Art
Art galleries, exhibitions and reviews of the latest and best art in New York
MoMA is offering free online art courses you can take from home
It will probably be a while before your next visit to the Museum of Modern Art—though you can still take a podcast tour of the collection or visit it online. But now that you have some down time, you might want to take things to another level and up your art game. As it happens, the Museum of Modern Art makes it easy through its free Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on Coursera. Thanks to these offerings, you'll be able to hear directly from curators, artists and designers, and take a closer look at the works featured in MoMA's collection and exhibitions. You can enroll in the program anytime and complete it at your own pace. So what can you expect? A lot of cool stuff, actually, and to you give some idea, we've listed a few examples below. You can register for all of the offerings now at Cousera. What Is Contemporary Art? Good question, and one that will likely get answered by exploring more than 70 works of art made between 1980 and the present. Modern Art & Ideas MoMA digs into its collection to examine some of the major themes that have occupied artists and designers over the last 100 years or so. Seeing Through Photographs Artist and curators weigh in on how photography has been used throughout its history, and the impact it's made on culture as a result. Fashion as Design What we wear, why we wear it, how it’s made, and what it means is the focus of this look at fashion and its crucial role in defining the look of historical periods, including our own.
You can now take a virtual tour of NYC's best street art
Though shuttered by the coronavirus pandemic, many of New York's museums and galleries are allowing viewers to commune with art through virtual tours and web-only viewing rooms. But what if street art is more your thing? As it happens, you're covered there, too, thanks to Google Arts & Culture, which offers an online experience called 9 Amazing Street Art Murals in New York, featuring work by the genre's heaviest hitters. The tour utilizes Google street view to take you to see NYC's most vivid murals with a full 360-degree line of sight. Prolific Brazilian street artist Eduardo Kobra, for instance, is represented by three murals: A double portrait of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in Crown Heights; another in Bushwick pairing Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat wearing boxing gloves; and a rendering of David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, which climbs up the side of a condo tower in Jersey City. Photograph: Ali Garber A street art tour wouldn't be complete without Banksy, and his Hammer Boy on the Upper West Side (a spray-painted silhouette of a kid wielding a sledgehammer against an actual FDNY standpipe) is here, as is Keith Haring's famous Crack Is Wack mural at Harlem River Drive and 128th Street. Other notable street art destinations include the Big Pun Memorial Mural by Tats Cru in the Bronx, the Bowery Graffiti Wall on Houston Street, Freeman's Alley on the Lower East Side and the Graffiti Hall of Fame in Harlem. So if you're jonesing for street art murals, look no further.
These NYC-based artists are making free digital coloring books
The golden age of adult coloring books is here, and right now especially, folks need to put colored pencils or crayons to paper and focus on something playful. Even if you’re a pretty subpar artist, the act of scribbling inside the lines here is a triumph in and of itself. Coloring allows you to mindfully engage enough with one task to occupy your mind, without feeling anxious that you have to be productive while cooped up inside your apartment. Incredible NYC illustrators have taken their doodling and artistic abilities to create digital coloring books ready to download and print at home, so you can decompress while adding some color to your life. Emmy-award winning animator and artist Mike Perry Fans of Comedy Central's Broad City should be familiar with Mike Perry’s psychedelic work. For the uninitiated, his vital animated illustrations for the show are found at the beginning of each episode, setting the scene for what you’re about to watch. Perry created a 150-page coloring book in 2017 filled with his hand-drawn animations inspired by the show. It allows you to feel like you're a part of Abbi and llana’s crazy world and color it into 2-D. Beyond Broad City, Perry's years of art can be found inside studios from NYC to LA, and even as murals in the community. Now, while self-isolating, the Brooklyn-based artist has given the gift of more drawings for us to color, this time inspired by his personal life, free for download here. There are 70 whole pages in the PDF. Mike Pe
Take a trip to your favorite NYC museums with these virtual tours
