Art
Annabel Keenan
Mickalene Thomas, installation view Katherine Dunham: Revelation2024, “The Ailey Edge” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2024. Photography: David Tufino. Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art.
The holidays are in full swing, and New York is filled with twinkling lights, pop-up shops, and special attractions, from the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center to the holiday train show at the New York Botanical Garden. In addition to the seasonal experiences on offer, there are several exciting museum exhibitions throughout the city.
Whether you’re a visiting tourist or a local on vacation in town, there are plenty of exhibits to add some culture to your agenda. From an overview of Latin contemporary art at El Museo del Barrio to 24-hour films at the Museum of Modern Art, here are the must-see museum exhibitions during the holidays.
“Brooklyn Artists Exhibition”
brooklyn museum
As of January 26, 2025
Installation view of “Brooklyn Artists,” Brooklyn Museum, 2024. Photography: Timothy Doyon. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.
In this sweeping group exhibition, the Brooklyn Museum is celebrating its 200th anniversary and paying tribute to the vibrant creative community that has called it home for two centuries. Featuring more than 200 artists whose work spans a variety of disciplines from painting and photography to stop-motion animation, the exhibition features the artists’ connections to Brooklyn—all of whom have lived in or established themselves in the borough within the past five years. own studio.
The exhibition was developed through an innovative curatorial process by artists Jeffrey Gibson, Vik Muniz, Mickalene Thomas and Fred Thoma Fred Tomaselli chose many of the names. In addition, the museum held an open call and received responses from more than 4,000 hopefuls. The resulting presentation is a diverse, visually exciting melting pot—much like Brooklyn itself. Overlapping themes emerged, such as the intertwined nature of identity, memory and place, and the power of art to create community. Among the standout works is Artsy Vanguard 2025 artist Melissa Joseph’s felt portrait of her niece Olive giving her father a haircut during the pandemic. With extraordinary skill, Joseph meticulously recreates the images from the selfies, even interpreting minute details of family members’ facial expressions using her signature dry felt fibers.
The Brooklyn Museum will be closed on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.
Museum of Modern Art
As of February 17, 2025
Christian Maclay, still from clock2010. © 2024 Christian Maclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery and White Cube.
Christian Marclay’s 24 Hours of Film clock (2010) was an ambitious project that earned the artist and composer the prestigious Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Now, the work returns to New York for the first time since it was exhibited at MoMA more than a decade ago. The film is composed of thousands of clips from movies and TV shows, from images of clocks to characters stating the time, as if time itself is part of the narrative. Maclay and his assistants spent two years editing footage to create clockdrawn from a wide range of sources including noon (1952), godfather (1972), and national treasure (2004), as well as TV series such as sex and city (1998-2004). To match the time of day the viewer is watching, time passes in a stunning, almost meditative montage.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) will be closed on Christmas Day. Enter clock Quantities are limited, first come first served, priority given to museum members. The museum is hosting a special 24-hour tour clock December 21-22.
Egon Schiele “Vibrant Landscape”
new gallery
As of January 13, 2025
Egon Schiele, installation view of “Living Landscapes” at Neue Galerie, 2024. Photography: Annie Böser. Courtesy of New Gallery.
Although best known for his raw, erotic portraits, Austrian Expressionist artist Egon Schiele was also a skilled landscape painter. Focusing on this group of works, “Living Landscapes” explores Schiele’s discovery of the beauty and symbolism of plants, which he approached in a similar manner to portraiture. In these paintings, the artist focuses on reminders of the cycle of life, from verdant trees marking the arrival of spring to withered flowers that no longer bloom. He also considered the relationship between man and nature, depicting towns with rows of houses, their rooftops visible from a bird’s-eye view sandwiched between dense tree canopies. A small town among green trees (Old Town III) (1917). Featuring nearly 60 works from Schiele’s celebrated career (interrupted by his death from influenza at just 28), this exhibition provides a rare opportunity to understand the artist’s practice beyond his famous portraits.
Neue Galerie will be closed on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.
Alvin Ailey, “Ailey’s Edge”
Whitney Museum of American Art
As of February 9, 2025
Installation view of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, left to right, fly trap2024; and Purvis Young, love to dance1991, The Avery Edge , Whitney Museum of American Art, 2024. Photo: Jason Lowrie/BFA.com. © BFA 2024. Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art.
“Ailey’s Edge” explores the breadth and lasting impact of Alvin Ailey’s career and is the first major museum exhibition dedicated to the leading choreographer and artist. The immersive presentation includes extensive live performances, as well as music, video and visual art, celebrating Ailey as an artist and founder of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre.
Particularly special is the rare archival material on display, which includes performance footage and a range of ephemeral objects such as posters and performance programs, as well as notebooks, poems and letters. The exhibition also features an 18-channel video installation featuring footage from Ellie’s life and work, created by filmmakers Josh Begley and Kya Lou and curator Ai Co-written by Adrienne Edwards. Selected works by more than 80 artists, including Rashid Johnson and Mickalene Thomas, demonstrate how Ailey influenced future generations and provide context for the themes he explored, including The African Diaspora, Black Spirituality, and Black Liberation.
