Featured Events in New York in November 2024 (June Updated)

Lightscape at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a captivating illuminated spectacle, is making a grand return until January 5, 2025. This extraordinary event showcases a mesmerizing trail of art created by talented local and international artists. The trail is adorned with over a million dazzling lights, vibrant colors, and enchanting music. Immerse yourself in the iconic Winter Cathedral, a sight that will leave you in awe. To enhance the experience, a carefully curated playlist of music breathes life into the light art. Along the trail, you'll find food concessions offering delightful seasonal treats such as hot cocoa, hot cider, mulled wine, as well as delectable light bites, cookies, and sweets. Tickets for this highly anticipated event are now available for purchase. The pricing structure includes off-peak and peak options, catering to different preferences. Adult tickets range from $24 to $45, while children can enjoy the experience for $12 to $23. Lightscape at Brooklyn Botanic Garden promises an unforgettable journey through a world of radiant beauty and artistic brilliance. Don't miss out on this extraordinary opportunity to be captivated by the magic of lights.

Black Friday in New York is the biggest discount shopping day of the year. Shoppers can usually expect discounts of up to 80% off on items at this time! It only happens once a year, at the end of November. In 2024, Black Friday will be on November 29. Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving. For many people, this marks the "official" start of the holiday shopping season. Every Thanksgiving, the US retail industry does its best to lure shoppers into stores or online, hoping to make a killing by offering the best deals. Look out for "flash sales," which are select items sold at extremely low prices when stores open or in the early hours of Black Friday. Flash sales are always worth waking up early for! Flash sales have the biggest markdowns on top brands and electronics. However, these sale items are available in limited quantities: so once they're sold out, they're gone. Plus, each person can usually only take advantage of one flash sale.

The reopened galleries dedicated to European Paintings from 1300 to 1800 highlight fresh narratives and dialogues among more than 700 works of art from the Museum’s world-famous holdings. The newly reconfigured galleries—which include recently acquired paintings and prestigious loans, as well as select sculptures and decorative art—will showcase the interconnectedness of cultures, materials, and moments across The Met collection. The chronologically arranged galleries will feature longstanding strengths of the collection—such as masterpieces by Jan van Eyck, Caravaggio, and Poussin; the most extensive collection of 17th-century Dutch art in the western hemisphere; and the finest holdings of El Greco and Goya outside Spain—while also giving renewed attention to women artists, exploring Europe’s complex relationships with New Spain and the Viceroyalty of Peru, and looking more deeply into histories of class, gender, race, and religion. The reopening of the suite of 45 galleries at the top of the Great Hall staircase follows a five-year project to replace the skylights. This monumental infrastructure project improves the quality of light and enhances the viewing experience for a new look at this renowned collection. Major support for Look Again: European Paintings 1300–1800 is provided by Candace K. and Frederick W. Beinecke.

This porcelain head, a self-portrait, is glazed in shades of blue and covered with metallic droplets called “silver mist,” or gintekisai. The term, like the secret technique that produces the effect, was invented by ceramicist Kondō Takahiro (born 1958). Based in Kyoto, Japan, he carries on a legacy of innovation in ceramic art. For the last one hundred years, Kondō Takahiro and his father Kondō Hiroshi (1936–2012), grandfather Kondō Yūzō (1902–1985), and uncle Kondō Yutaka (1932–1983) have broken free of centuries-old traditions to pursue original, individual expression. Porcelains in the Mist brings together sixty-one pieces that celebrate the Kondō family’s innovations and talents. Their early creations range from freehand-painted vases to pure-white jars. Most of the works on view are by Takahiro, who often pairs his “mist,” which he describes as “water born from fire,” with dramatic shapes and textures. Several of these powerful porcelains reflect his personal responses to monumental events, particularly the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan. Museum Spotlights are intimate installations of noteworthy collection works, recent acquisitions, and loans, presented to encourage deeper conversations about art, history, and justice. Porcelains in the Mist: The Kondō Family of Ceramicists is organized by the Brooklyn Museum based on the exhibition Transcendent Clay/Kondo: A Century of Japanese Ceramic Art, originally presented by the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, and guest curated by Joe Earle. The Brooklyn Museum’s presentation is organized by Joan Cummins, Lisa and Bernard Selz Senior Curator, Asian Art. We are grateful to Carol and Jeffrey Horvitz, whose generosity and enthusiasm made this exhibition possible.

