While it may seem cruel to send you off into the burning asphalt today, it’s your last chance to see some of our critics’ most passionate recommendations. So, grab your parasol and catch, for example, Willem de Kooning in Chelsea before heading to see Chloe Dzubilo across town. Our July edition of What’s On offers a snapshot of the New York scene, from the season’s most talked-about events (i.e. the fêted two-gallery presentation by Salman Toor and Jack Whitten’s star turn at MoMA) and shows that might otherwise fly under your radar (such as N.H. Pritchard’s concrete poetry and a cross-section of Jane and Louise Wilson’s experiments in psychic architecture), all sorted by neighborhood.
LAST CHANCE TO VIEW
Willem de Kooning through July 11
Gagosian | 555 West 24th Street
Jane and Louise Wilson through July 11
303 Gallery | 555 West 21st Street
Kyoko Idetsu through July 12
Bridget Donahue | 99 Bowery, 2nd Floor
Chloe Dzubilo through July 13
Participant Inc. | 116 Elizabeth Street
Circa 1995: New Figuration in New York through July 17, 2025
David Zwirner | 537 West 20th Street
Steve McQueen through July 19
Dia Chelsea | 537 West 22nd Street
LOWER EAST SIDE
N.H. Pritchard
Peter Freeman, Inc. | 140 Grand Street
Through August 1, 2025
N.H. Pritchard (1939–96) was a New York poet associated with the Black Arts Movement, whose work segued from a fragmented lyric mode to expansive yet exactingly concrete poetry. His first compendium, The Matrix Poems: 1960–1970, initially published in 1970, has only recently garnered recognition after its reissue in 2021 by Primary Information. A trained art historian and a mystic guided by his own philosophy of “transrealism”—which he represented symbolically with the letter “O”—the poet’s work focuses on typographic detail, recalling Marcel Broodthaers’s 1969 erasure homage to Stéphane Mallarmé, or the minimalism of Aram Saroyan and Carl Andre. Following the inclusion of a number of Pritchard’s letter-size sheets in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, “Boom!”—an exhibition of more than 30 visual poems at Peter Freeman Inc.—is his first-ever solo show.—Paige K. Bradley
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Chloe Dzubilo
Participant Inc. | 116 Elizabeth Street
Through July 13, 2025
Chloe Dzubilo’s first posthumous exhibition, “The Prince George Drawings,” at Participant Inc. brings together a selection of the artist’s diaristic, manifesto-like line drawings, created between 2008 and 2011. Curated by Alex Fleming and Nia Nottage, the show takes its title from the Prince George, a HASA (HIV/AIDS Services Administration) supportive housing site, where Dzubilo lived for more than a decade. After moving to New York in 1982, Dzubilo quickly became a fixture of the blossoming East Village art scene, with jobs at Studio 54 as well as the art magazine East Village Eye, and as the lead singer of the punk band Transisters. Her HIV diagnosis in 1987 thrust her into the frontlines of Trans and HIV advocacy.
