Featured Events in New York in May 2025 (June Updated)

Enamel decoration is a significant element of Chinese decorative arts that has long been overlooked. This exhibition reveals the aesthetic, technical, and cultural achievement of Chinese enamel wares by demonstrating the transformative role of enamel during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. The first transformational moment occurred in the late 14th to 15th century, when the introduction of cloisonné enamel from the West, along with the development of porcelain with overglaze enamels, led to a shift away from a monochromatic palette to colorful works. The second transformation occurred in the late 17th to 18th century, when European enameling materials and techniques were brought to the Qing court and more subtle and varied color tones were developed on enamels applied over porcelain, metal, glass, and other mediums. In both moments, Chinese artists did not simply adopt or copy foreign techniques; they actively created new colors and styles that reflected their own taste. The more than 100 objects on view are drawn mainly from The Met collection.

In 1969, The Who created a rock opera that changed the course of music history. Some 25 years later,The Who’s TOMMYarrived on Broadway, winning 5 Tony Awards® and pushing the boundaries of what musical theatre can be. This March, the Amazing Journey arrives in a dazzling new production direct from a sold-out, record-breaking, award-winning Chicago premiere. “Broadway has nothing else like this wizardry going on, not this season and nothing I know of for next season. Visually and sonically overwhelming, it’s a prescient masterpiece of a rock opera.”Chris Jones,Chicago Tribune

More than a hundred remarkable objects from the Heber Bishop collection, including carvings of jade, the most esteemed stone in China, and many other hardstones, are on view in this focused presentation. The refined works represent the sophisticated art of Chinese gemstone carvers during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) as well as the highly accomplished skills of Mogul Indian (1526–1857) craftsmen, which provided an exotic inspiration to their Chinese counterparts. Also on view are a set of Chinese stone-working tools and illustrations of jade workshops, which will introduce the traditional method of working jade.

The Jefferson R. Burdick collection of ephemera at The Met contains one of the most distinguished collections of historical baseball cards anywhere in the world. In 1947, Burdick (1900–1963), an electrician from Syracuse, New York, and avid collector of ephemera, began to donate in large batches his holdings of more than 300,000 trade cards, postcards, and posters to the Museum. Included in the donation were more than 30,000 baseball cards dating back to the 1880s. This exhibition features over one hundred dating cards from 1895 to 1956. Produced using a variety of printing techniques and in a range of styles, the cards feature legends of the game from a bygone era.

This timely exhibition looks back at the year the captivating Eurasian eagle-owl took to Manhattan’s skies, learned to hunt, and peered into apartment windows.

Playful, kinetic, and full of surprises, Songs of New York is an immersive interactive experience that introduces visitors to a full range of music from and about New York City, from the 1920s to the 2020s, showcasing everything from be-bop to K-pop, across genres, boroughs, and musical movements. Songs of New York will be installed in a dedicated gallery on the Museum’s second floor in February 2025. Featuring music from 100 artists, programmed with both sound and visuals, Songs of New York reflects on topics like the subway, apartments, nightlife, and neighborhoods, toggling through acts as diverse as Susanne Vega, Tito Puente, Merle Haggard, LCD Soundsystem, Yoko Ono, Lil’ Kim, and many, many others. The interactive experience will be paired with original photography from the MCNY collection, including works by notable photographers including Allan Tannenbaum, Joe Conzo, Fred W. McDarrah, and Janette Beckman, who captured images of NYC icons such as Blondie, LL Cool J, and the Velvet Underground that celebrate the city’s longstanding role as a place for music making and a source of inspiration for artists across the five boroughs.

He is one of the greatest entertainers of all time. Now, Michael Jackson’s unique and unparalleled artistry has finally arrived on Broadway in a brand-new musical. Centered around the making of his 1992 Dangerous World Tour, and created by Tony Award®- winning Director / Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, MJ goes beyond the singular moves and signature sound of the star, offering a rare look at the creative mind and collaborative spirit that catapulted Jackson into legendary status. Turn it up, Broadway — MJ is here! • MASKS OPTIONAL - All guests are strongly encouraged to wear a mask in the theatre to protect themselves and others, but it is no longer required.

