded brain activity from a person asked to imagine a series of images, UUmwelt is also activated by visitors whose gazes alter the network’s generative imagery in real time.
Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L
The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, Soho, Manhattan
June 26–Sep. 27, 2026
With over 200 rarely-seen works spanning from William Pope.L’s early career to his final years, a survey of the late performance artist’s prolific drawing practice introduces a new urgency to his absurdist distillations of human hierarchy. Works pulled from key series including Failure Drawings and Skin Sets, and a rarely exhibited installation titled “Relational Painting a.k.a If Black Is Beautiful….” underpin this exhibition, functioning as a cross-section of Pope.L’s provocative aesthetics spanning medium, language, and action.
Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through Feb. 28, 2027
By leveling Orientalist and Islamic art and decorative objects from The Met’s collection, this exhibition examines the exchange between Europe, West Asia, and North Africa from the 19th century. It unpacks the westward trade of Ottoman and Persian wares at a time of rapid industrialization, reflecting the porous boundaries between observation and perception, as well as aesthetic influence and cultural appropriation. Central to the exhibition is an exploration into Osman Hamdi Bey, a French-trained Ottoman painter who uniquely infused the Orientalist style with his first-hand cultural insights.
Ulises Beisso: (Hidden) in Plain Sight
Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, 142 Franklin Street, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through Aug. 29
Uruguayan artist Ulises Beisso’s works could be called literal hidden gems. After his untimely passing in 1996 at the age of 38, many of his paintings and sculptures were stored away, not to be exhibited publicly until very recently. This show, his first in the United States, is centered around moving works from the last two years of his life, when he traveled to New York City and was deeply influenced by Ross Bleckner, Félix González-Torres, and other queer artists at the height of the AIDS crisis. Downstairs, exhibitions of Shipibo-Konibo artist Chonon Bensho and the Venezuelan duo Yeni and Nan round out a rare chance to take in three wholly unique Latin American visual practices in one fell swoop.
Greater New York 2026
MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens
Through August 17
Endearing aluminum-foil rats and cats that Hyperallergic Associate Editor Lisa Yin Zhang called “a love letter to the city”; Kameron Neal’s unsettling video installations using plainclothes NYPD surveillance footage, which Editor-at-Large Hrag Vartanian said “play off the dynamics of seeing and being seen.” These are among the more than 150 works by 50 artists on view in Greater New York, MoMA PS1’s signature survey of art across the five boroughs. It’s an imperfect curatorial premise that yields strange, experimental, funny, heartbreaking, and delightful results.
Read our editors’ review, and our list of works we loved, didn’t, and are ambivalent about.
Whitney Biennial 2026
Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, West Village, Manhattan
Through Aug. 23
Our Editor-in-Chief Hakim Bishara called it “meek and joyless“; critic Aruna D’Souza said it was “visually astute.” But the point isn’t whether the Whitney Biennial is good or bad — it’s about forming an opinion, any opinion, and fervently defending it at your next dinner party. You have just a few more weeks to see the museum’s highly discussed survey of contemporary art in the United States, with standout works by Akira Ikezoe, Samia Halaby, Ali Eyal, Pat Oleszko, and more than 50 other artists and collectives.
Read our editors’ first impressions, Hakim Bishara’s review, and Aruna D’Souza’s review.
Also read our profiles of artists in the exhibition, including Lisa Yin Zhang on CFGNY, Renée Reizman on Ali Eyal, Aruna D’Souza on Kamrooz Aram, and Clara Maria Apostolatos on Maia Chao.
Marcel Duchamp
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan
Through Aug. 22
As the story goes, in 1917, Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal on its head — and the art world upside down. This dutiful survey at MoMA, stuffed with 300 works from 1900 to ’68, marks the first Duchamp retrospective in the US in more than half a century. It’s a welcome refresher on the inner workings of the mind of the infamous trickster artist.