Going into the exhibition, I expected the artist’s simple drawings—scrawled in pink, red, green, and blue ink on paper, neatly framed and hung interspersed throughout the gallery—to feel like a poignant, but distant, historical record, a time capsule. Instead, Dzubilo’s acidic voice, defiantly and humorously captured in her penned narrations, collapses the distance in a chorus of conversations, rants, and hopes that feel urgently current in a time of Trans persecution. Dzubilo’s starkly evocative phrases—like “bed bugs in building funded for people w / AIDS,” “lost SO much art in the 80’s, 90’s,” “too fired up for political correctness”—are sometimes accompanied by drawings of herself in a hospital bed. For one scene, in which she’s shown attending a medical appointment with her friend Lori, the artist has rendered her own body in pink ink; she lies on her side facing us as she’s examined by a top gastroenterologist “for people w/ Aids,” his eyes wide with excitement as he recounts a story about a “hot transexual blonde” he once knew.—Jeanette Bisschops
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CHELSEA
Willem de Kooning
Gagosian | 555 West 24th Street
Through July 11, 2025
The artworks on view are of an astonishingly high caliber for any exhibition, whether at a museum or gallery. The earliest is a neurasthenic pink lady (the small, oil-on-Masonite Figure, 1944), and, like a mini retrospective, this show covers the artist’s career right up to the end, to the very dematerialized ribbons of color that characterize his final phase, when he was suffering from dementia. One period is markedly not included: the black-and-white oil-and-enamel paintings of the later ’40s. But the skeptic or simply the attentive viewer might go gooey with indecision and second-guessing, so paltry is the conceit undergirding this show. The microwaved pu pu platter of press-release folderol is stunning, something about arms and knees and who knows buttocks and bosoms. You know, the Body, or the body parts, rather, chopped up and abstracted, Cubist and Surrealist, etc., etc. These are among the inescapable, real characteristics of de Kooning’s art—the truth that’s nonetheless too obvious, almost tedious.—David Rimanelli
Jane and Louise Wilson
303 Gallery | 555 West 21st Street
Through July 11, 2025
The blurry 10-minute video Routes 1 & 9 North, 1994, shows the British artists Jane and Louise Wilson, identical twin sisters, seated side by side in a sad, spartan motel room, somewhere just off the work’s eponymous New Jersey highway. Deep in a hypnotic trance, moving sloth-like and slightly out of sync, obeying the instructions of an out-of-frame male voice, the duo cedes directorial control, confronting viewers with their staged—but apparently authentic—suggestibility. Their vulnerable state is alarming. The piece is among the earliest on view in the career-spanning cross-section of works in “Altogether” at 303 Gallery, grounding the exhibition in the sisters’ sincere or skeptical invocation of the supernatural (telepathic twindom, the mythic good-and-evil sibling dyad, the murdered girls of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, and the artist-as-spirit medium, for example).—Johanna Fateman
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Christine Sun Kim
Whitney Museum of American Art | 99 Gansevoort Street
Through September 21, 2025
Christine Sun Kim’s mid-career retrospective “All Day All Night” at the Whitney isn’t one of those exhibitions that reactionaries can use to claim identity’s role as some dour bogeyman in the art world. Thanks to Kim’s witty, piercing, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny pieces across video, ceramics, and drawing (which span the early 2010s to the present), such a reductionist reading would be impossible. For Kim, a native user of American Sign Language, Deaf identity is an open door, and musical notation is a universalizing motif. The works, installed throughout the museum and on the entire eighth floor, include black, blue, and red charcoal-and-pastel drawings—ranging in scale from roughly poster-size to A6 paper—that are like better, smarter David Shrigleys, or akin to Cy Twombly’s work in their use of rhythmic mark-making. How To Measure Quietness, 2014, quantifies, in descending order, quiet things—“the silent treatment” is a ppppppp cold ultra-pianissimo. Ouch. A shrug? Only pp.—A.V. Marraccini
Steve McQueen
Dia Chelsea | 537 West 22nd Street
Through July 19, 2025
Steve McQueen, never easy on viewers, this time asks nothing less of us than to stare into the sun. The bitterly titled Sunshine State, 2022—which is, as those familiar with the artist’s sensibility might guess, not a smiling advertisement for Florida—opens with two views of our fiery star from outer space. (The two-channel work is shown on adjoining screens that bisect the cavernous gallery, so the film can be watched from either side.) The double image works as a kind of existential establishing shot: The terrifying molten sphere, which fuels life on earth, sets the stage for a story of near-death, told in the artist’s own voice.—Johanna Fateman
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Rosemarie Trockel
Gladstone | 515 West 24th Street (Chelsea)
Sprüth Magers | 22 East 80th Street, 2nd Floor (Upper East Side)
Through August 1, 2025
“I’m not a humorous person,” Rosemarie Trockel has said, but her work takes humor very seriously, as her two concurrent gallery shows demonstrate. In 1990s Cologne, while her jokey male peers were rapidly gaining attention in an art market that shrugged off women, she spelled out, with stitch-like lettering on upholstery foam, “ichi auchi,” a German children’s phrase meaning “I want this too!” The unsexy foam has yellowed in 35 years while the work’s market value has skyrocketed, which only heightens the joke: Isn’t misogyny funny?
