January 2027
January at a glance: 1 exhibition opening, 31 closing, and 42 more on view across the city.

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
The first major survey of modern architecture across seven West African nations from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, exploring how building shaped newly independent states. Most objects have never been shown publicly.

The Studio Museum in Harlem
The first Artist-in-Residence cohort in the Studio Museum's new building: Derriann Pharr, Simonette Quamina and Taylor Simmons use figuration across mediums to explore cultural memory and time.

The Studio Museum in Harlem
A group show of nineteen artists — including Roy DeCarava, Kerry James Marshall and Lorna Simpson — exploring tone, from black to white and every value between, as an expressive material language.
The Shed
World premiere musical with a book by Lynn Nottage and music and lyrics by John Legend, directed by Liesl Tommy. Two mothers, one Black and one White, raise their daughters across 1920s Atlantic City and 1930s New York.

New Museum
Jafa's inaugural US museum survey spans nearly four decades of work, including "Love is the Message, The Message is Death" and the Golden Lion-winning "The White Album," alongside new pieces exploring Black life in America.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Conceived by Si Lewen (1918–2016) in the aftermath of World War II, The Parade is informed by the artist's extraordinary life.

125 Newbury · Free
Paintings and works on paper by Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb from 1941 to 1951, when both turned to myth and Surrealist abstraction. Curated by Arne Glimcher.

Whitney Museum of American Art
A touring retrospective of self-taught artist Minnie Evans's work from 1935-1981 — vibrant drawings, paintings and collages blending spiritual imagery with natural motifs, made in North Carolina during the Jim Crow era.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
A sweeping survey of Pop art from the 1960s to today, with works by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Hamilton and Chryssa shown alongside a Yayoi Kusama Infinity Mirror Room and recent contemporary acquisitions.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Inaugurating the new Conde Nast Galleries, the Costume Institute pairs nearly 400 garments with paintings and sculpture to explore how art has depicted the dressed body.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Early 20th-century European avant-garde painting drawn from the collection, with works by Kandinsky, Goncharova, Franz Marc and others who reimagined painting for a rapidly changing world.

Neue Galerie New York
Opening Autumn 2026, this milestone show fills the entire museum with collection highlights, from Klimt's Adele Bloch-Bauer I to German and Austrian masterworks and Wiener Werkstaette design.

Dia Chelsea · Free
A comprehensive survey of Argentine Conceptual artist David Lamelas, tracing his work from 1965 to today across film, sculpture and performance, unfolding as exhibition, film program and live work.

Pace Gallery · Free
Elmgreen & Dragset debut a 40-ton, traversable steel sculpture with a new series of wall works, on the performative side of architecture. At Pace's 508 and 510 West 25th Street spaces.
Hauser & Wirth · Free
Zeng Fanzhi's first New York exhibition in over a decade: a new sculpture and a suite of new paintings of imagined celestial landscapes, at the 22nd Street gallery.

The Shed
A survey of Virgil Abloh's work in fashion, art, architecture and music: nearly 1,000 objects from his archive over 28,000 sq ft, including a recreation of his Paris office.

The Frick Collection
Nearly forty Renaissance bronzes, including works by Donatello and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, exploring the innovations of Sienese sculptors in the second half of the 15th century.

Whitney Museum of American Art
The inaugural solo museum presentation of Senegalese American artist Coumba Samba, an immersive installation examining nuclear power and African resource extraction through symbols of the U.S. military-industrial complex.

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
A survey of Surrealism's book-as-art-object experiments by André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Claude Cahun, Max Ernst and others, built around a major gift of rare artists' books from the Helen and Sam Zell Collection.

Gagosian · Free
Georg Baselitz's last completed paintings and sculptures, curated by Richard Calvocoressi, at 555 West 24th Street; the gallery's first Baselitz show since his death in April.

Pace Gallery · Free
Lucas Samaras's box sculptures of the 1960s to 1980s alongside never-before-seen fabric paintings from his 1979 Reconstructions series.

New Museum
A new site-specific video work by Singapore-based artist Ho Tzu Nyen installed in the museum's OMA-designed elevators, part of an ongoing series exploring power, endurance, and transformation.

The Studio Museum in Harlem
A group exhibition exploring geometry as an organizational principle, translating sources from city maps to West African textiles into a shared visual vocabulary spanning figuration and abstraction.