Read Hakim Bishara’s review and Lisa Yin Zhang’s interview with Duchamp scholar Thierry de Duve
THE ARK: What is Wild is Sacred
Powerhouse Arts, 322 Third Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn
June 11–Aug. 30
If you can’t swing a visit to the Bronx Zoo, Powerhouse Arts’s very first exhibition, The Ark, might just be the next best thing. Originally staged in Eric Fischl’s Sag Harbor church, this expanded show continues to reflect on both the majesty and marginalization of the natural world through its animals. New works by Jeffrey Gibson, Nicole Cherubini, and Spencer Tinkham are among the show’s highlights, as are pieces by Wangechi Mutu, Kiki Smith, Rob Pruitt, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Toshio Sasaki, Daniel Firman, and Ryan Johnson.
Another Wonderland: Abram Champanier’s Alice Mural
Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through Sep. 27
Amid threats to New Deal-era art, a newly restored mural commissioned through the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project is getting a second life. Created by Abram Champanier for the children’s ward at Gouverneur Hospital between 1938 and 1940, Alice of Wonderland Visiting New York envisions Lewis Carroll’s heroine in a bustling subway car, at the Central Park zoo, sitting atop one of the lions guarding the New York Public Library, and more. Alice, she’s just like us!
Carol Bove
Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through August 2
Best known for her mind-bending, abstract steel forms that wink playfully at the legacy of modernist sculpture, Carol Bove activates Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic spiral with works spanning more than 25 years — not just sculptures, but also paintings, works on paper, and unconventional interventions. Among the highlights of Bove’s first museum survey, writes critic Seph Rodney, is not a work by the artist per se, but rather a cutout she made to reveal a mural by Joan Miró and Josep Llorens Artigas that was built into the Guggenheim’s ramps in the 1960s.
Creatures of Myth and Imagination: Europe and the Americas
Met Cloisters, 99 Margaret Corbin Drive, Washington Heights, Manhattan
Through October 18
This exhibition at The Met’s medieval art branch explores the cross-cultural urge to imagine and depict creatures of all sorts — mythological, zoomorphic, hybrid beasts of dreams and nightmares. More than 50 objects, including sculpture, ceramics, textiles, and paintings spanning 500 to 1500 CE, show us how diverse civilizations across Europe and the Americas similarly conjured fantastic beings to make sense of our world.
Fade
Studio Museum in Harlem, 144 West 125th Street, Harlem, Manhattan
Through Sep. 6
“Fade” can refer to a disappearance, a kind of haircut, a basketball move — and now, the title of an exhibition at the Studio Museum, the sixth in a series of “F” shows spotlighting emerging artists of African descent beginning in 2001. One highlight in this strong 17-artist show is Malaika Temba’s massive tapestry depicting a market scene. In it, a woman walks in from the foreground as a stand-in for the viewer, her skirt and feet fraying into tassels that drift in the air, fading in and out.
Sheyla Baykal: Horizontal Thinking
Participant Inc, 16 Elizabeth Street, Chinatown, Manhattan
July 10–Aug. 16
The Turkish-American photographer Sheyla Baykal came onto the scene in the Lower East Side of the 1960s, mingling with artists and writers including Elaine and Willem de Kooning and Frank O’Hara. Though she diligently documented the downtown arts world for decades, training her lens on iconic figures like Peter Hujar and the “street queens” of her community, Baykal has risen in prominence in recent years thanks to the work of her friend Penny Arcade and others who stewarded her archive.
Cinthya Santos Briones: Living in Sanctuary and Res Julian: True Hole
Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, 154 Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
June 17–Aug. 12
At Baxter St, one of the city’s oldest artist-run nonprofits, photographer Cinthya Santos Briones presents sensitive portraits of undocumented people and refugees in the United States, many of whom have found shelter in churches and religious institutions. The organization’s concurrent show highlights the work of Res Julian, who photographs voids and holes as a way to process the mounting violence against queer and trans communities.
Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan
July 5–Jan. 2, 2027
A rare and novel research-based exhibition centering modern African architecture from the 1950s through the ‘80s, when over a dozen nations inaugurated their independence and began navigating the development of new identities through Pan-Africanism. Focusing on Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Togo, Architects of Liberation brings attention to the first generation of African architects who shaped and were shaped by the culture, politics, economics, and climate of this critical era of reinvention and self-definition. A majority of exhibition objects — including archival photographs, architectural drawings, and dimensional models — are entering the public eye for the first time.
Sonia Boyce: Demonstrate
Queens Museum, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Corona, Queens
Jun. 27–Jan. 31, 2027
Freedom, imagination, and improvisation become art in their own right through this newly commissioned body of social practice work. Boyce documented the creative collaboration between attendees of multiple onsite events at the museum — interactive experimental performances, artmaking workshops, a procession by the Resistance Revival Chorus, and the opening ceremony of the Día de Muertos community ofrenda. She emphasizes their reverberations by converting what she captured into multi-channel videos, sculptural installations, and kaleidoscopic wallpaper prints.
Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures
El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue, East Harlem, Manhattan
Through August 2
If a self-portrait of her peering over sunglasses and smoking a pipe doesn’t make it crystal-clear, Sophie Rivera is just so damn cool. This long-overdue survey of the Nuyorican photographer is at El Museo del Barrio, where she herself organized shows in the 1980s — a homecoming fit for a queen.
Yehwan Song: The Other Internet
Subtitled NYC, 113 Franklin Street, 2nd floor, Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Through Aug. 23
You’ve heard of doomscrolling — maybe you’re doing it on another device as you read this guide? — but what about the internet as a water system? Artist Yehwan Song examines water as a metaphor for our digital lives, from streaming to surfing the web. Her show at Subtitled NYC explores this analogy through the lenses of ecology, geography, and surveillance.
Hyunjin Park, Etienne Gisto Cipriani, Noormah Jamal
Wave Hill, 4900 Independence Avenue, Riverdale, Bronx
June 27–Aug. 9 (Park & Cipriani); Aug. 4–Oct. 18 (Jamal)
Three solo exhibitions round out Wave Hill’s peak-summer art programming. Hyunjin Park’s sculptures and video work dissect human and non-human connectivity through the artist’s relationship with her AI-operated robot dog Echo; Etienne Gisto Cipriani fashions a dioramic display of the cryptid and its ecological position; and Noormah Jamal’s Blooms depict the people of Peshawar, who blossom despite the arid environment, political upheavals, and regional trauma along the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Kim Gordon: Count Your Chickens and CFGNY: Puddles into Pond
Amant, 315 Maujer Street, East Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Through August 16
Left: Work by CFGNY (image courtesy the artists); right: Installation view of Kim Gordon: Count Your Chickens (photo Natalie Haddad/Hyperallergic)
Sonic Youth legend Kim Gordon’s first love wasn’t music but visual art, and it shows in this exhibition that includes everything from spandex-covered cocktail tables to fake plastic hedges. Also at Amant, the “vaguely Asian” fashion collective CFGNY — which alternatively stands for “Concept Foreign Garments New York” and “Cute Fucking Gay New York,” among many more possibilities — shows ceramics made in collaboration with more than a dozen friends.
Read Natalie Haddad’s feature on Kim Gordon’s exhibition and Lisa Yin Zhang’s profile of CFGNY
Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through Sep. 27
As Trump-stoked nationalism collides with the US’s 250th anniversary, there may be no phrase as hot-button as “Made in America.” But what does that actually look like? Christopher Payne might have an answer in his photographs of dozens of places that power production. Think lush, full-color arrays of the making of everything from colored pencils to massive tires.
Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds
Jewish Museum, 1109 5th Avenue & East 92nd Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through July 26
German cultural critic Walter Benjamin often gazed upon Paul Klee’s watercolor of an angel, which he kept in his study, and thought about history, progress, and freedom. Now you can do the same at the Jewish Museum’s show on the artist, which also includes crowd-pleasing pieces with delicate linework and stained-glass color.