This piece is included in “Material” at Sprüth Magers, a small survey of works from the 1980s through 2024. Admittedly, there’s nothing very funny about the series “Less Than 1–6,” 2017/24. These manila-colored plexiglass wall pieces with cryptic cutouts are based on 19th-century punch cards for programming semi-automated looms, which shifted the textile industry toward cheaper production while undercutting skilled workers. Mute Servant, 2024, a ceramic replica of an 1800s English musket, faces—across the room—Speakers’ Corner, 2012, an unassuming, two-tiered ceramic soapbox. Between these pointedly opposed works is the comic Untitled, 2006, in which a platinum-glazed leg rests on a foam pedestal, like a bottle of wine on a mattress.—Mary Simpson
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Circa 1995: New Figuration in New York
David Zwirner | 537 West 20th Street
Through July 17, 2025
It’s a fascinating mixed bag of works that still feels fresh 30 years on. Well, mostly. A room of paintings by John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage—with the apparent theme of boobs—feels stale and dated as a pairing (hint: it’s Currin’s work that isn’t aging well). More interesting is the conversation between Marlene Dumas with Luc Tuymans in the next gallery. Two lesser Dumas paintings—one of a pregnant woman, the other of two children wading in water—typify her compositional mode, but not her usual power. However, the South African artist’s expressive gifts, such as her paint-into-paint rendering of pairs of held hands, are on full view, in the less typical composition The Visitor, 1995—a scene of five young woman in a dark interior (a nightclub?), turned away from the viewer, looking back through an open door in the distance. In sharp contrast, Tuymans’s Jesus (Christ, 1998) looks like a U.S. federal law enforcement agent trying to blend in while boarding a flight. And why not?—John Vincler
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Salman Toor
Luhring Augustine | 531 West 24th Street
Luhring Augustine | 17 White Street
Through July 25, 2025
Toor’s characters are alone or together, connecting or longing for connection. They’re in public parks, sitting vigil in hospital rooms, getting intimate in bedrooms, getting to know each other at a house party, or they are onanistically solitary. Toor toggles always between the warmth of everyday life and the heat of desire, between the careful and the candid, allowing space for an accompanying melancholy too. No one is painting figures better right now, by which I mean no one is imbuing painted figures with such humanity.—John Vincler
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LOWER EAST SIDE
“Small Format Painting”
56 Henry | 105 Henry Street
Through August 1, 2025
“The group shows are starting,” I texted my co-chief art critic with just a dash of dread. The arrival of these summertime presentations initiates both a seasonal slowdown and a now traditional mix of unfocused, indistinct gallery fare. But “Small Format Painting,” at 56 Henry’s slightly bigger gallery (a few blocks up from its eponymous location), avoids the usual pitfalls with its clever conceit. For this curatorial collaboration between the painter Josh Smith and actor and former gallerist Leo Fitzpatrick, 34 artists were issued a 10-by-8-inch canvas to work with. The eclectic gathering includes both blue-chip artists and skaters-who-paint.
In the corner of the gallery, Larry Gagosian’s face looks out from Nate Lowman’s pointillist constellation of black dots, next to a glittery astral composition that announces itself as a Chris Martin from across the room. (All works are from 2025.) Several contributions may be better described as drawings on linen, such as Rita Ackermann’s great Rider in the Rain, which sketchily inscribes a pair of horses in a turquoise field of wet paint, seemingly with the opposite end of the brush. Farther down on the same wall, Nicole Eisenman uses a similar approach for their four-cell stick-figure comic, What R U Doing This Weekend? And there are plenty of artists here previously unknown to me, or known to me for other reasons, like the skateboarder Mark Gonzales whose Hand Rail Bail is a deadpan crash scene.—John Vincler
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Kyoko Idetsu
Bridget Donahue | 99 Bowery, 2nd Floor
Through July 12, 2025