"Don Giovanni" is an opera in two acts composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. The story follows the life of the infamous Don Giovanni, a seductive and immoral nobleman who uses his charm and power to seduce and betray women. His actions eventually catch up to him, leading to a dramatic confrontation with his past victims and a supernatural punishment.

Once Upon a One More Time is a new Broadway musical that tells the story of a group of fairytale princesses who gather for a book club meeting, only to discover that their lives are not as perfect as they seem. When a fairy godmother grants their wish to read a new book, they are transported to a world where they must confront their own desires and fears. With a score featuring the music of Britney Spears, Once Upon a One More Time is a fun and empowering musical that celebrates the strength and resilience of women.

Two singers at the height of their powers—radiant soprano Nadine Sierra and tenor sensation Benjamin Bernheim—come together as the star-crossed lovers in Gounod’s sumptuous Shakespeare adaptation, with Met Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin on the podium to conduct one of the repertoire’s most romantic scores. Bartlett Sher’s towering staging also features baritone Will Liverman and tenor Frederick Ballentine as the archrivals Mercutio and Tybalt, mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey as the mischievous pageboy Stéphano, and bass-baritone Alfred Walker as Frère Laurent.

Six remarkably talented young men form a singing group who become international sensations: The Comedian Harmonists.

Welcome to opening night of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society’s newest production, The Murder at Haversham Manor. This 1920s whodunit has everything you never wanted in a Broadway show—a ramshackle set, a leading lady with a concussion, and a corpse that can’t play dead. It’s a classic murder mystery… and it’s a mystery how it ever got to Broadway!

Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. From Tudor Queens to Pop Icons, the SIX wives of Henry VIII take the microphone to remix five hundred years of historical heartbreak into a Euphoric Celebration of 21st century girl power! This new original musical is the global sensation that everyone is losing their head over!

The Gazillion Bubble Show is a live, interactive performance that showcases the mesmerizing art of creating bubbles. The show features a variety of bubble-related acts, including creating bubbles within bubbles, giant bubbles that encapsulate audience members, and even bubble sculptures that float and dance around the stage. The performers use a range of props, including wands, hoops, and even their bare hands, to create an incredible variety of shapes and sizes of bubbles.

The show is a modern retelling of William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet, but with a twist - it explores an alternative ending where Juliet doesn't die and instead sets out to discover her own identity and independence.

What’s your fantasy? Ana knows that everybody has one—her especially, and she’d do anything to make it come true. And when she meets Jonah, a sweet and caring student at her boarding school, everything she’s ever wanted is finally falling into place. Except Jonah, like everything else in this moving world premiere play from Rachel Bonds, is not all that he seems. A singularly haunting and heart-racing coming-of-age tale that will keep you guessing until its final twisting moments, Jonah is about the true cost of survival, and the lengths some will travel to feel just a little less alone in the world. Danya Taymor directs.

Hamilton is the story of the unlikely Founding Father determined to make his mark on the new nation as hungry and ambitious as he is. From orphan to Washington's right-hand man, rebel to war hero, a loving husband caught in the country's first sex scandal, to the Treasury head who made an untrusting world believe in the American economy. George Washington, Eliza Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and Hamilton's lifelong friend/foil Aaron Burr all make their mark in this astonishing new musical exploration of a political mastermind.

Based on the award-winning HBO documentary, How to Dance in Ohio is a heart-filled new musical exploring the need to connect and the courage it takes to step out into the world.

Eminent American composer John Adams returns to the Met after a decade-long hiatus for the company premiere of his acclaimed opera-oratorio, which incorporates sacred and secular texts in English, Spanish, and Latin, from biblical times to the present day, in an extraordinarily dramatic retelling of the Nativity. El Niño brings together three of contemporary opera’s fiercest champions, all of whom make highly anticipated company debuts: Marin Alsop, one of the great conductors of our time, who has led more than 200 new-music premieres; soprano Julia Bullock, a leading voice on and off stage; and pathbreaking bass-baritone Davóne Tines. Radiant mezzo-sopranos J’Nai Bridges and Daniela Mack take turns completing the principal trio.

