Featured Events in New York in December 2024 (May Updated)

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.

L'Elisir d'Amore is an Italian opera composed by Gaetano Donizetti. The opera tells the story of a young man named Nemorino who is in love with a beautiful and wealthy woman named Adina. In order to win Adina's heart, Nemorino buys a love potion from a traveling salesman named Dulcamara. The potion turns out to be fake, but Nemorino's belief in its power and the jealousy it inspires in Adina ultimately leads to their union. L'Elisir d'Amore is known for its beautiful arias and duets, as well as its lighthearted and humorous plot.

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.

Kim is a bright and funny Jersey teen, who happens to look like a 72-year-old lady. And yet her aging disease may be the least of her problems. Forced to maneuver family secrets, borderline personalities, and possible felony charges, Kim is determined to find happiness in a world where not even time is on her side.

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.

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

A mandala is a diagram of the universe—a map of true reality that in Tibet is used to conceptualize a rapid path to enlightenment. This exhibition explores the imagery of the Himalayan Buddhist devotional art through over 100 paintings, sculptures, textiles, instruments, and an array of ritual objects, mostly dating between the 12th and 15th centuries. This dazzling visual experience provides a roadmap for understanding Himalayan Buddhist worship through early masterworks, juxtaposed with a newly commissioned contemporary installation by Tibetan artist Tenzing Rigdol.

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.

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.

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.

In 1933, newly elected President Roosevelt initiated what became known as the New Deal, a series of federal programs and agencies designed to spearhead economic recovery from the Great Depression through public services, regulation, and new jobs. Among the programs his administration created in 1935 was the Rural Electrification Administration (REA). Managed by the Department of Agriculture, the REA helped build energy infrastructure in areas where private companies refused to operate, extending electricity to remote areas with small populations. Lester Beall was hired to advertise the REA’s work, creating three series of posters over a five-year span. Knowing that Americans were generally distrustful of overly intellectual and visually obtuse European modernism, Beall deftly translated and advanced these artistic concepts to create a new kind of American art, one that distilled the heart of various avant-garde movements with the need for clear communication and the desire to sell. This exhibition highlights the groundbreaking work Beall produced for the REA, as well as the development of his contributions to American modernism up through World War II.

Over the last several decades, Gillian Wearing’s work has chronicled confessions, taboos, and voyeuristic inclinations. Her videos and photographs often confront separations between private and public realms. Shot in a southeast London shopping mall, Dancing in Peckham depicts the artist freely dancing alone, without headphones and unaccompanied by music. Wearing’s camera also positions passersby as unwitting participants in the performance.

For a handful of decades at the end of the last century, one of the most popular ways for a superstar professional athlete to cement their iconic status was to have their persona memorialized on a Nike poster. It became a right of passage, and the posters’ popularity peaked as the Nike brand ascended to the pinnacle of its industry. In an age where athletes’ images are much more accessible and down to earth, these posters may seem quaint—but they’re also larger-than-life and undeniably entertaining, just like the stars they depict.Chronicling the many professional sports promoted by Nike, from basketball and football to tennis and golf, as well as the myriad athletes who worked with the brand, this exhibition showcases how one company paved the way for modern sports advertising.

Schütte considers his subjects and selects his materials while contextualizing them in a time and place: Germany at the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st. Since his student days at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Schütte has approached art with a critical eye. Exploring, then rejecting, Minimal and Conceptual art, his work “brought the story in again.” These stories encompass the personal and the historical. Schütte’s work challenges established artistic norms by revitalizing genres rooted in past traditions and making them relevant in the present and for the future.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has launched its first-ever major museum exhibition to examine the career of influential 20th-century architect Paul Rudolph, a second-generation Modernist architect who came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s alongside peers such as Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei. Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolphexhibits the full breadth of Rudolph’s important contributions to architecture—from his early experimental houses in Florida to his civic commissions rendered in concrete, from his utopian visions of urban megastructures and mixed-use skyscrapers to his extraordinary immersive New York interiors. The exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to experience the evolution and diversity of Rudolph’s legacy and to better understand how his work continues to inspire ideas for urban renewal and reconstruction around the world. The exhibition features more than 80 artifacts of varying scales, ranging from small objects collected throughout his life to a wide range of materials produced in his office, including drawings, models, furniture, material samples, and photographs.

Two Drag Houses, both alike in indignity, vie for supremacy in a wig-snatching, diva-licious journey of fashion, family, and forgiveness. Leave the lip syncs at the door, darling. Get ready for Drag realness: REAL singing, in a REAL theater, with REAL DRAMA. After their bitter split, fishy queen Alexis Gilmore opened her club, The Fishtank, as glamourpuss Miss Kitty established The Cathouse. Heels click and tensions rise as old wounds are opened and the two clubs fight to survive.

For her first museum exhibition in New York City, Lebanese American artist Nour Mobarak presents a large-scale installation reinterpreting the first opera, Dafne, which was staged by Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini in 1598 and inspired by Ovid’s myth of Apollo and Daphne. In Mobarak’s reimagining of Dafne, 15 singing sculptures—encasing a multichannel sound installation within mycelium structures—recount the tale in some of the world’s most phonetically complex languages. Building on histories of avant-garde sound, Mobarak’s most ambitious work to date draws on a longstanding interest in mechanized voice and memory across her practice, which ranges from sculpture to performance, moving image, poetry, and music. In Dafne Phono, Mobarak draws analogies between linguistic structure and the biological processes of mycelium, exploring how both are governed by systems of repetition, decomposition, and regeneration, and relate to wider forces of political power. Bringing new perspectives to a key antecedent in the history of performance, Dafne Phono joins nature and technology in an exploration of the voice’s ability to endure cycles of life and death, bridging histories both ancient and present.