New Humans: Memories of the Future
New Museum, 235 Bowery, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Ongoing
Okay, it’s true — our editors didn’t love this show. Still, this massive exhibition, with work about humans and technology (emphasis on the latter) by over 200 artists, inaugurates the New Museum’s expanded building, certainly a milestone in the New York art world. And there’s plenty of good work — Senior Editor Valentina Di Liscia in particular loved a small blue gallery with works by Jean Tinguely, Konrad Klapheck, and Alison Knowles.
Read our editors’ conversation and Aaron Short’s feature on the building
Donald Moffett: IMPEACH
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
Through April 11, 2027
During Bill Clinton’s 1998 impeachment hearings, Representative John Lewis delivered a fiery minute-long speech grounded in his childhood memory of a torrential downpour in rural Alabama. “The wind may blow, the thunder may roll, the lightning may flash, but we must never leave the American house,” cried Lewis. Nearly 30 years later, his voice reverberates through the walls of artist Donald Moffett’s cacophonous sound installation, which implores us to stand our ground right in the eye of that storm.
Rose Malenfant: Sun-Dried
Tempest Gallery, 16-42 Weirfield Street, Ridgewood, Queens
Through July 11
Rose Malenfant’s delectable exhibition consists of tender prints of her grandmother’s hands pressing out strips of pasta — often inked on pasta dough —and installations incorporating family heirlooms like silver spoons. Taken together, it’s a multisensory meditation on family, heritage, and rituals passed down from generation to generation, from plate to plate.
Outside NYC
The Aldrich Decennial: I am what is around me
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, Connecticut
Through Jan. 10, 2027
Connecticut is often derided as a mere suburb of New York City, but especially for artists, it’s always been so much more. Titled after a line by the late Hartford-based poet Wallace Stevens, the Aldrich’s debut decennial showcases the work of 40 artists who call the state home, including Arghavan Khosravi, Tammy Nguyen, and Aki Sasamoto.
Just Powers: Long Island Biennial 2026
Heckscher Museum of Art, 2 Prime Avenue, Huntington, New York
Through Sep. 13
If you need an excuse to escape the concrete jungle this summer, look no further than the Long Island Biennial. Just Powers, its ninth edition, gathers work by dozens of local artists who explore the promises and betrayals of democracy. Fittingly, the show is organized in the spirit of two works: the Declaration of Independence, signed 250 years ago, and George Grosz’s “Eclipse of the Sun,” painted 100 years ago as a critique of the Weimar Republic.
Clay Has Memory: Creative Lineages from Africa
Princeton University Art Museum, Art@Bainbridge, 158 Nassau Street, Princeton, New Jersey
July 19–July 3, 2027
In African diasporic art history, clay has been treated as a way to record and remember, as if it were a living organism itself. The medium and its infinite possibilities are at the center of this show, which explores some of the countless traditions, practices, and visual languages of ceramic artists across time.
Topographies of Dissent: Armenian Art from the Dodge Collection
Allan Rohan Crite: Neighborhood
Zimmerli Art Museum, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, New Jersey
Through July 19 (Armenian art) and through July 31 (Crite)
For Allan Rohan Crite, art was a vital part of community memory. Neighborhood examines the decades-long practice of the Boston-based printmaker and painter, who meticulously documented and celebrated Black life in American cities during the 20th century. Meanwhile, the Zimmerli presents another show that sheds light on Armenian art from the Soviet era, organized by subject and themes including national landscape, abstraction, and Pop Art.
Risham Syed: Destiny Fractured
Newark Museum of Art, 49 Washington Street, Newark, New Jersey
Through Jan. 17, 2027
Artist Risham Syed develops the sixth in a series of exhibitions at the museum, drawing from its eclectic collection of period rooms, American landscapes, and Chinese paintings. In doing so, she also draws connections between Newark and her hometown of Lahore, Pakistan — pairing, for instance, a print of an iron and steel factory on Chinese jacquard silk with an installation of taxidermied birds.
