Covering last week’s openings in Chelsea and downtown, as well as a few outliers and museum shows, our Speed Round offers something like a core sample, if not a comprehensive view, of the New York art scene. Writers, working against the clock, reviewed shows of our choice in one (sometimes quite long) sentence. But, though we raced around, you don’t have to: Many exhibitions are open through Halloween. To map our picks and plan your route, enter the Critic’s Table hashtag #TCT in the search bar of the See Saw app.

SOHO / TRIBECA

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, “Burning in the Eyes of the Maker”

Jeffrey Deitch | 76 Grand Street
Through October 31

Don’t you want to be punched in the chest, hard, by ferocious painterly talent and devastating political insight and volcanic queer anger and roiling brushwork and ragged visceral grief and strikingly current apocalyptic allusions to William Blake, Sue Coe, and Matthias Grünewald, cuz I sure do, don’t you? —Julia Bryan-Wilson

Rosalyn Drexler, “My Life Has a Life of Its Own”

Garth Greenan Gallery | 25 Greene Street
Through October 24

Rosalyn Drexler is typically thought of as a Pop artist with some extra paint on her brush, perhaps unduly overshadowed by peers like Roy L. and Andy W.—she was also a novelist, experimental playwright, screenwriter who collab’d with Richard Pryor, and professional wrestler—but this impressive new show makes a fine case for her as the first Pictures artist in its emphasis on collage, source material, technique, and how she transformed media images in ways that foreshadowed Charlesworth and Longo, among others. —Domenick Ammirati

Herman Cherry, “Rivers from 30,000 Feet”

Sebastian Gladstone | 36 White Street
Through October 24

What a delirious rush for anyone who loves paintings that lie in the formal outfields of French and New York painting: at mid-century, Cherry was a more classic AbEx type, but a 1960s epiphany led him to jazzier, janglier quasi-Pop abstractions, which yielded to these ’70s works (never before shown), featuring aerated cartographies of color-shapes and rainbow line sequences, deftly limned on sumptuous pale grounds, mapping out space from above and across at once. —Amy Sillman

Mark Armijo McKnight, “Cut the World”

Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery | 87 Franklin Street
Through October 24

Surfaces—stretched and scarred skin, weathered metamorphic rock, rippling desert sand—crossfade, one into the next, with silver gelatin’s finely modulated grays yawning between deep blacks and bright whites, but for all of this fine detail, there is also an all-over mist-like grain when prints are enlarged to this size, a subconscious shiver about the images, conveying a peculiar, sad eroticism, all the sadder and more erotic for their intense pictorial intelligence. —Jarrett Earnest

Narcissister, “Albert’s Paintings, Rachel’s Dress”

Margot Samel | 295 Church Street
Through October 10

See one of her live shows to experience how the masked, semi-anonymous artist’s body becomes both gallery and archive (Narcissister’s performance-as-Rube Goldberg machine combines sculptural prowess, burlesque trickery, abjection, sensuality, melancholy, humor, and family history); stay afterwards to contemplate the beauty of her uncle Albert’s painted seascapes. —Wendy Vogel

Yuan Yuan

Bortolami | 39 Walker Street
Through October 24

You wouldn’t be alone if you think the world is collapsing, and Yuan Yuan’s wet, dystopian paintings suggest that society is not only on the decline, but actually drowning under the weight of its own materialistic obsessions and excesses. —Sammy Loren

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, “Multiple Offerings”

Artists Space | 11 Cortlandt Alley
Through November 21

Exile and displacement, the limits of language and memory: these haunting concerns are explored with insistence and restraint—via film, performance, and text—in the art of Korean-American conceptualist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who was brutally murdered in 1982 at the age of 31, shortly after the publication of her influential genre-defying memoir Dictée, which occupies its own vitrine in this survey of her truncated but still expansive oeuvre—Cha’s first retrospective in 25 years. —Margaret Sundell

“Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L”

The Drawing Center | 35 Wooster
Through September 27

A survey of the late, great American artist’s work in drawing, a medium interpreted capaciously as ever by both institution and artist, features an anarchic installation which at 5 p.m. blares noise at the artist’s preferred volume as well as mind-cracking titles and declarations such as “The American Dream Is To Be Able To Think In Clear Acrylic Polymers”—contemporary art makes another turn on its roasting spit—or “The Winter of Black People,” and I think if you believe the latter phrase has any meaning at face value, then you’re exactly the kind of person who needs the work of Pope.L to detonate your pat, glib, totally not racist view of the world. —Paige K. Bradley