The Whitney Museum will be closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
“Aerial Ritual: Ralph Lemmon”
Museum of Modern Art PS1
As of March 24, 2025
Ralph Lemon, installation view at “Aerial Ritual: Ralph Lemon” at MoMA PS1, 2024. Photography: Steven Paneccasio. Courtesy of MoMA PS1.
Over the past few decades, choreographer, author, and visual artist Ralph Lemon has built an extensive and acclaimed practice, including one that earned him a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2020. This major institutional solo exhibition brings together a diverse body of work created over the past 10 years in the 1980s, showcasing his enduring exploration of choreography and his more recent shift toward abstraction in his artistic practice. Gesture, expressionist painting. The exhibition includes paintings, dance, sculpture, photographs and videos, as well as a rich program of live performances that demonstrate his ongoing interest in storytelling. Indeed, throughout Lemmon’s career, he explored the expressive potential of the body as an archive of human experience, from race and identity to spirituality and emotion, as well as the power of movement to express and challenge our understanding of the world around us.
MoMA PS1 will be closed on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.
“States of Flow, Los Angeles Triennial 2024”
neighborhood museum
As of February 9, 2025
Maria A. Guzman Caprón, installation view in your look [In Your Eyes], curly manand at your service [Here for you]throughout 2024, in “Flow States, LA TRIENAL 2024” at El Museo del Barrio, 2024. Photography: Matthew Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and El Museo del Barrio, New York.
The El Barrio Museum will host its second major triennial of Latin contemporary art, featuring 33 artists from the United States and Puerto Rico, as well as the American, Asian, Caribbean and European diaspora communities. The exhibition is organized by the museum’s chief curator Rodrigo Moura, curator Susanna V. Temkin and guest curator Maria Elena Ortiz (María Elena Ortiz) organization, presenting a broad idea of place.
Although coming from different backgrounds, the artists explore similar themes, including the complexity of identity and the fluidity of cultural exchange in a world defined by globalization, displacement and migration. Works on display span a range of disciplines, from mixed media paintings and sculptures to immersive presentations such as Widline Cadet’s striking photographic portraits that consider the hybrid, fragmented nature of identity inherent in the diaspora. The materials in the exhibition are equally diverse. In particular, some artists have used unconventional ingredients, such as the air freshener Chaveli Sifre incorporated into neon lights Permanently updated (2024) – one of 10 works commissioned specifically for the Triennale. Air fresheners spread the scent of coconut and pineapple throughout the gallery space, which viewers can take home with them, creating an atmosphere reminiscent of a tropical island.
El Museo del Barrio will be closed on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
As of May 11, 2025
Installation view of “Florida: Anastasia Samoilova and Walker Evans” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2024. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The two artists’ exhibition “Florida” explores the Sunshine State’s many connotations, from a tourist paradise to a fragile landscape on the front lines of climate change. Photographs and mixed-media paintings by Miami-based contemporary artist Anastasia Samoylova are on display alongside historical documentary-style photographs and paintings by Walker Evans.
A visitor to Florida for decades, Evans was a pioneer in documentary photography, photographing landscapes, architecture, and vernacular visual culture, such as beach signs that read “Boat Rental.” During his four-decade career, he captured everything from palm trees and the Everglades to Gilded Age mansions and trailer parks. Since 2016, Samoilova has taken a similarly broad approach to depicting Florida, highlighting vibrant seaside architecture, devastation from hurricanes and rising sea levels, and evidence of political extremism. There’s no doubt that “Florida” is a major career milestone for Samoilova, as it marks the first time in more than 30 years that a living woman has filmed a film, following Helen Levitt in 1992. Photographers hold large exhibitions in museums.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art will be closed on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.
“Pets and the City”
new york history
As of April 20, 2025
Charles Wilson Peale, peel family1773–1809. Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society.
During the holidays, the city’s oldest museum is hosting a fun exhibit celebrating the pets in New Yorkers’ lives. Pets and the City traces animal companions in visual culture across centuries, showing how their domestication paralleled the development of New York itself. The exhibition illustrates the long history of how humans record their relationships with their pets through photographs, paintings, sculptures, and a collection of ephemera and archival materials.
The presentation begins with colonial-era engravings and written documentation of working animals, such as the dogs that hunted with the native Lenape and Haudenosaunee peoples. As cities grew from Aboriginal lands to early settlements, the role of pets and their depiction in art also changed. While some animals may still assist in hunting, animals are also increasingly depicted waiting for scraps of food on the laps of their aristocratic owners, or hiding under tables in stately houses, as in the case of Charles Wilson Like the dogs in Peele’s paintings peel family (1773–1809). The show has survived decades of industrialization and globalization to become the pet it is today. Contemporary works depict exotic and service animals, as well as quirky domesticated images, such as William Wegman’s humanized dog portraits.
The New York Museum of History will be closed on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.