In her second solo show at Bridget Donahue, the Tokyo-based artist Kyoko Idetsu paints co-existing records of the intimate and public, folding care work into an atmosphere of collective feeling. Her paintings, in oil on canvas and acrylic on paper, track both strange and domestic fragments: They depict babies crying purple tears, elders, family meals, hospital rooms, children, a washing machine portal, dead bodies. In Only the Dog Knows, 2018, eyes and a black snout are superimposed—and supersized—over a breastfeeding figure lying in bed. In repose, the mother becomes little spoon to a large dog (perhaps the owner of the eyes and snout), who shares real estate on her baby blue pillowcase. It’s tender and spectral. The mother’s visible eye opens just beneath the dog’s giant one. As in Mira Schor’s paralinguistic paintings, the body and text complicate meaning rather than resolve it; Idetsu’s scenes of daily emotional labor establish their own language.—Blakey Bessire
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UPPER EAST SIDE
“The Stettheimer Dollhouse in a New Light”
Museum of the City of New York | 1220 Fifth Avenue
Ongoing
Yes, I know, the Frick recently reopened. But another Upper East Side mansion with a fabulous art collection is back on public view, too, and this one boasts a tiny Duchamp. After two years off site undergoing extensive conservation, the Stettheimer Dollhouse—a transporting mini monument of the interwar avant-garde, as well as a wryly opulent representation of the domestic lives and social sphere of three legendary Manhattan salonnières (the sisters Carrie, Florine, and Ettie Stettheimer)—returned, having been cleaned, refreshed and repaired, to the Museum of the City of New York in November. It’s the centerpiece and subject of the new exhibition “The Stettheimer Dollhouse in a New Light,” curated by Lilly Tuttle.—Johanna Fateman
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MIDTOWN
Jack Whitten
The Museum of Modern Art | 11 West 53rd Street
Through August 2, 2025
Jack Whitten sits among the highest order in the pantheon of the art gods—at least for now, in the Museum of Modern Art’s top-floor gallery. Ever since the $450 million-dollar expansion completed in 2019, MoMA has felt disorienting, usually crowded, and vague in its too-much-of-a-good-thing dispersion, leading the visitor to feel as if they are stumbling through its unmatched collection. (It’s less than half the size of the Met and somehow more difficult to navigate.) Yet, there are few better art experiences to be had in the world than a great MoMA exhibition in this sixth-floor space, which provides the sprawling museum its reassuring beacon.
With “Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” composed of nearly 200 objects, mostly paintings, MoMA’s curator at large, Michelle Kuo, has organized one of the best in a series of reliably great exhibitions on this upper level. Posthumous career retrospectives don’t get much better.—John Vincler
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BROOKLYN
Torkwase Dyson
Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 1, Bridge View Lawn
Through March 8, 2026
My timing is misaligned: I visit Torkwase Dyson’s Public Art Fund commission Akua on a Monday, even though the sculpture takes its name from the Akan word meaning “born on a Wednesday.” But I’m afforded another form of synchronicity: a rhyming between the artwork and the atmosphere. It’s raining; water saturates the air around me, dampens my breath. Accordingly, inside the sculpture—which is adjacent to the East River—the sound of water circles a ring of eight speakers, cascading from one to the next. I find myself surrounded by whirling, gurgling, frothing sonorities, as though set adrift or submerged in water. Akua beckons us to swim with—and battle against—the current of history: Its aqueous sounds are stitched into an assemblage that also includes voices such as those of Christina Sharpe and Dionne Brand, who read on the ecstatic possibilities of Black life and the impossible terror that begets black death. Cradled in Dyson’s sculpture, I feel a high register of affective intensity harmonize with low sonic frequency. The water vibrates like a bass, rumbling and roiling underfoot.—Zoë Hopkins
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HUDSON VALLEY
Cameron Rowland
Dia Beacon | 3 Beekman Street, Beacon
Through October 25, 2025
Cameron Rowland’s “Properties,” curated by Jordan Carter and Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, occupies a conventional, white-walled exhibition space in the museum’s Riggio galleries, or so it might seem initially. At the heart of the artist’s show is Plot, 2024, represented here—inside—by a small, shaded triangle on a map. In the surveyor’s drawings of the Hudson Valley property owned by the institution, you can see that it represents a single acre—one of 32. Beginning near the southeast corner of the Dia Beacon building, it runs parallel to a creek, pointing, like an arrow, away from the back of the museum. It can’t be seen from the gallery, which is located near Dia’s front entrance, and no photographs are included in the artist’s stark presentation of documents and just a few objects. I take pictures, though.—Johanna Fateman
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