New York art exhibitions to see in January

A new year has dawned, and this month is abuzz with an array of intriguing and thought-provoking art from group shows to subversive installations. From large immersive exhibitions at MoMA to solo shows and retrospectives, there is a variety to choose from scattered across the city.

New York continuously proves to be a powerhouse of creativity, and we don’t want you to miss a thing. Plan your next visit with our handy, monthly updated guide to the best exhibitions to see around the city.

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The best New York art exhibitions: what to see this month

Nick Cave 'Amalgams and Graphts'

Jack Shainman Gallery until 15 March 2025

Nick Cave makes the most of the epic space at Jack Shainman Gallery with his new exhibition which unites Amalgams, composed of three large bronze sculptures, with Graphts, a series of mixed media works encompassing needlepoint and domestic items such as vintage trays. Questioning what it means to serve, Cave here considers questions of power, class and race.

Writer: Hannah Silver

jackshainman.com

Henni Alftan ‘Stop Making Sense’

Karma until 11 January 2025

‘Stop Making Sense’, which features 17 new works, some of which are diptychs. Henni Alftan’s paintings inhabit a border between suspense and generosity from where her vignettes of everyday moments lure the viewer. The Paris-based Finnish artist intricately constructs eerily familiar instances with a painterly determination on form and colour – en route to rigorously constructed visions, however, she refuses to sacrifice a seductive ethereality.

Writer Osman Can Yerebakan

karmakarma.org/

Annie Leibovitz: Stream of Consciousness

Hauser & Wirth until 11 January 2025

American artist Annie Leibovitz presents a series of landscape, still life and portrait photography which captures the artists’ thought process in an intriguing visual dialogue which allows the viewer to feel the movement of the image rather than anchored in a moment in time.

hauserwirth.com

Shifting Landscapes

Whitney Museum of American Art until January 2026

‘Shifting Landscapes’ is a group show exploring how evolving political, ecological, and social issues motivate artists as they attempt to represent the world around them. The works are drawn from the gallery’s collection featuring works from the 1960s to present day with a variety of approaches towards the environment from cityscapes to rural landscapes, the works gathered here bring ideas of land and place into focus, all works uniting on how society is shaped by the spaces around us.

whitney.org

Light by Rafaël Rozendaal

MoMA until Spring 2025

Artist Rozendaal chose the internet as his canvas for this graphically hypnotising installation. With each square designed as a story board sketched on paper, it is then translated into code where its final form is a website which powers the animation. The graphically intriguing installation uncovers a new way to harness a multi-dimensional landscape, with the installation presenting a selection of his work across a 25 feet resolution screen in MoMAs Garden Lobby.

moma.org

Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930

Guggenheim until 9 March 2025

Dive into the world of Orphism at Guggenheim, showcasing its broad abstract art collection. The art movement which is derived from Cubism, emerged in the early 1910s with artists engaging in idesa in colourful kaleidoscopic compositions. It was spearheaded by Robert Delaunay, whose work features in the exhibition, alongside, Sonia Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Mainie Jellett, František Kupka, Francis Picabia, and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, and by the Synchromists Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell.

guggenheim.org

Sean Scully: Duane Street, 1981-1983

Lisson Gallery until 1 February 2025

Electric Op

Buffalo AKG Art Museum until 27 January 2025

In a collection of 90 works across six decades, Electric Op explores how artists use abstraction to unveil the complex relationship between perception and technology. In the 1960s ‘Op’ short for ‘Optical’ became an emerging movement whereby Op artists used abstract patterns to create optical illusions. The exhibition is an ode to this movement, which helped pave the way for art to be abstracted into analogue and digital movements.

buffaloakg.org

Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies

Brooklyn Museum until 19 January 2025

The Brooklyn Museum has partnered with the National Gallery of Art to spotlight Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012), a pioneering Black female artist of the twentieth century, who has not received mainstream art world attention as she should have. With over 200 works, the exhibition showcases a variety of sculptures and prints all derived from her lifelong devotion to feminism, and social justice.

brooklynmuseum.org

Edges of Ailey

Whitney Museum until 9 February 2025

'Edges of Ailey' is a large-scale exhibition celebrating the life and work of artist and choreographer Alvin Ailey (1931-1989). The exhibition focuses on his life, dances, and influences through live performances, music, a variety of archival materials and a multi-screen video installation. It is presented in two parts, with an immersive exhibition in the museum’s fifth floor galleries, and a performance in the third-floor theatre.

whitney.org

Who Wants to Die for Glamour

MoMA until 17 February 2025

Artist Jasmine Gregory’s latest exhibition is a visually tactile experience. Intertwining her paintings with wine bottles, vitrines, plastic bags, tinsel, and studio refuse, she creates scenarios which can be viewed as a satirical poke at patrimony and preservation. This is her first institutional exhibition in the US, which features a selection of new works, including a site specific installation.

moma.org

‘Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage’

The Museum of Modern Art until March 2025

Robert Frank, who is best known for capturing post-war America and its following social and political unrest, is celebrated in MoMA’s latest exhibition Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage. After he passed away in 2019, it was in great discovery that tucked away in film canisters and tapes was an archive of unseen footage which spans the years 1970 to 2006. In partnership with the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, Frank’s long-time film editor Laura Israel and the art director Alex Bingham have used these fragments to create a moving-image scrapbook that conveys life through Frank’s lens.

moma.org

‘What It Becomes’

Whitney Museum of American Art until 12 January 2025

Featuring the work of 11 artists, What It Becomes explores new and rarely seen works which explore what drawing is and what drawing can be. The exhibition presents a variety of processes and techniques inherent to drawing. Some artists have explored this through drawings on paper, in photography and video, while others have explored different tools, or using their body as a surface. The cohesive nature of the exhibition lies between identity and the beauty and possibility of reshaping or redefining oneself.

whitney.org

'In the Shadow of the American Dream: David Wojnarowicz'

Museum of Modern Art, ongoing

Wojnarowicz's work has been recontextualised by MoMA, who have presented it alongside his contemporaries from the eighties New York downtown scene including filmmaker Marion Scemama, Donald Moffett, Agosto Machado and painter Martin Wong. Important works here include Wojnarowicz's's 1987 Fire, while Machado’s Shrine is a moving time capsule of ephemera. It includes a ‘Justice for Marsha’ sign, referring to questions around the suspicious death of trans activist Marsha P Johnson in 1992, as well as club flyers and memorial service cards.

Writer: Lauren Cochrane

moma.org