Coronavirus has NYC practically on lock down with closures of Broadway theaters, bars, restaurants and museums. While you can still get take out and even cocktails to go (hooray!), no one has quite figured out how to eat or drink digitally at your favorite restaurants. That’s not a problem for several of NYC’s major museums, however, that are all offering virtual tours through their collections and exhibitions—all for free and all from the comfort of your couch. Available in partnership with Google Arts & Culture, the tours feature images from various collections and, in some cases, walkabouts through parts of the museum via street view. So if you’re getting tired of Netflix, and want to try something more culturally enriching, here are some of the online experiences you should definitely check out. The Metropolitan Museum Of Art Some 200,770 objects covering 5,000 years of art history await you at The Met online, which lets you browse the entire collection, and visit online exhibits like, “The Art of Music through Time,” which includes audio of the curators weighing in on the historical instruments on display. There are also street view tours of various galleries at the Met and the Met Breuer. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, Paul Cézanne's Still Life with Apples and Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy are just some of the 129 modern masterpieces from the Museum of Modern Art that you'll find on Google Arts & Culture, along with online exhibit
Take a podcast tour through MoMA’s highlights with Abbi Jacobson
Since the city went into lockdown because of the pandemic, Gotham's major museums have moved online to share their exhibitions and holdings with New Yorkers sheltering in place. These web experiences offer much-needed diversions in troubled times, and that's doubly true of "A Piece of Work," a podcast tour of collection highlights at the Museum of Modern Art hosted by comedian and actor Abbi Jacobson. Promising "everything you wanted to know about modern and contemporary art but were afraid to ask," "A Piece of Work" is co-produced by WNYC and features the Broad City and Disenchantment star as she ponders the meaning of contemporary art, often in the company of famous friends. In one segment, Jacobson discusses the in-and-outs of performance art with RuPaul, who allows that she likes anything with naked people and fat butts in it. This leads to a discussion of Sir Mix-A-Lot before segueing into a conversation about Carolee Schneemann's classic art performance, Meat Joy. In another episode, Jacobson's Broad City co-star Hannibal Buress joins her for an encounter with Marcel Duchamp's iconic, ur-conceptual artwork, Bicycle Wheel, which consists of the eponymous object mounted onto a wooden stool. Buress’s reaction is to label the piece “so Williamsburg,” while also pleading to spin it. You may wonder what qualifies Jacobson as an art connoisseur, but in fact she went to art school and makes art. And while her guest sometimes sound like they're poking fun of what they see, Jaco
What's on view at NYC museums
Current art exhibition reviews
Latest art news
See the new outdoor art coming to the High Line in April
Besides being one of the coolest attractions in New York, the High Line is also of the the biggest showcases for outdoor art in the city. Every spring, the High Line picks an international roster of artists to create site-specific sculptures for the elevated structure to go along with its the views of Chelsea and the Hudson Yards. Hannah Levy, Retainer, 2020 Photograph: Courtesy the High Line The commissions include individual works, and as well thematically organized pieces situated throughout the park. The former includes a mural by Jordan Casteel located at 22nd Street, which has been up since the beginning of the year, and two new additions by Hannah Levy and Ibrahim Mahama, respectively. Levy's work is titled Retainer and it is just that: An oversize rendering of an orthodontic appliance made of carved marble and stainless steel; it'll be taking up a spot at 23rd Street. Mahama, meanwhile is presenting 57 Forms of Liberty, which consists of an inverted industrial tank from an old factory, sprouting a tree—an idea inspired by a rusted smokestack the artist saw in Ghana, which likewise served as a mini arboretum. You'll find it at Northern Spur Preserve by 16th Street. Ibrahim Mahama, 57 Forms of Liberty, 2020 Photograph: Courtesy the High Line This year's theme show is titled The Musical Brain and aims to explores "how music can be used as a tool to inhabit and understand the world." Eight artists—Rebecca Belmore,Vivian Caccuri, Raúl de Nieves, Guillermo Galin
Works by internationally renowned artists are coming to LaGuardia Airport's Terminal B