Close to Home is an installation that honors the domestic space as a custodian of cultural and spiritual traditions by providing support and comfort to forge appreciation for heritage and their continuity. Modeled after Nsenga Knight’s family residences from their past six years living in Cairo, Egypt, the installation’s eclectic atmosphere reflects the historic and cosmopolitan. While furnished in various materials and styles, old and new, this family home is also adorned with artifacts from the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair as well as artworks by Knight, including paintings, prints, videos, and wallpaper. A Brooklyn-born Afro-Caribbean American Muslim artist, Knight researched the Queens Museum’s 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair Archives with a focus on the representations of the then-newly postcolonial Islamic African and Caribbean nations. The historical trajectory of these nations and their influence on Black Americans has emerged as the central focus of her exhibition. Knight presents this exhibition as both a home and a forum for “Peace Through Understanding,” echoing the theme of the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair. She extends this concept into the exterior section of the installation. Hovering above are words initially spoken by martial arts masters at the SWAM Academy of Modern Martial Arts in South Jamaica, Queens. Transcribed by Knight word-by-word, these “poems” encapsulate their wisdom about self defense, spirituality, and ethical integrity imparted at the renowned Black Muslim-owned dojo. The act of safe-keeping and hope for peace extends to the toy paragliders in the exhibition. These airborne devices carry complex yet arbitrary layers of symbolism related to the Museum’s building history. The New York City Building housed the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1947 when they passed Resolution 181 to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. By juxtaposing SWAM poetry with paragliders and parachutes, Knight considers how to position peace and safety amidst conflict and oppression. Food culture also played a pivotal role in the World’s Fair. Close to Home will host a scheduled series of social gatherings by serving tea and coffee in this installation. With this act of hospitality, Knight calls on viewers to consider the power of sensorial and experiential engagement to foster understanding, connection, and appreciation among people from various corners of the world. Close to Home is curated by Hitomi Iwasaki, Director of Exhibitions/Curator. Nsenga Knight (b. Brooklyn, New York, 1981) is an In Situ Artist Fellow at the Queens Museum. She earned an MFA from University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Howard University. She has exhibited her work internationally, including: Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo, Egypt (2022); Drawing Center, New York, NY (2017, 2016); Project Row Houses, Houston, TX (2015); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY (2011); among others. Knight is a recipient of grants from Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2019), Foundation for Contemporary Art (2016), Brooklyn Arts Council (2007). She was an artist-in-residence at BRICworkspace, Brooklyn, NY (2019); and Film/Video Arts Center, New York, NY (2005) among others. She lives and works in New York.

Exploring the intersection of art making and play, Cas Holman designs innovative toys and tools that inspire participatory imagination. Prototyping Play experiments with the different modes of intuitive and child-directed free play in an art museum environment by extending the body’s movements with uniquely crafted elements and prompts. Released in two phases, Holman’s open-ended playthings and playspaces foster collaboration, inventive thinking, and interactivity. Prototyping Play invites artists of all ages to create, exchange, cooperate, and leave your mark through these new devices. Tracing Play (launching May 19, 2024): Drawing Tools and Drawing Pads invite collective acts of drawing. The awkwardly shaped, human-sized Drawing Tools are equipped with large-scale crayons which challenge users to collaborate in figuring out how to use them. The fun is in the creative process. You can make marks using these tools on the Drawing Pads, or Tyvek paper surfaces, where your drawings will inspire future markmakers. Alternatively, you can collaborate with markmakers who visited the exhibition beforehand. Critter Party (launching July 2024): For this playscape, Holman has created different elements: the Mama Critter, Baby Critters, and Thingies. The arched Critters invite various types of interaction and opportunities for transformation, while the add-on objects, or Thingies, offer the possibility to adapt each structure with new narratives and identities. Encouraging crawling, sliding, building, storytelling, pretending, and more, the assorted sizes of Critters demonstrate how scale can change our relationship with shapes and spaces. Each critter, as well as the open-ended, reconfigurable Thingies, accommodate various types of play, depending on the desired sensory and social engagements. Here, Holman creates inclusive environments where many different types and ways of playing can coexist together. Prototyping Play will activate the Skylight Gallery as the Queens Museum prepares for a children’s museum that encourages intergenerational learning experiences. This playscape will further the Museum’s knowledge of its audiences and facilitates test thinking for future family programming. Prototyping Play is curated by Lauren Haynes, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Programs, and Kimaada Le Gendre, Director of Education.