Step into the heart of Cuba, beyond the glitz of the Tropicana, to a place where blazing trumpets and sizzling guitars set the dance floor on fire. Here, the real sound of Havana is born—and one woman discovers the music that will change her life forever. Inspired by true events, the new Broadway musical Buena Vista Social Club™ brings the Grammy® Award-winning album to thrilling life—and tells the story of the legends who lived it. A world-class Afro-Cuban band joins a sensational cast of musicians, actors, and dancers from around the world for an authentic experience unlike any you’ve seen or heard before. Don’t miss this unforgettable tale of big dreams, second chances, and the power of art to help us survive.

The exhibition is co-hosted by the Shanghai Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, USA. It brings together more than 200 collections from important domestic and foreign institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Museum in the UK, the Cernuschi Museum in France, the Palace Museum, the Shanghai Museum, and the Liaoning Provincial Museum. This exhibition is a friendly exchange project between the two museums. After the closing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in September 2025, the exhibition will move to the East Hall of the Shanghai Museum.

Thousands of artists—including Norman Rockwell, Mark Rothko, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jacob Lawrence—have studied and taught at the Art Students League, a New York institution founded in 1875 by a group of young artists who believed that an arts education should be accessible to anyone seeking it and who envisioned an artist-run school free from dictates of process or style. To mark the 150th anniversary of the League, The New York Historical showcases works by League affiliates with featured paintings drawn from The Historical’s promised gift of 130 scenes of New York City from art collectors and philanthropists Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld. The installation is part of a larger city-wide, cross-institutional, year-long celebration programmed by the Art Students League. Curated by Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto, vice president & chief curator, in collaboration with Ksenia Nouril, gallery director and curator, and Esther Moerdler, curatorial assistant, at the Art Students League.

Brazilian contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes creates mural-like, abstract paintings through an innovative technique she calls “monotransfer.” She begins this process by painting her forms onto clear plastic sheets. Once dry, she layers and adheres the painted films onto the canvas, and then peels off the plastic sheets, revealing the forms in reverse. The resulting vibrant and dynamic compositions balance abstract forms, organic patterns, and geometric structures on densely textured and intricate surfaces.

SMASH, inspired by the hit TV show, is finally on Broadway! A hilarious behind-the-scenes rollercoaster ride about the making of a Marilyn Monroe musical called Bombshell, it’s got all the iconic songs, kick-ass choreography, and backstage pandemonium that make Broadway the beloved institution it is today. Our cast is stacked, because who better to play a bunch of wannabe Broadway big shots than actual Broadway big shots? Among them: Robyn Hurder, Brooks Ashmanskas, Krysta Rodriguez, Bella Coppola, Jacqueline Arnold, Caroline Bowman, John Behlmann, Kristine Nielsen and Casey Garvin to name just a few.

Lorenzo Homar was a pioneering printmaker, poster designer, calligrapher, painter, illustrator, caricaturist, and costume and theatrical set designer. Active from the 1950s through the 1990s, few equal his impact and influence as a teacher of poster design and printmaking in Latin America. This exhibition focuses on his poster output over a thirty year period during which time his work reflected the complex history of Puerto Rico, encompassing elements of Taíno, Spanish, and African cultures as well as the rising tensions between tradition and modernity under the Luis Muñoz Marín government. His influence is so extensive that today he is known as the father of the Puerto Rican poster. Alejandro Anreus is Emeritus Professor of Art History and Latin American Studies, William Paterson University. A former curator at the Jersey City Museum and Montclair Art Museum, he is the author of over sixty articles and catalogue essays, and six books on Latin American and Latinx Art.

