As temperatures drop, art shows around New York City this month invite us to reflect on the ways we interact with and impact our environments. They include sprawling sculptures by Frank Stella, miniature acrylic paintings by Jaqueline Cedar, looming earthy installation works by Delcy Morelos, an eye-opening exhibition about nude art in the Arab world, and so much more. Enjoy these selections and stay warm!
Marc Librizzi: Like Magic
These strange representational paintings play with the anthropocene in everyday life. Bridges take on human forms, fly tape transforms into a marionette or doll, while a flat tire becomes a representation of the cycle of life. A fan of accidental beauty and surprising juxtapositions in his work, Librizzi continues to solicit awe and glee with every image. “Spin Cycle” (2023) is one of the best on display with its cosmos of objects that seem to moonlight as other things, but what makes it work is the artist’s love of paint and form; a soap bubble becomes a universe unto itself. This is a show about the love of the freedom that art allows. —Hrag Vartanian
Harkawik (harkawik.com)
30 Orchard Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through November 12
Frank Stella: Indian Birds
I’m not going to lie, I hated this series of Frank Stella artworks when I first saw them last century, but now they’ve grown on me. Their cardboard-like and other flimsy features have a very “of the moment” feel as artists younger than Stella continue to play with ephemerality, roughness, and other qualities that are fully on display here. Based on a visit to India, the maquettes Stella brought back from his trip became the basis of these large metal sculptures, which flatten in photographs but very much feel in the round IRL. Revisit these colorful monstrosities by Stella and see for yourself. As an added bonus, Stella brought his own benches so visitors can sit and enjoy the art. —HV
Mnuchin Gallery (mnuchingallery.com)
45 East 78 Street, Lenox Hill, Manhattan
Through December 9
Jaqueline Cedar: Tryst
Jaqueline Cedar’s gorgeous, small acrylic paintings on wood panels barely ever exceed the size of eight by 10 inches. They are snapshots of quiet moments in the lives of her elongated human figures. One of those figures is possibly the artist herself, who shares intimate observations of her body and environment. I’m deeply charmed by this exhibition. —Hakim Bishara
Shelter (shelternyc.com)
127 Eldridge Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through December 10
Manet/Degas
We don’t have to think of Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas’s relationship as a stormy rivalry roiled by peaks of love and hate in order to appreciate their contributions to art history — but isn’t it a lot more fun that way? This sprawling exhibition at The Met doesn’t pit the two Impressionist titans against each other, exactly, though it does examine their synchronous and sometimes clashing artistic trajectories through over 160 paintings and works on paper that will have you asking, “Who did it best?” (In my humble opinion, a clear victor emerges from this show, but I’ll say no more; see it for yourself.) —Valentina Di Liscia
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (metmuseum.org)
1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through January 7, 2024
Guillaume Dénervaud: Ozoned Station
These eccentric paintings oscillate between the microscopic and cosmic in perspective, and that relationship is part of their appeal. Exhibited in the Swiss Institute’s basement gallery, these sci-fi-inspired works use architectural drafting stencils and evoke early modernism as much as scientific illustration or space photography. The walls of the gallery are covered with a weird paint-like residue — it’s a mixture that uses umber — meant to recall the sticky dust in urban tunnels or on subway platforms. While a show like this could easily end up resembling a designer showroom (let’s face it, they’re very pretty paintings) the presentation pushes you to look closer to uncover the visual worlds Dénervaud is revealing. —HV
Swiss Institute (swissinstitute.net)
38 St. Marks Place, East Village, Manhattan
Through January 7, 2024
María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold
Upon entering María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s exhibition, visitors are greeted by “Spoken Softly With Mama” (1998), an installation of upright ironing boards printed with family photographs onto which are projected videos of the artist’s bare legs walking and hands peeling a pomegranate. The boards stand on a raised platform, scattered with cast-glass irons and trivets, that lends the work the gravitas of an elegy with the intimate softness of a nursery rhyme. It sets the mood for the rest of the show, in which the artist draws from her own roots and core values — her Afro-Cuban ancestry, her upbringing on a former sugar plantation, and the role of mothers and women, to name a few — to establish a profound connection with the viewer. Through her photographs, sculptures, paintings, and more, Campos-Pons holds our gaze. —VD