The Studio Museum in Harlem
Photography by seventeen teen artists from the Studio Museum's signature Expanding the Walls program, capturing New York's streets alongside intimate moments at home.

New Museum
The US institutional debut of London- and Tokyo-based artist Umi Ishihara, bringing together three recent films exploring precarity and collective life through personal memory and social realities.

Whitney Museum of American Art
Ten watercolors from the Whitney's collection, spanning 1916–1960, tracing Charles Burchfield's visionary, lifelong reverence for natural phenomena — from flowering meadows to dramatic storms.

New Museum
The Italian artist's first solo New York museum show presents three recent films alongside the newly commissioned "Krapfen" (2025), blending horror, comedy, and animation to explore desire, memory, and perception.

New Museum
The inaugural exhibition traces five centuries of the Bowery's history, from Lenape footpath through skid row to thriving arts community, examining the street as a site of ongoing reinvention.

Brooklyn Museum
Twenty-one works from the collection trace 900 years of Japanese narrative imagery behind modern manga; a companion to Art of Manga.

Brooklyn Museum
East Coast debut of the first major Americas exhibition on manga as an art form, with more than 600 original drawings including Inuyasha, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and ONE PIECE.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The first major New York presentation devoted to either artist in more than 20 years.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The dazzling stained-glass windows, lamps, mosaics, and interiors from Tiffany's studios began as drawings created by the many talented designers who worked there.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Multidisciplinary artist David Hartt transforms John Vanderlyn's 19th-century painting Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles into a site-specific installation exploring place and perspective.

Brooklyn Museum
Three chapters of longtime favorites and new standouts, bringing fresh narratives to the fore while exploring the collection's history and future evolution. Marks the Museum's bicentennial.

MoMA PS1 · Free
An international artistic campaign in support of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, presenting posters, film, photography, sculpture and ephemera by artists including Regina José Galindo and Carlos Amorales, organized by Estudio Pedro Reyes and ICAN.

MoMA PS1 · Free
Trained as a forensic pathologist and photographer, Margolles examines transnational violence, with particular attention to the US-Mexico border, through work that traces disappearances, femicides and displacement and rethinks the memorial.

Dia Chelsea · Free
Co-organized with Blank Forms, this show restages French composer Éliane Radigue's pulsating 1970s sonic installations in Dia's program space, with live synthesizer and acoustic performances.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg's immersive video and sound installation digitally resurrects an extinct male Northern white rhino using AI and visual effects, questioning whether species resurrection is a justified answer to extinction.
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Over 60 oil and graphite sketches from Church's 1865 trip to Jamaica, documenting plant life and landscapes, drawn from Cooper Hewitt's collection of the artist's work.

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Na Mira's first solo museum exhibition in New York: a newly commissioned media installation in the Kravis Studio using radio frequencies, infrared heat and holography, drawing on Korean shamanism and structural filmmaking.

The Frick Collection
New paintings by contemporary artist Kent Monkman responding to Vermeer's Officer and Laughing Girl, examining trade, colonization and Indigenous-European encounters through his alter ego Miss Chief.

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
For the first time in decades, rarely lent sculptures leave Brancusi's Paris atelier (closed for renovation) to join MoMA's Brancusi collection, alongside his photographs, films, hand-carved furniture, tools and archival materials.

The Studio Museum in Harlem
The first exhibition to tell the story of arts advocate Peggy Cooper Cafritz as a collector, drawing on her bequest of over 200 artists of African descent across multiple media.
American Museum of Natural History
An interactive exhibition on what color reveals about the natural world and ourselves, from how animals and plants use it to how it shapes mood.

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Digital installation Berl-Berl reimagines Berlin's lost wetlands as a singing, digital swamp, blending ecological research, Slavic folklore and game-engine technology to explore human and more-than-human worlds.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
A major new commission premieres never-before-seen photographs, text, video, and sculpture in a single interactive installation spiraling through the entire rotunda.

MoMA PS1 · Free
A major exhibition examining the legacy of abstract painting by Black artists in the US from 1969 to today, featuring over forty artists across three generations.

MoMA PS1 · Free
Archive material and partial reconstructions of the fashion installations curator Hollywood Di Russo staged at PS1 with Julio, Charles James, Willi Smith and Betsey Johnson.