In East Asian cultures, the arts of poetry, calligraphy, and painting are traditionally referred to as the “Three Perfections.” This exhibition presents over 160 rare and precious works—all created in Japan over the course of nearly a millennium—that showcase the power and complexity of the three forms of art. Examples include folding screens with poems brushed on sumptuous decorated papers, dynamic calligraphy by Zen monks of medieval Kyoto, hanging scrolls with paintings and inscriptions alluding to Chinese and Japanese literary classics, ceramics used for tea gatherings, and much more. The majority of the works are among the more than 250 examples of Japanese painting and calligraphy donated or promised to The Met by Mary and Cheney Cowles, whose collection is one of the finest and most comprehensive assemblages of Japanese art outside Japan.

The Museum of Modern Art announces Jack Whitten: The Messenger, the first comprehensive retrospective dedicated to the groundbreaking art of Jack Whitten (American, 1939–2018), on view from March 23 through August 2, 2025, in the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions. Presented solely at MoMA, the exhibition will explore the full range of Whitten’s innovative art over his nearly six-decade career, showing more than 175 works from the 1960s to the 2010s, including paintings, sculptures, rarely shown works on paper, and archival materials. Together, these works will reveal how Whitten overturned the tenets of modern art-making to become one of the most important artists of our time. Beginning his career during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Whitten was under great pressure to create directly representational art as a form of activism, yet he dared to invent new forms of abstraction and, in the process, transformed the relationship between art, memory, and society.

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie radically reimagines the story of European porcelain through a feminist lens. When porcelain arrived in early modern Europe from China, it led to the rise of chinoiserie, a decorative style that encompassed Europe’s fantasies of the East and fixations on the exotic, along with new ideas about women, sexuality, and race. This exhibition explores how this fragile material shaped both European women’s identities and racial and cultural stereotypes around Asian women. Shattering the illusion of chinoiserie as a neutral, harmless fantasy, Monstrous Beauty adopts a critical glance at the historical style and its afterlives, recasting negative terms through a lens of female empowerment. Bringing together nearly 200 historical and contemporary works spanning from 16th-century Europe to contemporary installations by Asian and Asian American women artists, Monstrous Beauty illuminates chinoiserie through a conceptual framework that brings the past into active dialog with the present. In demand during the 1700s as the embodiment of Europe’s fantasy of the East, porcelain accumulated strong associations with female taste over its complex history. Fragile, delicate, and sharp when broken, it became a resonant metaphor for women, who became the protagonists of new narratives around cultural exchange, consumption, and desire.

In her first solo museum exhibition, Whitney Claflin (American, b.1983) features a focused selection of works tracing her distinctive approach to painting and ongoing engagement with notions of infatuation, misrecognition, and waywardness. The exhibition includes over twenty new and recent paintings, which careen between subjects and styles ranging from lyrical abstractions and breezy sketches to snippets of text, renditions of logos, and scraps of mass-produced textiles. Following the associative logic of a mixtape or poem, they express transient states of intensity. References and subcultural symbols—such as nods to 1970s flower-power paraphernalia, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, beloved New York bars, and the late-90s DIY scene of her teens in Providence, Rhode Island—suffuse her work with varying degrees of legibility. In addition to paintings, the exhibition also includes drawing, photography, video, and sculptural interventions, highlighting Claflin’s multifaceted approach.

The River is a Circle is a software-driven animation by Marina Zurkow (b. 1962, New York, NY) that presents a view of the Hudson River as a horizontal split between the world above and below the water. The dynamic composition of the animated elements is driven by algorithmic probability and reflects the current weather and season in New York. The work brings together a mix of river ecology, researched with the help of Hudson River Park Trust, and references to the history of the Meatpacking District, including its time as a trading post for the Lenape people, a hub for meat processing plants, a haven for queer night life, and a site for the sculptural works by Gordon Matta-Clark and David Hammons across from the Whitney. The River is a Circle extends the underwater environment to the terrace with maritime wreckage and oyster reef balls, structures used to provide a habitat for oysters. It speculates on circular systems and a potentially positive cyclical flow back to modest strategies of maintaining ecological networks.