Michael E. Smith

Maxwell Graham | 72 Walker, Floor 5
Through October 24

Michael E. Smith is back with an exhibition at the gallery’s new Tribeca space, high up in an old, dusty building with a slanted ceiling and windows galore, each covered with a sheet or moving blanket, softening the atmosphere of the room to a kind of eternal twilight, and backlighting the textiles gridded stains and patterns, offering a backdrop for Smith to once again perform his own brand of trash magic, where instead of finding your card in the deck, he leaves your favorite childhood toy that you assumed was lost forever, right on your pillow at home: a tribute, a ghost, a return, a divination, or a damnation—who’s to say? —Ajay Kurian

Kelsey Isaacs, “Baby Mozart’s Kiss”

Theta | 184 Franklin Street
Through October 24

I adore Kelsey Isaacs’s new show, a body of work—paintings and video installation—that is as much about its vibrant colors and throbbing lights as it is about the birth of genius and the performance of painting itself. —Sammy Loren

LOWER EAST SIDE / CHINATOWN

Emma Beatrez, “Candy Apple”

Hair + Nails | 39 Henry Street
Through October 25

Lucky is the occultist noise band who secures an image from this Minneapolis painter for an album cover, as any one of the fuzzed-out beauties here—like Moonflower, 2026, which captures a levitating figure in black pajamas, rising from rumpled floral bedding, or Hex I, also from this year, featuring a face concealed by rubber costume witch fingers—would be a real score with its gossamer layers, ghostly intimations, and degraded Polaroid palette. —Johanna Fateman

Eileen Quinlan, “Line Call”

Miguel Abreu Gallery | 88 Eldridge Street
Through October 31

Quinlan culled through two decades of her own photo archives using the taciturn word “stripes” as a prompt, and the curated results form an exhibition that dares to be both incredibly broad in format and intensely touching in affect, showing that, all along, she has used the medium of photography as a kind of chemical companion for processing whatever she looks at, reflects on, scans past, squints into, casts off, and shines through. —Amy Sillman

“Alive at the End of the World”

Storey Gallery | 1 Rivington Street
Through October 17

Though Storey Gallery’s logo is a freshly blown-out candle, the opening was lit for its inaugural group show, where a sweaty intergenerational queer crowd packed into the Lower East Side space to see work by artists who came up during the AIDS crisis in dialogue with that of a younger cohort, Marlene McCarty’s 1993 heat transfer-on-canvas issuing its flaming order “You’re My Slut Bottom Suck” from the wall, while Christopher Gambino’s 2025 sculpture of a deconstructed chair in heels and tights lies face down on the floor below—Pierre Molinier meets household furniture—ready to obey. —Ksenia M. Soboleva

WEST VILLAGE / MEATPACKING

“Andy Warhol Family Album”

Whitney Museum | 99 Gansevoort Street
Through October 19

After opening the door to a generation of druggy outsiders and counter-cultural Superstars, Warhol slammed it on them, limiting his circle to close collaborators, handsome studs, and monied collectors, groups that feature prominently in this cozily titled exhibition of his Polaroids from the early 1970s, which includes some incredible blink-and-miss-it cameos by elderly greats (Marc Chagall and Giorgio de Chirico), Picasso historian John Richardson in leather daddy drag, and the artist’s perfect dog, Archie, but is mostly dominated by rich layabouts, whose poreless, sun-baked mugs threaten to drown out moments like Helmut Berger’s crossed-out face, and the mysterious caption of a photo of Yves Saint Laurent and Paloma Picasso (“EZZebeth and me – So Cute”), that is, the details that actually show character. —Harry Tafoya

Jared Buckhiester, “Five Ceramics”

American Art | 239 West 4th Street
Through October 17

Jared Buckhiester’s five new, materially exquisite, cryptically kinky figural ceramics are simply too “good” as sculpture qua sculpture to hazard selling short their formal dazzlements in an overeager rush to the art’s dream-time undercurrents—a supplicant-king cradling a pair of sacrificial calves in good in its way or the severed lower body of with only serious difficulties remaining, charred feet dangling beneath an oxblood knot of roiling bodies human and animal. —Jack Bankowsky

Josiah McElheny, “Instrument Object”

The Kitchen at Westbeth | 163 Bank Street, 4th Floor
Through November 7

Glass is a complex material, liquid, solid, fragile, strong, clear, opaque, and Josiah McElheny, whose sculptures astonish with the medium’s possibilities, now joins glass to music so that surprising sounds emerge from his artworks, asking spectators to look and listen, to see that glass might be a trumpet; or a rectangular wall piece with a central, glowing glass disc that looks like a platter or LP; or a wood chair/sound box that lets people sit between speakers playing long-lost music by composer Julius Eastman; or other elegant, inspired, special innovations of rare brilliance. —Lynne Tillman

Alison Nguyen, “Prior Occupants”