Public Art Fund partnered with The Studio Museum in Harlem to advise Lincoln Center on the selection of artists for this first iteration of the art program. Two prominent sites were identified for the site-specific commissions: the 50-foot Hauser Digital Wall in the lobby, which Jacolby Satterwhite has animated with a richly layered and inclusive celebration of performance that brings into dialogue the past, present and future; and the Hall’s 65th Street façade, which Nina Chanel Abney has transformed into a captivating tribute to the vibrant history and culture of San Juan Hill. Both artists undertook extensive research to develop their works. They emerge as gifted visual storytellers, committed to a more inclusive understanding of the past while giving us all a sense of future potential at a moment of reopening and reinvention.

Abstract art has evolved significantly over the years. Since our inception in 1982, the Anita Shapolsky gallery has been dedicated to showcasing and supporting artists who work in abstraction. We are excited to present a compelling blend of historical and contemporary abstract art in our upcoming exhibition Abstract Art Yesterday and Today.

This exhibition selects more than 200 artworks from KAWS's private collection, and is personally curated and designed by the artist. The exhibition explains KAWS's unique appreciation of art to the audience and reveals the inspiration for his public sculptures, multimedia art, commercial products and interactive exhibition projects. KAWS began to cultivate his hobby of collecting art in the mid-1990s, and has collected more than 3,000 works on paper from different artists around the world, most of which are cartoonists, graffiti painters and self-taught artists.

The first US survey of artist Sohrab Hura (Indian, b. 1981) showcases more than fifty works from the last two decades of his experimental practice. Sohrab Hura: Mother weaves together bodies of work across photography, film, sound, drawing, painting, and text that have never before been shown together. Renowned for capturing remarkable everyday moments that give form to systemic political forces, Hura brings into focus colonially imposed borders, the trauma of partition, and the changing ecosystem of the Indian subcontinent. This survey includes a selection of key works such as Pati (2010), a film that explores the rural Indian region of Madhya Pradesh and its role in the movement to pass the 2005 National Rural Employment Guarantee Act; The Coast (2019), a book project, series of photographs, and film that use India’s coastline as a lens to examine the nation’s changing politics; and a selection of pastel drawings and gouache paintings from Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed (2022–ongoing) and Ghosts in My Sleep (2023–ongoing), his new series depicting familial memories both experienced and imagined. Through cathartic strategies of personal and political introspection, the exhibition traces Hura’s shifting existential concerns around the ethics of image-making as a documentary act. Sohrab Hura is a photographer and filmmaker who lives and works in New Delhi, India. Recent solo and group exhibitions have been presented at Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Amsterdam; Liverpool Biennial 2021; Kunstmuseum Bonn; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; and the Cincinnati Art Museum. His films have been shown in film festivals such as the Berlin International Film Festival and the 66th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Hura has self-published five books under the imprint Ugly Dog. His work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai; and the Cincinnati Art Museum, among others.

Sanxingdui is one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of mankind in the 20th century. The Sanxingdui site is a Bronze Age civilization of about 3,600 years ago. It was accidentally discovered by a farmer in Guanghan City, Sichuan Province, China in 1927 and is a treasure trove of cultural relics. With large-scale excavations in 1986 and 2021, more than 30,000 pieces of gold, jade, ivory, stone, pottery, and the most unique bronze objects have been unearthed so far. These mysteriously patterned bronze objects, including the 2.62-meter-high "Bronze Standing Man", the 1.38-meter-wide "Bronze Mask" and the 3.95-meter-high "Bronze Sacred Tree", are unprecedented and sublime masterpieces. "Sanxingdui Encounter: A 12K National Treasure Micro-Viewing Global Journey" is an immersive digital exhibition, the first of its kind produced in collaboration between the Sanxingdui Museum and the Memor Museum, which will open in October 2024 on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, New York. This exhibition, which has been shown in Beijing, Shenzhen, Paris and Doha, is now on display in New York for the first time, using one-to-one replicas of the Sanxingdui Museum's collections and ultra-high-definition technology to showcase precious artifacts unearthed from the Sanxingdui site. For the first time, through the immersive 12k digital hall, VR and AI interactive activities, you can experience Sanxingdui up close digitally and appreciate the mysterious ancient Shu civilization.

Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350 examines an exceptional moment at the dawn of the Italian Renaissance and the pivotal role of Sienese artists—including Duccio, Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and Simone Martini—in defining Western painting. In the decades leading up to the catastrophic onset of the plague around 1350, Siena was the site of phenomenal artistic innovation and activity. While Florence is often positioned as the center of the Renaissance, this presentation offers a fresh perspective on the importance of Siena, from Duccio’s profound influence on a new generation of painters to the development of narrative altarpieces and the dissemination of artistic styles beyond Italy.

Harry Potter™: The Exhibition is a groundbreaking touring exhibition that celebrates the iconic moments, characters, settings, and beasts as seen in the Harry Potter™ film series and the Wizarding World through best-in-class immersive design and technology. Celebrate your favorite moments, props, costumes, characters, and locations from the Harry Potter film series, as well as experience the expanded Wizarding World including iconic moments, creatures, and stories from Fantastic Beasts™ and Harry Potter and The Cursed Child.

Nara Roesler New York presents Exploded View, André Griffo's first solo show in the United States. With a critical essay by Lúcia Stumpf, the show brings together around 12 works by the artist developed over the last year specifically the exhibition.