MoMA PS1 · Free
First US museum show of Masao Gozu: photographs from the 1970s to today, from his Windows series of tenement residents and the Harry's Bar series, with recent returns to the same sites.

Whitney Museum of American Art
Marking the 25th anniversary of the Whitney's artport platform, this show gathers over 100 commissioned net-art works charting the evolution of internet art from 2001 to 2024.

The Studio Museum in Harlem
A site-specific installation by Kapwani Kiwanga reworking the quilting "flying geese" pattern in natural dyes, evoking the Underground Railroad and histories of Black resistance.

Brooklyn Museum
An immersive sound installation built around Representative John Lewis's speech on the floor of the US House during the December 1998 impeachment debate.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Presents more than 180 exceptional works exploring art and identity beyond ancient Greece.

Brooklyn Museum
More than 50 modern European works by Cézanne, Modigliani, Degas, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Soutine, from the Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection gift.

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Marianne Wex's 1970s feminist photo survey of gendered body language is shown alongside contemporary artists Nona Faustine, Martine Gutierrez, K8 Hardy, Yuki Kihara, Joiri Minaya, Paulina Olowska, and Wendy Red Star, reappraising bodies in public space.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Postwar Japanese photography, from Okinawa and base towns under US occupation, drawn from the Met's collection with rare photobooks and new acquisitions. Gallery 851.

Whitney Museum of American Art
A comprehensive retrospective of roughly 130 works spanning the 1940s through the 1990s, tracing how Roy Lichtenstein transformed mass-culture imagery into iconic Pop art while probing duplication and the circulation of images across media.
The Morgan Library & Museum
Blockbooks from 1450–80, when woodblock-printed books competed with manuscripts and typeset books, including a rare Ars moriendi, from the largest US collection of blockbooks.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Treasured Korean objects are turned around to reveal their interiors, reverses, and hidden details, offering a fuller view of each work's form across two rotations.

Whitney Museum of American Art
A focused show of rarely seen works from the final year of the Pop artist's life, including prints, photographs and sculptural maquettes alongside studies for unrealized projects, revealing his late-career experimentation.

Brooklyn Museum
Michael Richards's sculpture of a pilot pierced with nails commemorates the Tuskegee Airmen, the US Air Force's first Black unit.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Beijing-based artist Liu Wei (born 1972) inspires visitors to ponder cycles of rupture and resistance for the 2026 Genesis Facade Commission.

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
MoMA's first exhibition devoted entirely to information design, presenting 30 works of digital and analog design — including six new acquisitions — that explore how designers help visualize and shape our understanding of complex data.

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
A survey of painter Nilima Sheikh's five-decade practice, tracing her engagement with Kashmir through narrative scroll paintings including a new, site-responsive series debuting at MoMA.
The Morgan Library & Museum
Early printed ragtime and cakewalk music from the John Davis Collection of Early Printed Musical African Americana, setting Ernest Hogan beside Scott Joplin.

Brooklyn Museum
The first exhibition to examine the Hopi kachina doll tradition from the perspective of the women and girls who receive them, presented at the Center for Feminist Art.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
19th-century bark cloth tapa from Fiji, Samoa and Futuna, plus a Niuean hiapo on loan from Te Papa, shown as ceremonial gifts and diplomacy. Gallery 359.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Results from a collaborative exchange among curators, conservators, and digital specialists studying The Met's Della Robbia sculptures.
National September 11 Memorial & Museum
Historic American flags tied to 9/11, including the Ground Zero Flag, paired with personal stories in Foundation Hall to mark the nation's 250th anniversary.

National September 11 Memorial & Museum
Examines how comic book and graphic novel artists responded to 9/11, from pre-2001 fictional depictions of the World Trade Center through decades of memoirs, charitable efforts, and educational works.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The first US exhibition on the Savonnerie centers The Met's three monumental Baroque carpets woven for Louis XIV's Grande Galerie at the Louvre, tracing their making and dispersal.

National September 11 Memorial & Museum
Opened for the 25th anniversary, this exhibition explores how individuals and communities transformed grief into service inspired by 9/11, among a generation with no lived memory of the attacks.

Brooklyn Museum
A six-year installation of the Rubin Museum's beloved Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room within the Arts of Asia galleries: over 100 thangkas, sculptures, and ritual objects arranged as an elaborate household shrine, with chanted prayers, butter lamps, and incense.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.