Eight New York City Art Shows to Kick Off the New Year

It’s 2025 and time to start a new year of exploring art — and there’s already plenty to see. While shimmering gold and sequins from artists like Machine Dazzle and Myrlande Constant are ideal to cut through the winter gray, Japanese poetry, calligraphy, and painting at The Met tap into the more meditative side of entering a new year, while the sociopolitical critique of artists Nicholas Galanin, Sohrab Hura, and Gary Simmons provides food for thought. Meanwhile, the modernist patterns of Mary Sully and Harlem Renaissance paintings of Romare Bearden offer rich aesthetic experiences not to be missed. —Natalie Haddad, Reviews Editor

Ayiti Toma II: Faith, Family, and Resistance

Luring Augustine, 17 White Street, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through January 11

A collaboration between Luhring Augustine, El-Saieh Gallery in Port-au-Prince, and CENTRAL FINE in Miami Beach, Ayiti Toma II, organized by artist Tomm El-Saieh, immediately stands out for its striking visuals. Jewel hues and sparkling sequins share space with figural iron cut-outs and intricate psychedelic scenes. The work in this stunning exhibition of Haitian artists across generations is also a fascinating lesson in the country’s rich art history and, in turn, its cultural and political history. Searing historical images by the likes of brothers Philomé and Sénèque Obin, who pioneered the Cap-Haïtien school of painting, sit alongside works by contemporary artists, including Myrlande Constant’s textile works, inspired by the Drapo flags of Haitian Voudou, and mixed media sculptures titles “Zwazo” (“bird” in Haitian creole) by Jean Hérard Celeur. Group shows can be a mishmash but El-Saieh, with the three partnered galleries, beautifully interweaves distinctive artworks into a complementary whole without sacrificing the individual aesthetic or message of each artist. It’s hard to single anything out, but Constant’s shimmering sequined and beaded banners and André Pierre’s commanding portraits are mesmerizing. —NH

Gary Simmons: Thin Ice

Hauser & Wirth, 134 Wooster Street, Soho, Manhattan
Through January 11

Gary Simmons’s new paintings for Thin Ice use his signature tactic of blurring to do something other than making his figures seem ghostly. Instead, the smeared renderings of phases of a skater’s “port de bras” movements represent a uniquely American mashup of a caricatured blackness made to mimic idealized European forms. The artworks indicate a dilemma at the heart of the popular culture of the United States —Seph Rodney

Mary Sully: Native Modern

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through January 12

Mary Sully, a self-taught Yankton Dakota artist born on Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota in 1896, worked mostly under the radar from the 1920s through ’40s. Now, about a century later, Sully’s distinctive colored pencil triptychs and abstract portraits get their due in her first solo show. Across this set of 25 drawings, patterns pulse and geometric shapes tessellate. Abstraction gives way to representation, and vice versa. Flowers, faces, and fashions (think: Easter parade outfits and Native regalia) blend with graphic pops and textile-esque patterns. Evincing a keen color and design sense, Sully’s works blend eclectic cultural references and bring Modernist and Native art together in fresh ways, revealing and complicating ideas that surround each of these designations. TAnd this survey exhibition, in turn, locates Sully in the American art canon and expands the picture of what 20th-century art looks like. —Julie Schneider

Obsession and Evidence

AP Space, 555 West 25th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through January 15

Sometimes, more is more. The drag queen and performance artist Machine Dazzle, recently featured at the Museum of Arts and Design, has a keen eye for texture and a hyper-baroque maximalist queer sensibility, giving the found object assemblages in this new body of work a pulse. Sculptures like “Hydra” bring together a clever combination of found objects, coated with a thick layer of gold paint that somehow accentuates rather than suppresses the artwork’s surface variations. Long heralded as the creative genius behind Taylor Mac’s iconic sculptural costumes, this exhibition is a rare opportunity to experience Machine Dazzle’s magnetic aesthetic up close and personal. —Daniel Larkin

Nicholas Galanin: The persistence of Land claims in a climate of change

Peter Blum Gallery, 176 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through January 18

For Nicholas Galanin’s (Lingít and Unangax̂) third solo show at Peter Blum Gallery, Indigenous relationships to land confront the appropriation of Indigenous cultural symbols and objects by colonial powers, and empty gestures from Western institutions. Galanin’s facility for upending expectations and putting viewers on the spot is in full display here — literally in the interactive installation “Pause for Applause” (2024), in which a mirror is bookended by two teleprompters displaying land acknowledgments, with an X on the floor marking where the viewer stands. Other works, such as the photo series “Reenactment (Inversion)” (2024), depicting a pile of burning wood cut from counterfeit totem poles, and “Eye opener (South)” (2024), a decorative porcelain pry bar resting on a pillow in a glass case are subtler but no less scathing. —NH

Romare Bearden: Paris Blues/Jazz and Other Works

DC Moore Gallery, 535 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through January 18, 2025

Walking between Romare Bearden’s paintings at DC Moore, I felt a sudden urge to have music in my ears. When I realized that I had left my headphones at home, I became deeply frustrated. That is until I understood that the music I really wanted to hear was begging to burst out of Bearden’s jazz-infused images of Paris, New York, and New Orleans. It was at this point that I began not just seeing, but also listening. Keep your eyes and ears open in this great show, and dream. —Hakim Bishara

Sohrab Hura: Mother

MoMA PS1, 22–25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
Through February 17

Sohrab Hura’s first US survey show is far too expansive to summarize in a paragraph, much like the New Delhi-based artist’s multilayered practice. Encompassing video, painting, sculpture, and photography, Mother deserves time and attention, and rewards it with an intimate look into Hura’s world and experiences. A room filled with gouache paintings of remembered scenes and people, including Hura’s family, has a warm, inviting feel. While each individual work feels like a window into a moment in time, together, sweeping across the walls, they form the ebbs and flows of life. Best known as a photographer and filmmaker, Hura’s recent explorations of painting in the series Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed (2022–ongoing) and Ghosts in My Sleep (2023–ongoing) reveal a more introspective side of a prolific talent. —NH

The Three Perfections: Japanese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting from the Mary and Cheney Cowles Collection

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through August 3

Surveying a millennium’s worth of works, The Three Perfections: Japanese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting from the Mary and Cheney Cowles Collection shows how these three art forms merge in Japanese aesthetic traditions. “The Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals” is a gorgeous set of painted screens from the 17th century that portrays courtly poets — only five of them women — deemed important at the time. It’s a good example of the three perfections in one: the calligraphy, portraits, and poems are by different people. This sits in dialogue with 159 other works on view, including the 20th century “Handscroll of Tyrannical Government,” depicting a woman who lost her entire family to tigers but still preferred life in the mists, far from an authoritarian government, where soldiers were enlisted to reinforce class inequality. —AX Mina