The exhibition is drawn from the Museum’s collection, as well as through key loans from organizations including: Institute of Jazz Studies, Louis Armstrong House Museum & Archives, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, Celia Cruz Foundation, Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Centro), Royal House of LaBeija, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Remix⟷Culture, CUNY Center for Dominican Studies, Apollo Theater, Karla Flórez School of Dance, Think!Chinatown, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, Brooklyn Contra, and private lenders such as Rubén Blades, DJ Rekha, Judy Santos, Hellotones, and many more.

This exhibition presents a bold new history of American photography from the medium’s birth in 1839 to the first decade of the 20th century. Drawn from The Met’s William L. Schaeffer Collection, major works by lauded artists such as Josiah Johnson Hawes, John Moran, Carleton Watkins, and Alice Austen are shown in dialogue with extraordinary photographs by obscure or unknown practitioners made in small towns and cities from coast to coast. Featuring a range of formats, from coast to coast. daguerreotypes and cartes de visite to stereographs and cyanotypes, the show explores the dramatic change in the nation’s sense of itself that was driven by the immediate success of photography as a cultural, commercial, artistic, and psychological preoccupation. In 1835, even before the nearly simultaneous announcement of the invention of the new art in Paris and London, the American philosopher essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson noted with remarkable vision: “Our Age is Ocular.”

For the 2025 Roof Garden Commission, Jennie C. Jones (born 1968, Cincinnati, Ohio) will produce Ensemble. Only her second outdoor sculptural installation, the project will explore the sonic potential of stringed instruments as well as their formal possibilities. In the artist's unique response to modernism, these acoustic sculptures propose the line of the string as a proxy for art history, unbroken and continuous. In her paintings, sculptures, works on paper, installations, and audio compositions, Jones uses sound to respond to the legacy of minimalism and to modernism itself. Drawing on her immersion in Black improvisation and avant-garde music, she deploys sound and listening as important conceptual elements of her practice, from the acoustic fiberglass panels she affixes to canvas, which absorb sound and affect the acoustic properties of the environment, to the lines and bars she creates through her compositions that refer to elements of musical notation. Her work across media offers new possibilities for minimalist abstraction, challenging how—and by whom—it is produced.

This spring, the Guggenheim Museum’s iconic rotunda will fill Rashid Johnson’s Anxious Men, spray-painted text works, large-scale sculptures, films, and more in a highly anticipated mid-career exhibition. Rashid Johnson: Poems for a Deep Thinker will bring together nearly 90 works that showcase the Chicago-born, New York-based artist’s wide-ranging practice, exploring themes ranging from history and literature to black pop culture and music.

Mike King is America’s most prolific gig poster artist. What began as a means of promoting his own bands’ shows in the late 1970s gradually morphed into a full-time specialty in the art of the eye-catching concert poster. Today, there are few major venues or bands that have not worked with him—his imagery has saturated into the tapestry of American music culture, appearing on album covers, t-shirts, and, most importantly, posters. The posters in this exhibition are a mere slice of a much larger visual pie—a taste of some of Mike’s rarest posters from a thirty-year spread within his ongoing career. They highlight shifts in both the available technology for making posters, from fully analog to digital, as well as how the function of gig posters has evolved from advertisements to collectible merchandise. Rather than being presented strictly chronologically, each section focuses on Mike’s process for creating the paste-up or digital file necessary to produce each type of poster.

Di Donna Galleries presents The Surrealist Collage: Where Dreams and Reality Meet. Organized in collaboration with Timothy Baum-a renowned poet, essayist, collector, and expert in Dada and Surrealism-the exhibition showcases a significant collection of collages by leading Surrealist artists.The Surrealist Collage celebrates the evocative power of collage as a unique medium and explores how it embodied both the imagination and ingenuity of the Surrealists. By assembling fragments of printed images, photographs, and other ephemera, they created dreamlike compositions that merged the boundaries between reality and the imagination.