If you pull your luggage through LaGuardia Airport's shiny, new Terminal B Arrivals and Departures Hall when it opens later this year, you'll see major installations designed by internationally-recognized artists that will "express the creative spirit of New York." The Public Art Fund on Thursday announced that it has partnered with LaGuardia Gateway Partners to commission four art installations inside the new terminal's Arrivals and Departures Hall. The Public Art Fund selected Jeppe Hein, Sabine Hornig, Laura Owens, and Sarah Sze out of a group of creatives who developed proposals for original and iconic artworks for the terminal. While the chosen artists have been featured at museums around the world, they have also all had artwork shown here in New York: Jeppe Hein, a resident of Berlin, recently had his piece, Please Touch the Art, displayed at the Brooklyn Bridge Park in 2015. Sabine Hornig, also based in Berlin, has had her work, Projects 78, featured at The Museum of Modern Art. Laura Owens from Los Angeles has been featured at the Guggenheim, MoMA, and the Whitney. Sarah Sze, who lives in NYC, is a professor of visual arts at Columbia University and recently unveiled her work at the new Second Avenue subway line's 96th Street Station called Blueprint for a Landscape. Jeppe Hein, Laura Owens, Sabine Honig and Sarah Sze Photographs: Courtesy Tom-Wagner, Noah Webb, Sabine Honig and Sarah Sze The initial portion of Terminal B (the new eastern concourse that opened in 20
Follow love stories at this massive exhibit coming to a Brooklyn warehouse
If anything deserves a massive exhibition, it's love! Open now through March 31, A Romantic Comedy, showcases 50 works by 28 international and local artists all about the ambiguities of romance—and it's set across the 16,000-square-foot Williamsburg warehouse called 25 Kent. The show is curated by Sophia Sobers and Steven Pestana and told over three parts that create a narrative, pulling in topics like courtship, domesticity, online dating and workplace dynamics in a whimsical, fantastical (and sometimes confusing) way, without the Hollywood cliches. Photograph: Andrew Allison While you're there, make sure to find the following: Amanda Nedham's life-sized bathtub made of paper, a recreation of Paul Manafort's Brooklyn home foyer that's made with actual sales flyers left on his doorstep (all by Kyle Hittmeier), and Amanda Thackray's pinky-red mesh Caul Veil that echoes the webs we weave in our relationships. The show's curators, Sobers and Pestana, have exhibited art for the Rubin Museum, the Knockdown Center, the Spring/Break Art Show, BRIC, the Museum of American Art and more. You can find out more at Wallplay.com. A Romantic Comedy is at 25 Kent Avenue through March 31, Wednesdays through Sundays from 11am to 7pm.
See this art installation transform a Times Square lobby into a garden party
If there’s one thing you could say about Times Square, it's that it’s stimulating—maybe a little too stimulating. Everywhere, giant flagship stores lure shoppers with visual theatrics, while five-story high digital billboards bombard you with ads for everything from Broadway musicals to Asian news agencies (though why tourists would be interested in the latter is anyone’s guess). But it has ever been thus: Almost from the beginning, Times Square has been dominated by noise, traffic—and especially by flashing, repeated messaging. Now, a new installation by artist and architect Aaron Pexa promises to provide a break from all that sensory overload. Taking up the lobby of 10 Times Square, Pexa's work is called Garden Party and combines floral wallpaper inspired by the building’s Art Deco interior with neon and back-lit sculptures. But Garden Party's main attraction is a mesmerizing, 20-minute video titled, I Wander the Forest in Search of Mystery. A surreal sequence that looks like it's been shot through gauze, I Wander the Forest features a crystal chandelier sparkling in the midday sun as it lazily twirls above a clearing by a lake. Every now and then, billowing clouds of colored smoke pass through the frame, obscuring the dreamlike mise-én-scene. Photograph: Zdravko Cota Pexa describes his effort as an escape from the strobing, quick-cut editing of the signage environment outside, and indeed, the installation title and its 1920s-style touches evoke nothing so much as a roma
Most popular art news
The best museums in NYC
New York City's cultural amenities are many, but none quite match the number, scale and variety of its museums. There is literally an institution for every interest, whether it’s in art, history, science or quirkier subjects. The Metropolitan Museum, for instance, shelters 5,000 years of art history under its roof with a collection that runs the gamut from Stone Age objects to the latest examples of contemporary art. And speaking of the latter, there’s a host of institutions dedicated to cutting-edge art, from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of Art to the New Museum and MoMA, which re-opened in 2019 after a significant expansion of its space, and a total rethink of its mission. There are dozens of other types of museums, too, some of which are encyclopedic (The American Museum Of Natural History), or focused on specific categories, such as NYC history (The New-York Historical and The Museum of the City of New York), architecture (the Skyscraper Museum), photography (International Center of Photography Museum), film (Museum of the Moving Image), sex (Museum of Sex), and even the subway (New York Transit Museum). And, of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg, even if you don’t count all of the other museums in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Is it a lot to take in? Certainly. But if you want find a museum with your name on it, look no further than our complete guide to the best museums in NYC, complete with highlights of current exhibitions at each.
