10 NYC Art Shows to See in December

Abstract Expressions: 7 Paintings by 7 Painters

Bienvenu Steinberg & C, 35 Walker Street, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through December 14

I love to see galleries offer their spaces to artists who can show us what they got, and this exhibition is a nice celebration of seven painters who feel connected to the legacy of the New York School and its taste for large gestural paintings that are more event than object. Each artist brings their own visual vocabulary to the walls, from Andrea Belag’s luscious translucency to Stephen Pusey’s webs of radiant energy, and they all offer us insight into the artistic gardens they actively cultivate in their studios. You can feel the respect in the room among the artists, all of whom confidently showcase their very individualist styles. A nice tour of some artists who continue to challenge what the legacy of New York abstraction is today. —Hrag Vartanian

Your Patience Is Appreciated: An Inaugural Show

Marian Goodman Gallery, 385 Broadway, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through December 14

This is your last chance to see the inaugural exhibition at Marian Goodman’s new large three-story gallery space. This is the latest proof that Tribeca has cemented its reputation as the city’s premiere art gallery hub — sorry, Chelsea, but you were always a terrible place to see art. Upon entering you’re greeted by a large cheesy Maurizio Cattelan “I Love NY” artwork, while works by Pierre Huyghe, Julie Mehretu, Nairy Baghramian, Marcel Broodthaers, Steve McQueen, Louise Lawler, Robert Smitson, Danh Vo, Giuseppe Penone, and so, so many others can be found in one of the 16 — if you include the stairwell — spaces. There’s even someone to perform Tino Seghal’s “This Ornation” (2024) for you in a rather nondescript office space on the third floor. —HV

Jerome Caja: Ugly Pageant

Bortolami Gallery, 39 Walker Street, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through December 19

🤩 was the reaction from my nine-year-old niece when I sent her a picture of Jerome Caja’s “Virgin Poop” (1992), an anthropomorphic pile of dung with a beatific gaze. This is not to say that the painting is just for kids who like gross-out jokes. Rather, it points to the star quality that the artist could imbue in the most unlikely subjects. Born in Cleveland in 1958, one of 11 boys in a Catholic family, Caja left Middle America after high school to study ceramics at the San Francisco Art Institute. Between 1985 and ’95, the year he died, he created a presence in San Francisco as a drag performer but he continued to make visual art. The works on view here are primarily small paintings on paper. His materials include glitter, nail polish, collaged fabrics, and white-out. Some pieces are in found frames (including a toilet seat); others take the form of reliquaries. Most are portraits whose subjects range from crusty drag queens holding mixed drinks to amalgams of sexual and religious iconography. A lot of artists have tried in vain to capitalize on kitsch and camp aesthetics. In contrast, Caja plumbed the depths of the grotesque in all its glitter and doom to reflect a world where saints wearing fishnets are born in Cleveland and the Virgin Mary’s grace rings truer when she’s at the bottom of a sewer. —NH

Andrea Geyer: Manifest

Hales, 547 West 2oth Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through December 2o

I’m usually averse to text-based art because it often tries to tell me what to think and how. I’ll make an exception for Andrea Geyer, whose beautifully sewn banners deliver a piercing manifesto on what today’s deeply flawed art museums can and should be. She wants a museum to “face history without fear”; “be a space to breathe”; and “feel its own floors tremble when others are destroyed.” Amen to all that. —Hakim Bishara

Anne Samat: The Origin of Savage Beauty

Marc Straus Gallery, 57 Walker Street, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through December 21

Born from grief and loss, Malaysian artist Anne Samat’s work looks from afar like pua kumbu textiles, with bright colors and totemic shapes that create an altar to the artist’s lost loved ones. But on closer inspection, the installations are composed of toy army figurines, a bra holder, and a container for a mosquito coil. Each of these objects references memories of individuals, stories that are not readily apparent but that flow easily from the artist’s recollection. For example, “Never Walk in Anyone’s Shadow,” the stunning centerpiece of the show, looks like a three-part altar that folds into the floor. The title comes from a memory of her late elder brother, who encouraged her to build an art career in New York with a style that is distinctly her own. —AX Mina

Bill Viola: The Raft

James Cohan Gallery, 291 Grand Street, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through December 21

