April's Must-See Art Shows in NYC and Beyond

April's Must-See Art Shows in NYC and Beyond

By Harry Tafoya
Apr 11, 2025

I didn’t see as many shows in March because this past month was more festive than most. I celebrated my birthday, two weddings, and a gala, while doubling up my work load, traveling back and forth across the country and wincing my way through taxes. I’ve been so tired I’ve fallen asleep in cars and on the subway, jolting awake to the sound of doors opening and my friends’ amused laughter. One morning, I’d actually dressed and headed downstairs for a walkthrough of an exhibition, before pausing at the door and realizing I was too exhausted to properly concentrate. I slept for an hour before getting up to teach another round of classes.

Balancing the correct portions of art and life is a central human dilemma. Keep your head down for too long and you end up a miserable crank; indulge in too much fantasy and you cut yourself off from any reality outside your own head. At either extreme, life becomes incredibly pointless and without a measure of grounding, so does art. In a recent column for Artnet, Annie Armstrong wrote about the rise of “red chip” over “blue chip” art, or in other words, the increasing market dominance of worthless trend-chasing garbage over more traditional artists. I was struck by a quote from the art advisor, Amy Cappellazzo who described the collectors fueling this boom as being “heavily digital… because they live in an immaterial world... their own status creation and accomplishments are not material. So they’re not really attracted to physical things.”

In a way it is very timely. Visually noisy, attention-grabbing, completely immaterial trolling is the dominant style of social media and it’s fitting that contemporary art reflect that. The impact that much of this slop has on the wider world is mostly limited to hurting your eyes and insulting your intelligence. Still, to see AI-generated kitsch almost immediately be put in service of dehumanizing people by the government is frankly remarkable to behold. Although it can be incredibly satisfying to dish harassment back, these networks thrive on antagonism, trapping you in an obnoxious loop of response and reaction. If I sound defeatist, I don’t mean to be. The lines between life and art, digital and IRL have never been more easily confused, and it takes an active effort to hold them in perspective. It’s as important to see art as it is to get brunch, call your mother, buy flowers, run errands, clock in, clock out and go dancing. Like exercise, budgeting time to see art of any kind can be a chore, but it’s worth it for the muscles it builds and the mental clarity it brings: of knowing the difference between burnout and growth.

Chelsea/Midtown

  • Aaron Gilbert - World Without End - Gladstone
    • Aaron Gilbert’s paintings are well-observed multi-verses that feature moments of domestic bliss punctuated by hole-in-the-wall glimpses of a chaotic city rush playing out all around them. Intimacy and alienation go hand in hand in a city of strangers only inches away from another.
  • Jack Whitten - The Messenger - Museum of Modern Art (MUST SEE)
    • The late, great artist was a genius for applying paint in inventive ways - building his own tools, incorporating unusual materials (octopus ink, glass), and organizing his canvases into limpid galaxies of color and texture. A new survey at MoMA charts his innovations alongside his deep political commitments and spirituality.
  • Jeremy Glogan - Leanings - Jenny’s
    • Cult favorite gallery, Jenny’s is back and freshly installed in Midtown with a new exhibition of paintings by Jeremy Glogan. Glogan’s style is deflated, bug-eyed, and brilliant. He shows what it would look like if a canvas could get a bad case of the bends.
  • vanessa german - GUMBALL—there is absolutely no space between body and soul - Kasmin
    • vanessa german’s sculptures combine the fineness of Meso-American mosaic with the positive charge of several Beverly Hills mansions worth of energy-healing crystals. Her latest exhibition at Kasmin uses gemstones to draw out cosmic maps and depict her subjects in the midst of death-dropping.

Downtown/SoHo

  • Ebecho Muslimova & Maria Lassnig - Magenta Plains
    • What unites these painters (one living, one dead) is a cartoonishly direct approach to imagining bodies. The gnarliness is front-loaded but so is the humor, and both Maria Lassnig and Ebecho Muslimova take gleeful, anarchic joy in taking off their character’s clothes and staring down their viewers.
  • Genevieve Goffman - All the Words that Came Down to Meet the Body that Came Up from the Ground - Alyssa Davis Gallery + Foreign & Domestic
    • Genevieve Goffman draws inspiration from the dream life of architecture, building out utopian cities and video game stages, into real world structures with elaborate digital mapping and 3D printing. Her latest show brings a whole new kind of being into the world, an actual 7-foot golem.
  • Leonard Baby - The Babys - Half Gallery
    • The text for Leonard Baby’s show is two lines long: “I grew up queer in an environment that told me that was gross. This body of work is about the angels that carried me through that time.” Those angels are his sisters, and the painter and sculptor’s love for women and femininity unfurls in a series of work that uses stylish scenes to channel pain and affection into art.
  • Lotus L. Kang - Already - 52 Walker (MUST SEE)
    • Lotus L. Kang treats photography as something more expansive than an image fixed to a wall, building it out into sculpture and alleyways for the viewer to literally navigate. Her use of light sensitive, over-exposed film gives the work a hazy, impressionist quality and heightens your awareness of time. This isn’t photography that’s over in a flash but a process that deeply involves you.
  • Olivia Erlanger - Spinoff - Luhring Augustine (MUST SEE)
    • Olivia Erlanger’s riff on the diorama takes a high school craft into ominous new dimensions, using odd perspectives to create perfectly realized, off-kilter scenes. Her work is in the lineage of the creepy little houses from Hereditary and the miniature hedge maze from The Shining, somehow compact and cosmic at the same time.
  • Osama Al-Rayyan - Poets or Poems - Francis Irv
    • The Syrian painter toes a beautiful line between figuration and abstraction, using a gorgeous palette of sunset and jewel tones to carve human shapes out of a gorgeous ambient mist.
  • Sheyla Baykal - Dearly Loved Friends: Photographs by Sheyla Baykal, 1965-1990 - Soft Network
    • For decades the Turkish-American photographer was a chronicler of New York’s queer subculture, as clear-eyed about the scene’s dirt and grime as she was attuned to its glittering trails of fairy dust. A footnote in many other famous people’s stories, she’s honored with a retrospective placing her front and center.

Uptown/Brooklyn/Queens

  • David Altmejd - The Serpent - White Cube (MUST SEE)
    • Legendary Canadian sculptor, David Altmejd has dedicated his practice to building out freakily plausible animal-human hybrids. His latest is a series of gracefully-grotesque mutants climaxing with an ungodly baby-doll serpent. It’s an inspired chop-shop nightmare and an absolute must-see.
  • The Frick Collection (MUST SEE)
    • After four years of construction and shuffling between venues, the Frick Collection is finally re-opening in its own space again! One of the most out-and-out beautiful collections of old master paintings in all of New York is made even more so.
  • Rashid Johnson - A Poem for Deep Thinkers - The Guggenheim
    • “Deep Thinking” is one word for it! The term most writers use to describe the prevailing theme of Rashid Johnson’s work is “anxiety” and the artist’s restless creativity is on full display in a major mid-career survey of his work at the Guggenheim.
  • Yehwan Song - Are We Still (Surfing?) - Pioneer Works
    • Yehwan Song’s installation at Pioneer Works visualizes all of the ways that information online does not flow freely. From corporate capture to the stripping of net neutrality, the artist shows that, now more than ever, we need to break the Internet.

Everywhere Else

Photo courtesy of White Cube

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