The High Line at West 14th Street
Through November 16

The bouncing basketball in this film echoes like adaptive reuse, nuclear subconscious, and affordable artist housing all echo in its story of Westbeth, the apartment complex converted in 1970 from an industrial Bell Labs facility, told via Harun Farocki-flavored video looping daily not far away from the fabled building. —Whitney Mallett

UNION SQUARE

Rosemary Mayer and Ree Morton, “Proserpina / Devil Chaser”

Gordon Robichaux | 41 Union Square West, #925 and #907
Through November 1

In classic New York style, these two Romantic Conceptualists, whose paintings, sculptures, and installations elide the difference between material form and rhetorical description—each artist radical in their rigorous commitment to sentimental or cliché motifs, each the creator of gestures, atmospheres, settings—fashioned gorgeous innovation from minimal, lean resources, see: Ree Morton’s single-word oil paintings and Rosemary Mayer’s rarely exhibited 1975 Proserpina, a model sculpture inspired by the Greek goddess indentured to a husband from hell, which gives Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International a run for its money (bigger isn’t better, bitch). —Paige K. Bradley

CHELSEA

Joseph Yaeger, “Agita”

Gladstone | 515 West 24th Street
Through October 31

Assertively scabrous grounds of pockmarked and thickly brushed gesso with dumb shit archaeologically embedded into them, like iPhone cords or coins (an observation) or cumrags (a guess), underscore the extreme thinness of the images painted on top of them in watercolor, as though mere projected light, while the images themselves are derived largely from cinema, acutely and ambiguously, tweaked beyond recognizable source material to hover somewhere in the emotional-erotic unconscious, which, it appears, is violent, scary, and misogynistic, bracketed by stylized beauty. —Jarrett Earnest

Johanna Unzueta, “Gardens in Orbit”

Casey Kaplan | 121 West 27th Street
Through October 24

Light green walls—the color of beneficial pond algae at dawn—set the mood for Unzueta’s exquisite floating and hinged drawings that are comprised of vibrating, looping lines, while a yarn-based installation featuring parallel fibers wound (carefully, so carefully) around wooden pegs extends the artist’s interests in textile methods and augurs thrilling fresh directions. —Julia Bryan-Wilson 

Alfredo Jaar, “A Logo for America, 1987”

Galerie Lelong | 528 West 26th Street
Through October 24

The exhibition charts the life and afterlife of what amounts to a political meme, the Chilean artist’s 1987 A Logo for America Times Square billboard, which has provided an enduring motif to rework (and a reference for op-eds questioning “American” identity in our surreally neo-imperial age as well as indirect inspiration for Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show), and—even if I have become more and more skeptical of claims for the deeper real-world impact of this kind of art—Jaar shows the needling, less-is-more, conversation-starting wit that doing it well requires. —Ben Davis

Yvonne Jacquette, “From the Air”

Karma | 549 West 26th Street
Through October 31

I can’t help but imagine Yvonne Jacquette in the window seat, setting up her watercolors on the airplane tray table between beverage services when I see the incredibly cool works on paper from the 1970s—I especially like the ones that really shows the ridged depth of the plastic frames encircling a distant expanse of landscape below—though I don’t know that the artist painted these onboard [Ed. note: she did!] ), and, of course, then there are the big, dizzying, twinkling pointillist canvases of airborne vantages that make me see her not as a passenger at all, but as stunt pilot and captain in stupefying command of her craft. —Johanna Fateman

Leidy Churchman, “Space Remembers” 

Matthew Marks | 522 West 22nd Street
Through October 24

Like the mad saints of Chöd, who develop their commitment to non-attachment on charnel grounds, Leidy Churchman pursues liberation in an arena of near-universal fear and suffering: the linen picture plane. —David Velasco

Lynda Benglis, “KNOTTING, TYING, FOLDING”

Pace | 540 West 25th Street
Through October 24

The same curling, draping forms, incarnated by a variety of materials to thrillingly diverse effects for over half a century—bronze, steel, nickel, copper, zinc, aluminum, “mirrored,” “stainless,” and dully reflective; chicken wire, mesh, bunting, clay; bandage-y plaster, like hollow bleached bone; rough paper, drawn tight as desiccated hide; opaque black glass, terrifyingly shiny; translucent glass, dusted with powder; gooey gummy bear glazes and sooty matte glazes; eye shadowy glitters and prom dressy metallic paints; cheap and coarse and smooth and expensive; undeniably brilliant and suspiciously stupid; visibly handmade and impeccably fabricated—are of unmatched alchemical glamour. —Jarrett Earnest

Eric N. Mack, “You Red The Shirt Off My Back”