This is the first time “The Raft” (2004) has been exhibited in New York City. Commissioned for the 2004 Athens Olympics, the large-scale video work depicts 19 people being bombarded with water in a deluge whose source remains unknown to us. It is surprising how the work seems to portend the immigration crisis that would show up on the shores of Europe over a decade later, as people from across the Global South would brave the Mediterranean to find safety, only to be demonized by Europeans. The work is complemented by two other video pieces by the veteran video artist, including “Traveling on Foot” (2012), one of five works from his Mirage series, and the 83-minute portrait called “Anima” (2000). All three showcase Viola’s interest in the human form when placed under various types of stress or even in awkward scenarios. These works suggest a greater truth that is found beyond simply the image. —HV

Jiha Moon: Fool’s Moon

Derek Eller Gallery, 38 Walker Street, Ground Floor, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through December 21

Bananas appear frequently in this one-person exhibition in Tribeca, and while Moon suggests it as a metaphor to navigate Asian American, particularly second-generation, identity, the zeitgeistiness of the very peelable fruit is not lost on the viewer. While Maurizio Cattelan may have leaned into the comedy of the banana in his obscenely expensive prank, Moon enjoys the more slippery aspect of the fruit that is often evoked when Asian Americans slide into good ol’ American assimilation politics. There’s one line in her press release that continues to bring me joy whenever I reread it: “I reference the Korean drag queen Kimchi and Keanu Reeves, whose life quotes resonate deeply with me, borrowing their voices to tell my story.” I can imagine no more apt way to encapsulate her aesthetic universe in a sentence. —HV

Simone Leigh

Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 and 526 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through December 21

Simone Leigh has a way of charging her sculptures of Black female figures with a palpable aura, even if she makes them headless. Moving between them at Matthew Marks’s cavernous gallery spaces is traversing through millennia-old histories and traditions, but it also feels like these figures have their own stories to tell. Don’t miss “Okwui” (2024), an 11-foot-long bronze sculpture of a reclining woman with an outstretched skirt. Her body is alive with dance and music, grief and joy. She’s still on my mind, weeks after seeing the show. —HB

The Lady and the Unicorn: New Tapestry

Salon 94, 3 East 89th Street,Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through December 21

The Lady and The Unicorn: New Tapestry offers a refreshingly contemplative return to the body as AI and disembodied technologies cast a shadow across art. The show presents eight contemporary textile artists operating in different geographical and cultural regions who tell their stories using natural dye processes, traditional weaving techniques, and a variety of materials. 

On the gallery’s first floor, Zapotec textile artist Porfirio Gutiérrez’s richly patterned works combine modernist design with his reverence for the land in his native Oaxaca. Some of his pieces feature wool canvases dripping with natural indigo dyes produced by his family, as well as pomegranate and pericon dyes, within a tight geometric structure, making a record of the exact period the plants were harvested. Hanging from the walls and taller-than-life ceilings on the next floor, Mitsuko Asakura’s ombré silk tapestries fill an entire room with waves of color. Her works contemplate Western and Japanese visual histories, as the materials interweave their respective approaches. The exhibition also includes playful and provocative works such as Qualeasha Wood’s embroidered collages of webcam selfies and desktop screenshots, as well as Felix Beaudry’s humanoid fabric wearables, that humorously reflect upon one’s sense of self. —Sebastián Meltz-Collazo

Pass Carry Hold: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2023–24

MoMA PS1, 22–25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
Through February 10, 2025

For its sixth iteration, the Studio Museum’s artist in residence program tasked its artists to “explore themes related to ancestral and intuitive knowledge.” Each artist — sonia louise davis, Malcolm Peacock, and Zoë Pulley — responded with distinctive, personal artworks, but all three assert the works’ materiality as part and parcel of histories and lives. In three different gallery spaces, family histories and transient moments hold forth. Peacock’s multimedia sculpture, a single, huge object in a small room, incorporates synthetic hair among other materials to simulate a giant tree trunk. The rings and textures are reflected in davis’s abstract textile pieces, while Pulley transforms clothing into abstract artworks, covered in furniture plastic and displayed alongside family ephemera. Rather than bogging the work down in explanations about its physical presence and emotional resonance, I suggest you see it and experience it for yourself. —NH