Here’s What Art to See in New York Before the Wave of Summer Group Shows Hits

Our monthly What’s On column is compiled from our longer Close Looks reviews and shorter In Brief and Speed Round entries. 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.

CHELSEA / MEATPACKING

Meg Webster

Paula Cooper Gallery | 521 West 21^st Street
Through July 24, 2026

Like a coda to her long-running exhibition at Dia Beacon, which closed in April, Meg Webster’s “Thicket” at Paula Cooper Gallery presents, for its centerpiece and title work, a simple large-scale form, anchored in the olfactory. But, if at Dia, the artist’s sculpture (including a curved wall of fragrant beeswax, a dome of soil) fell into inescapable dialogue with the canonical Minimalism and Land art of the institution’s collection, here, it seems to breathe easier. Thicket is an oasis on its own terms: an Elysian cul-de-sac of bunched-together branches, berries, and grasses, an abbreviated spiral that leads visitors—one or two at a time—to its center in a single whorl. Elysian may be the wrong descriptor, though, for this un-idealized, unsentimental, decidedly impermanent gift to the senses which retains its wildness, despite its carefully molded structure. The small, upstairs gallery smells like warm dirt, a flowering meadow, and brush, exquisite scents of desiccation and impending decay. —Johanna Fateman

“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 full review here.

TRIBECA

Bruce Nauman

Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer | 9 White Street
Through June 20, 2026

Bruce Nauman’s still got it. In “No Mistakes,” as his new show at Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer is titled, a technique of “blind drawing” and his disarmingly intimate 3-D video documentation of it (pick up the requisite viewing glasses at the front desk) become a moving reflection on perception and mediation. Working with his longtime assistant-collaborator Ellen Babcock, the legendary artist—who is now 84—regards an object or still-life (or a mirror, for the self-portraits), then closes his eyes to work from memory in silverpoint and goldpoint, drawing with both hands. The resulting works on paper feature apparitional, doubled, or conjoined images, more intentional than scribbles, but squiggly and fragile nonetheless, like tangled strands of hair. They indeed seem to derive from an interior, eyes-closed space. In contrast, the striking depth of the large-scale projected 3-D footage, shot (often) from an over-the-shoulder POV, puts the viewer in the studio, at the heart of the action. It’s a symbolically freighted and visually dramatic invitation from an artist to see not only with him in his stead. —Johanna Fateman

MIDTOWN

Marcel Duchamp

Museum of Modern Art | 11 West 53rd Street
Through August 22, 2026

The most fascinating—and disorienting—aspect of this revelatory exhibition is how, and when, Duchamp’s artworks appear in its chronology. Many of his most famous works are seen at the right time only in photographic reproduction (such as Alfred Stieglitz’s iconic photograph of Fountain published in May 1917). Then they reappear—often again and again—as refabricated copies or miniatures. The show is rife with replicas. —John Vincler

Read more from Vincler’s take here.

Nobuyoshi Araki and Roe Ethridge

Anton Kern Gallery | 16 East 55th Street
Through July 2, 2026

Roe Ethridge serves up visual confections several ways here, flexing his command of the medium. The pinhole-camera soft-focus of his “Floral Arrangements,” flowers photographed in dollar store vases against printed backdrops (which Ethridge has altered with paint) appear dreamy, imagined rather than recorded, especially in comparison to Nobuyoshi Araki’s “Flower Cemetery” series from 2017, which stages flower bouquets alongside plastic figurines that read more directly as documents of play and performance with objects. —John Vincler

Read more from Vincler’s gallery picks here.

UPTOWN

“Carol Bove”

Guggenheim Museum | 1071 Fifth Avenue
Through August 2, 2026

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

Read more from our critics’ speed round of one-sentence reviews here.

“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

Jessi Reaves, “process invented the mirror”

Arts and Letters | Broadway between West 155 and 156 Streets
Through July 3, 2026

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

Watch Mallett’s video tour of the exhibition.

Eliza Douglas

Gagosian | 821 Park Avenue
Through July 31, 2026

In Eliza Douglas’s New York solo debut, “Ghosts,” confounding compositions in acid colors are archeologically layered. The New York-born and German-trained artist (at the Städelschule in Frankfurt) has quite literally painted—or printed—over works previously shown at the recently shuttered French gallery Air de Paris gallery (RIP). And who is this diaphanous bespectacled lady emerging from each of the eight canvases? —John Vincler

David Hammons and Jannis Kounellis

White Cube | 1002 Madison Avenue
Through June 13, 2026

There are 40 works in the show, a stimulating pairing of the American David Hammons with the late Greek-Italian artist Jannis Kounellis (1936–2017), across two floors. Kounellis’s visual poems on paper and jute bags full of coal (Untitled, 1968) enter into a dialogue with great examples of Hammons’s tarp-covered paintings and body prints, as well as his surreal applications of Black hair clippings on rocks and a couch. —John Vincler

LOWER EAST SIDE & CHINATOWN

“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 review here.

Hayden Dunham

Company | 145 Elizabeth Street
Through June 13, 2026

A droning ambient musical track (whale sounds are involved) emanates from speakers throughout the space, as multiple video projections show a diaphanous porcelain-skinned figure looking more cyborgian than ghostly. Most intriguing were several egg- or stone-shaped constructions that look like paintings, cut up and reshaped into sculptural papier-mâché orbs. —John Vincler

Read more from Vincler’s LES guide here.

Altoon Sultan

Hoffman Donahue | 99 Bowery, 2nd Floor
Through July 18, 2026

Born in Brooklyn, Sultan showed at Marlborough Gallery in the 1970s, and later at Tibor de Nagy, while living in rural Vermont for more than 30 years. The work on view at Hoffman Donahue is the sort that someone who has stuck with exploring paint’s possibilities for over 45 years makes. She zooms in on fragmented details of mechanical parts within larger, complex systems while recording her findings through an idealizing reduction. Her compositions are heightened essences of her subjects. —John Vincler

Read more from Vincler’s LES guide here.

Stan VanDerBeek

Magenta Plains | 149 Canal Street
Through June 20, 2026

You’d be forgiven for thinking Stan VanDerBeek’s prints and computer animation work relate somehow to the history of the QR code. In the prints, especially the grid of nine color silkscreens sourced from computer graphics, Moveable Mandala, VanDerBeek builds pixelated abstractions that resemble the now ubiquitous “Quick Response” machine-readable barcodes… but these were made in 1976, from his experiments with computer animation that began a decade earlier. —John Vincler

Read more from Vincler’s LES guide here.

Adelisa Selimbašić  

Lubov | 5 East Broadway, 4^th floor (stair access only)
Through June 13, 2026

The Italo-Bosnian artist deconstructs the (mostly) female or feminine figure with a focus on legs and heels, torsos and breasts, in a series of paintings on cylindrical columns that interrupt the main front-room space, and in a horizontal band of canvas lining the walls of the back space, bathed in blue light. There is an aspect of the perception-bending theme park experience in these immersive environments—gummies are optional. The artist sourced her models from the New York nightlife scene, at clubs like Basement or Nowadays. —John Vincler

Read more from Vincler’s LES guide here.

QUEENS

“Greater New York”

MoMA PS1 | 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City
Through August 17, 2026

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 Fateman’s take here.

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