In Buenos Vecinos, which translates to “good neighbors,” Catalina Schliebener Muñoz confronts the impact of two Walt Disney animated films: Saludos Amigos (1942) and Los Tres Caballeros (1944). Both films emerged from Disney’s state-sponsored research trips to South and Central American nations as part of The Good Neighbor Policy, which sought to discourage Nazi influence and improve the United States’ public image in Latin America following its numerous military invasions throughout the early 20th century. Disney and his team of artists toured Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Mexico to generate visual motifs and storylines for recognizable characters like Donald Duck and Goofy, as well to create new characters, songs, and dances based on local customs and archetypes. Schliebener Muñoz examines how these films functioned as a form of soft power, enlisting children’s media towards the economic and geopolitical interests of the United States. Through installation, collage, sculpture, and murals, the artist subverts reductive and exoticized representations of Latin American cultures in the films to center its secondary characters and rebellious underdogs. Schliebener Muñoz also contends with Disney’s depictions of gender, sexuality, race, and Indigeneity by appropriating and fragmenting the films’ imagery to create critical narratives of resistance. Acknowledging the capacity of stories to shape value systems, the exhibition employs mirroring, queer coding, ambiguity, and humor to challenge the imposed boundaries between the real and fictional, natural and synthetic, spectacular and grotesque. As World War II gave way to the Cold War, the United States abandoned Pan-American unity to support coups and dictatorships in many of the countries depicted in Disney’s films. Schliebener Muñoz incorporates archival materials that address the aftermath of The Good Neighbor Policy, U.S. interventionism, and imperialist ideology through the history of the Queens Museum’s site. This building hosted the former United Nations, where decisions ranged from the 1947 partition of Palestine to the creation of UNICEF, and is also located on the grounds of the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair where Disney premiered the “it’s a small world” attraction. For Schliebener Muñoz, this context becomes integral to understanding the legacy of Disney’s films alongside hostile foreign policies, and how the imagination of children became a vehicle for the projection of American innocence and exceptionalism on the global stage. Buenos Vecinos is curated by Lindsey Berfond, Assistant Curator and Studio Program Manager.

“I think of myself, standing in a world that is never standing still,” the artistRobert Frankonce wrote. “I’m still in there fighting, alive because I believe in what I’m trying to do now.”Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue—the artist’s first solo exhibition at MoMA—provides a new perspective on his expansive body of work by exploring the six vibrant decades of Frank’s career following the 1958 publication of his landmarkphotobook,The Americans. Coinciding with the centennial of Frank’s birth, the exhibition will explore his restless experimentation across mediums including photography, film, and books, as well as his dialogues with other artists and his communities. It will include some 200 works made over 60 years until the artist’s death in 2019, many drawn from MoMA’s extensive collection, as well as materials that have never before been exhibited. The exhibition borrows its title from Frank’s poignant 1980 film, in which the artist reflects on the individuals who have shaped his outlook. Like much of his work, the film is set in New York City and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where he and his wife, the artist June Leaf, moved in 1970. In the film, Leaf looks at the camera and asks Frank, “Why do you make these pictures?” In an introduction to the film’s screening, he answered: “Because I am alive.” Organized by Lucy Gallun, Curator, with Kaitlin Booher, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, and Casey Li, 12 Month Intern, Department of Photography

This focused exhibition presents a selection of superlative drawings from the courts and centers of India and Pakistan (with a few related Persian works) dating from the late sixteenth to the twentieth century. These works are mainly selected from The Met collection in partnership with film director James Ivory, whose recent gift to the Museum of nineteenth-century photograph albums will also be featured in the exhibition (2021.381.1-16). The drawings will include fresh and informal preparatory exercises for paintings as well as beautifully finished works in their own right. The photographs will present the subject matter and styles that came about in the contexts of royal patronage and ceremony; views of architecture, cities, landscapes, and people, among others. As an artist and filmmaker, James Ivory will help us appreciate this material through his unique gaze. A short film — An Arrested Moment — directed by Dev Benegal, will accompany the show.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape artists often sketched outdoors in oil paint on paper to capture nature from direct observation. Yet as natural as these scenes look, the vantages were chosen or augmented to draw the viewer into the composition. Whether through adding a prescribed path, capturing flecks of light glinting off a winding river, or presenting a series of plateaus receding into the distance, artists created a point of entry and route along which the viewer could journey. These small-scale oil sketches—including a work by one of the few female European landscape painters of her era, Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont—illustrate how artists synthesized the real and ideal to evoke the experience of encountering nature.