Brooklyn Museum (brooklynmuseum.org)
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn
Through January 14, 2024
Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli, 1938–1948
Corrado Cagli was 28 years old when he was forced to relocate to the United States from Europe, where he had trained in Rome and then took exile in France. Though once employed to create public artworks for the fascist government, Cagli, who was both Jewish and openly gay, became the victim of persecution when the Mussolini regime enacted its notorious “Racial Laws.” In New York City, the artist quickly inhabited multiple and sometimes overlapping circles, from the underground queer scene to George Balanchine’s ballet posse to the cadre of Surrealist artists and other war-time émigrés who regularly contributed to View magazine. This exhibition at CIMA gathers paintings, drawings, photos, and archival material from this period to tell the story of a decidedly modern artist whose oeuvre was as complex and rich as his own life. —VD
Center for Italian Modern Art (italianmodernart.org)
421 Broome Street, Soho, Manhattan
Through January 27, 2024
Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920–1960
If you think that nude art is taboo in the Arab world, this show will make you think again. Curated by Kirsten Scheid, a preeminent scholar of Arab art at the American University of Beirut (AUB), this large exhibition includes an impressive collection of nudes from the post-Ottoman period of 1920–1960. Highlights include works by Huguette Caland, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Kahlil Gibran, Ahmed Morsi, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, and Onnig Avedissian. Modeled after a smaller exhibition curated by Scheid at AUB, and based on her scholarship, it’s a show that challenges common false perceptions about the region that so often metastasize into fear, suspicion, and hate. —HB
Wallach Art Gallery (wallach.columbia.edu)
615 West 129th Street, West Harlem, Manhattan
Through January 14, 2024
Shilpa Gupta: I did not tell you what I saw, but only what I dreamt
Shilpa Gupta’s haunting sound installation For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit, consisting of microphones suspended from the ceiling and reverse-wired to play the spoken poems of 100 writers who have been imprisoned for their work, stayed with me forever after I saw it at the 2019 Venice Biennale. In her new exhibition at Amant, Gupta continues her poetic examination of what remains unsaid. By placing the emphasis on the subversive interstices between speech and silence — the limits implied by the borders on a map, the liminal spaces of dreams, the deconstructed meanings of the colors of a flag — Gupta addresses political censorship and the suppression of language, and the possibility of transcending them. —VD
Amant (amant.org)
315 Maujer Street, East Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Through April 28, 2024
Delcy Morelos: El abrazo
In the United States, the term “earthwork” is often associated with a specific legacy of land art rooted in scale and the experience of the sublime. While Delcy Morelos’s soil artworks share some of these qualities, they are born from a different place; namely, the artist’s awareness of the cycles of land possession and dispossession that beget violence in her native Colombia and around the world. At Dia Chelsea, she presents two massive interactive pieces — “El abrazo” (“The Embrace”), a monolithic structure scented with clove and spices that visitors are invited to touch, and “Cielo terrenal” (“Earthly Heaven”), a walkable installation whose dark hue comes from soil taken from the Hudson Valley’s Black Dirt Region. —VD
Dia Art Foundation (diaart.org)
537 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through July 5, 2024
More Recommendations From Our Fall 2023 New York Art Guide:
- Off-Register: Publishing Experiments by Women Artists in Latin America, 1960–1990 at the Center for Book Arts, through December 16
- Fruits of Labor — Reframing Motherhood and Artmaking at Apexart, November 3–December 23
- Muriel Hasbun: Tracing Terruño at the International Center of Photography, through January 8, 2024
- Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus at Japan Society, through January 21, 2024
- We Tried to Warn You! Environmental Crisis Posters, 1970–2020 at Poster House, through February 25, 2024