Paula Cooper | 534 West 21st Street
Through October 24

Just as you see that a feather’s fallen on the floor, below a headdress that’s bowing down like a wig or a hat on a head, with tees stretched to a teasing degree across a pole that juts out of its other side, you might also see the slightest of tears, made in a white strip of thick acrylic paint that pulls and bunches and holds an array of fabrics together, each length nudging the eye one way or another, as in flirtation or a dance; or, you might follow a totally different line of sight than I did in that moment, across the space that Eric N. Mack has made, between the stitches or through the scrims that fold or swing or flutter, startling you, because you’re there, breathing like they are, moving them, while they do what they do, moving you. —Shiv Kotecha

Deana Lawson

Gagosian | 541 West 24th Street
Through October 24

Who gets to choose to be seen and how and why is the subject of Deana Lawson’s muscular show of photographs and holograms, so surgical and stunning that, in the middle of our Chelsea slog, Jacob turns to me and says, “Oh! Sometimes I forget there are artists.” —David Velasco

Anthony McCall, “Solid Light, 1973, 2020, 2026”

Sean Kelly | 475 Tenth Avenue
Through October 31

The few feet in the darkened haze-filled gallery between McCall’s 16 mm structuralist film-installation (Line Describing a Cone, 1973) and his newest, comparatively baroque engagement with the immaterial medium he calls “solid light” (Swarm, 2026), represent a lifetime’s meditation on the dynamics of time, space, and perception, which has, with the recent addition of atmospheric soundscapes by composer David Grubbs (field recordings of trickling rain and various buzzing) become ever richer and more evocative in its association and implication for what it admits rather than disavows: illusory imagery, psychological and emotional narrative, and the recognition of an ultimate, inescapable, transience. —Jarrett Earnest

Ana Segovia, “The Office of Inter-American Affairs Presents”

kurimanzutto | 516 West 20th Street
Through October 17

Like the cattle and sheep we did it to, there are herds of us, droves and packs and swarms and pods of us, who want to gather and wrangle our legs and feet and asses in line with one another—and Ana Segovia gives us a glimpse of all this, of all that amassing desirousness, in the wildly tight compositions he makes, drenched in bright color, and in the open space, so suddenly full of action, that we find ourselves roaming in, all around them. —Shiv Kotecha

UPTOWN / MIDTOWN

“Telenovela”

Americas Society | 680 Park Avenue
Through March 27

This exhibition of 52 contemporary artworks makes an utterly compelling case for the telenovela as a stealth medium for social critique while also, perhaps less deliberately, offering an ode to the lost phenomenon of synchronized viewership—I was hooked the same way I was as a kid watching telenovelas with my grandmother, and left the show clutching my nostalgia, a comprehensive “reader” published to accompany the exhibition, and a sultry maroon “Telenovela” baseball cap as a souvenir. —Ksenia M. Soboleva 

Danh Vo

White Cube | 1002 Madison Avenue
Through October 16

Not quite a historian, not quite a vintage housewares dealer, Danh Vo is nothing if not professionally elegant and consistent in his obsessions, as he demonstrates afresh in this first New York appearance since 2018, wherein he arranges a panoply of objets that arrogate variously into individual works, their materiality including Renaissance art and ancient Roman statuary (as well as bronze casts of it), old wooden soda crates, and his father’s calligraphy deployed in what amount to oversize wall labels and, to surmise off-press-release—are we allowed!?—the musings of a 19th-century to-be-executed French Catholic missionary in Vietnam, plus a gratuitous American flag, with the rooms punctuated by delicate flowers in cylindrical glassware and 15th-century Vietnamese ceramic bowls, all to an effect that mollifies this critic’s long-running skepticism into placid indifference: It’s fine. —Domenick Ammirati

“The Weitzman Shoe Museum”

New York Historical | 170 Central Park West
Ongoing

I love nothing better than a one-trick show that turns out to be more than the sum of its parts, and my YouTube history is exclusively historical fashion videos, so I returned twice to see this exhibition from the collection of Maxxinista-favorite Stuart Weitzman, which features bizarre non-wearables (JoAnne Bedient’s ceramic shoes with udders); the shoe molds used to make Beyoncé’s Super Bowl boots (size 8.5); Queen Victoria’s silk booties (spotlessly clean); and Ginger Rogers’s mules (with an invention called a “Spring-o-later” inside to keep her secure yet bouncy). —Elvia Wilk

“Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions”

The Morgan Library & Museum | 225 Madison Avenue
Through October 4

In this encyclopedic exhibition, which includes the oldest surviving Italian Renaissance tarot deck (from 1441), I was particularly struck by how tarot’s symbolism has flourished over the last century as a release valve for collective political trauma (Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Deck and the Surrealists’ Jeu de Marseille were created during WWII), and as a vehicle for erotic and personal emancipation for women, from the creations of Surrealists Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, to those of sex-magic practitioner Cameron, second-wave feminist Dorothy Iannone, and the Black liberationist interpretations of Betye and Alison Saar. —Wendy Vogel

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