Lisson presents Leiko Ikemura’s first exhibition with the gallery, featuring many of the themes present in her work over the past 30 years, including a wide range of media from paintings in tempera to bronze figures and glass forms.

For Dyson’s first major installation with sound in New York City, the artist experiments with “breath as geography.” Inside a large sculptural pavilion, Dyson introduces a multichannel soundscape comprising the artist’s recordings of a range of spoken sounds. In what Dyson envisions as a kind of spatial drawing of field recordings, she explores the idea that the sound in between the words we speak can carry memories of places and spaces. As audiences move through the installation, the sonic textures and compositions change. Surrounded by grand waterways and architectural landmarks, the work encourages audiences to reflect upon the ways that our experience is grounded in the landscape beneath and encircling us.

Explore Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach (1988), one of the most important works by Faith Ringgold, a renowned artist, writer, and activist. This monumental quilt, the first in a series of five, tells the story of a young girl who dreams of flying from her Harlem rooftop to celebrate her own freedom and self-possession. This exhibition dives into Ringgold’s artistic influences and the lasting impact she has had on later generations of artists. Alongside Tar Beach, visitors will see works from the Guggenheim New York collection by European modernists such as Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso, who inspired Ringgold, and contemporary American artists such as Tschabalala Self and Sanford Biggers, whose work reflects her legacy.

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Julien Nguyen, the next exhibition in his gallery at 526 West 22nd Street. The exhibition includes twenty new paintings. Julien Nguyen draws inspiration from disparate historical periods and cultural traditions, collapsing time and distance to create new worlds. Nguyen embodies this approach not only in the content of his work, which references art history, science fiction, contemporary subjects, and the artist’s personal life, but also in his materials, which draw from Medieval, Renaissance, and traditional Japanese painting practices. This exhibition presents the artist’s first paintings made directly on copper panels, a painting technique first developed during the Middle Ages and later popularized by Old Masters such as Rembrandt and Jan Brueghel the Elder.

In the century since its founding as a public institution, the Morgan’s collections have grown dramatically, deepening the core assembled by J. Pierpont Morgan and his librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, who became the first Director of the institution. This growth is made possible through the support of members and donors who expand and enrich the historical, artistic, and literary contexts of the Morgan’s holdings, and this exhibition commemorates a notable selection of purchases, gifts, and promised gifts made in honor of the Morgan’s Centennial. Ranging from the Middle Ages to the present, the Centennial acquisition highlights include two manuscripts related to the publication of Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting; Renaissance and modern bookbindings of exceptional craftsmanship; an extraordinary group of manuscripts related to Queen Elizabeth I, Marie de’ Medici, Edgar Allan Poe, and John Coltrane; groups of photographs by Emmet Gowin and Frederick Sommer; and drawings by Parmigianino, Annibale Carracci, Cy Twombly, Helen Frankenthaler, Giuseppe Penone, and Bridget Riley.

In the spring and summer of 1919 and 1920, during a period of intense engagement with nature, artist Hilma af Klint drew flowers almost every day. “I will try,” she wrote, “to grasp the flowers of the earth.” This exhibition focuses on a recently discovered portfolio of drawings—jewel-toned watercolors made by a keen-eyed naturalist, attuned to the rhythms and bounty of the blooming season. Breaking with traditional botanical art, af Klint juxtaposed her exquisitely rendered blossoms with precisely drawn diagrams: a blooming sunflower is echoed by nested circles; a marsh marigold is accompanied by mirrored spirals; a cluster of budding branches is set against checkerboards of dots and strokes. With this profusion of forms—an expansion of the abstract language for which she is best known—af Klint visualizes “what stands behind the flowers,” demonstrating her belief that careful observation of her surroundings reveals ineffable aspects of the human condition.