HUDSON VALLEY
Stan Douglas
Hessel Museum of Art | 33 Garden Road, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Through November 30, 2025
For more than 30 years, the Vancouver-based artist has mined primary documents, archival photographs, and eyewitness accounts to create meticulously staged historical scenes and imagined scenarios, often indexed to the coordinates of a specific time and place–the 18th-century coastlines of Nootka Island, British Columbia; pre- and post-Cold War Germany as witnessed by a young Black protagonist; or New York in the throes of a fictional 2018 blackout. Spanning still and moving-image work from the 1990s to 2025, and organized by Lauren Cornell, this precise and taut retrospective assembles several bodies of work that collectively posit history as a haunted and unfinished enterprise… —Gee Wesley
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Cameron Rowland
Dia Beacon
Through October 25, 2025
Rowland, who is in their 30s, has been exhibiting for only a decade or so, but they have, since the outset of their career, gained attention for their exacting conceptualism, its balance of cryptic gestures and distilled exposition, as well as for the subject matter of their art: racial capitalism. In using contractual relations to unveil institutional histories and complicities—and perhaps especially in making their work unavailable to purchase (the artist negotiates rental and loan arrangements)—Rowland sails against the headwinds. They are something of an anomaly in this era of frictionless transactions, in an art system that rewards thinking small. With “Properties,” they further develop the most ambitious element of their largely dematerialized practice. They engage with notions of monumentality and permanence, advancing an expansive vision of reparations—and challenging the very category of real estate—through Land art… —Johanna Fateman
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MEATPACKING DISTRICT
Christine Sun Kim
Whitney Museum | 99 Gansevoort Street
On view through September 25, 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
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TRIBECA
EJ Hill
52 Walker | 52 Walker Street
Through September 13, 2025
I remove my straw hat when entering the gallery to see EJ Hill’s newest endurance project, his first in seven years, for which he kneels every day—all day—during the run of his show “Low-Slung Promises on the Tongues of the Devout” at 52 Walker. The mise en scène works immediately: a red velvet curtain, the red leather kneelers, silence. Twelve years of Catholic school come back like muscle memory, the red marks on my knees—white when I press my fingers into the flesh. I wanted to be a nun, marry God, bride at nine… —Kate Zambreno
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SOHO
Pat Steir
Hauser & Wirth | 134 Wooster Street
Through August 15, 2025
Before her awesome curtains of dripping color, the famous canvases that, with the aid of gravity and various chemical reactions, “painted themselves,” there was the sharp conceptualism of Pat Steir’s in-situ works. “Mirage 1975,” in the former truck garage of Hauser & Wirth’s Soho location, restages the artist’s first-ever installation (at the State University of New York in Oneonta) for the occasion of both that show’s 50th anniversary and this summer’s publication of the lush doorstop Pat Steir Paintings 2018–2025—impressive evidence that the artist has kept very busy in her eighth decade… —Johanna Fateman
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QUEENS
Julien Ceccaldi
MoMA PS1 | 22-25 Jackson Ave, Queens
Through August 25, 2025
Though sly social commentary was a light theme of his already, it becomes clearer here that Julien Ceccaldi’s work is most compelling when it takes cues from an older genre to send up the contemporary pageantry of hopers, wishers, and strivers modeling themselves as romantic lead characters—or, at least, as the most desirable bod at the baths, per another large painting on plywood, titled Pompeii Bathhouse, 2017. Vitrines of drawings provide an endearing glimpse at process—three Post-its serve as quick character sketches—but a room dedicated to presenting lightly animated versions of Ceccaldi’s older comics is the more vivacious area of this compact show. With a style of movement mostly based on panning over still frames, the saucy dialogues proffer quotable one-liners, such as, “Preventing people from knowing who I really am feels incredible!”—Paige K. Bradley
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BROOKLYN
Torkwase Dyson
Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 1, Bridge View Lawn
Through March 8, 2026
Like much of Dyson’s work, Akua, 2025, adheres to a minimal and meticulously conceived geometric configuration: The powder-coated steel-and-aluminum structure is elliptical, its rectangular planks are arranged at an oblique angle, and the entrances at both ends are triangular. Dyson’s attention to shape recruits the formal schemas of abstraction to forge a compositional language of black survival within a spatial, architectural, and geographic order that works against this aim. The artist brings us to this knife edge between loss and life, submerging us in water’s sound, and then summoning us up to breathe through Akua’s openings… —Zoë Hopkins
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