United by their assertive, sometimes insistent, political messages, the fifty-two works by thirty-three artists included in this exhibition offer a select and lively perspective on American elections, politicians and social power dynamics. Spanning more than five decades, the works not only refer to political subjects and social issues specific to their time, but also resonate with ideological and humanistic themes amazingly relevant today. This exhibition invites the viewer to compare and contrast many visual strategies that explore issues of racism, demagoguery, oppression, war, climate change, among others. Some artists employ tools such as satire, propaganda, and the portrayal of newsworthy events or utopian ideals. Others utilize more iconic subjects—such as U.S. presidents, Uncle Sam, the Oval Office, and Old Glory—to celebrate, examine, and critique American governance and policy.

Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois presents the first exhibition of seminal Nouveau Réalisme artist Jacques Villeglé’s work in New York in over 20 years and the first since his passing in 2022. The show is a survey exhibition of 10 important paintings and one sculpture. Villeglé is a forerunner of pop art and street art. His mixed media paintings consist of layering and lacerating street posters to build up his images. The show in New York is accompanied by a second show at the Vallois gallery in Paris.

The rich tradition of Mexican printmaking—ranging from the 18th to the mid-20th century—is explored in this exhibition of works drawn primarily from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among the early works on display are those by Mexico’s most famous printmaker, José Guadalupe Posada, whose depictions of skeletons engaged in different activities helped Mexican art establish a global identity. After the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), printmaking proved to be an ideal medium for artists who wanted to address social and political issues and express resistance to the rise of fascism around the world. Artists also turned to printmaking to reproduce Mexican murals from the 1920s and to produce exhibition posters, prints for mass media, and portfolios celebrating Mexican costumes and customs.

For the 2024 Genesis Facade Commission, South Korean artist Lee Bul (born 1964, Yeongju, based in Seoul) has created four new sculptures that combine figurative and abstract elements. The Genesis Facade Commission: Lee Bul,Long Tail Halois the artist’s first major project in the United States in more than twenty years and the fifth in the series of contemporary commissions for The Met Fifth Avenue’s facade niches. With a career that spans four decades, Lee is widely recognized as the preeminent artist from South Korea. She is known for her sophisticated use of both highly industrial and labor-intensive materials, incorporating artisanal practices as well as technological advancements into her work. Her sculptures, often evoking bodily forms that are at once classical and futuristic, address the aspirations and disillusions that come with progress. The Genesis Facade Commission is part of The Met’s series of contemporary commissions in which the Museum invites artists to create new works of art, establishing a dialogue between the artist’s practice, The Met collection, the physical Museum, and The Met’s audiences.

A defining Black woman artist of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) has not received the mainstream art-world attention afforded many of her peers. The Brooklyn Museum, in partnership with the National Gallery of Art, closes this gap with Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies, an exhibition of over 200 works that gives this revolutionary artist and radical activist her due. A deft sculptor and printmaker, devout feminist, and lifelong social justice advocate, Catlett was uniquely committed to both her creative process and political convictions. Growing up during the Great Depression, she witnessed class inequality, racial violence, and U.S. imperialism firsthand, all while pursuing an artistic education grounded in the tenets of modernism. Catlett would protest injustices for nearly a century, via both soaring artworks and on-the-ground activism. Born in Washington, DC, Catlett settled permanently in Mexico in 1946 and for the rest of her life she worked to amplify the experiences of Black and Mexican women. Inspired by sources ranging from African sculpture to works by Barbara Hepworth and Käthe Kollwitz, Catlett never lost sight of the Black liberation struggle in the United States. Characterized by bold lines and voluptuous forms, her powerful work continues to speak directly to all those united in the fight against poverty, racism, and imperialism.