11 can't-miss art exhibits in NYC this spring

This year's Orchid Show at New York Botanical Garden is truly a work of art. Magenta orchids cascade from tall rocks, water gently glides along a waterfall, a fresh botanical aroma wafts in and gravel paths beckon visitors to explore. 

Landscape artist Lily Kwong designed this year’s iteration, called “Natural Heritage,” drawing inspiration from classic paintings of Chinese mountainscapes passed down through her family from Shanghai, plus her own heritage, medicinal traditions and her artistic interpretation of nature as a healing force. She also incorporated concepts from Chinese garden design. 

The annual orchid show is now open in the Bronx and runs through Sunday, April 23, offering a lush tropical escape without leaving the five boroughs. 

A collection of 15 prints by renowned artist Kara Walker explores the brutality of slavery and highlights the omission of African American narratives from historical texts that emerged following the Civil War. 

The exhibit, titled "Kara Walker: Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)," responds to the two-volume anthology "Harper's Pictorial History of the Great Rebellion," which was first published in 1866. To create the prints, Walker enlarged illustrations from Harper’s and overlaid them with large, stenciled figures. In addition to looking back at this history, the work also urges visitors to consider the continuing legacy of racial stereotyping and violence. 

The exhibit is on view now through June 11, 2023 at The New-York Historical Society on the Upper West Side. The Historical Society added additional context to the artwork with images, objects, and documents from its collections.

Photographer Berenice Abbott captured New York in small, black-and-white images, 266 of which will be showcased in a fascinating exhibit at The Met this spring. The museum describes it as a "kind of photographic sketchbook" of her adventures throughout the city documenting skyscrapers, bridges, elevated trains and neighborhood life.

"It's one of the unique treasures of The Met. It has never been fully exhibited, not been fully conserved, or published in its entirety—until now," Met Director Max Hollein said. 

The photographer had intended on making just a short trip to New York City, but when she arrived, she was entranced. Abbott is quoted as saying, "When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life."

"Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929" will be on view from March 2-September 4, 2023.

The Black Panther Party, one of the most influential militant groups of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, devised a specific graphic language to reclaim Black humanity and decommodify Black life. A new exhibit at Poster House will chronicle how the group created that design language. 

"Black Power to Black People: Branding the Black Panther Party" features 37 works dating from 1932 to 1980. You'll see heroic images of party members, printed materials like The Black Panther newspaper, political campaign posters, and powerful photographs by artists including Emory Douglas, Dorothy Hayes and Danny Lyon.

The show is on view from March 2-September 10, 2023 at Poster House, the first museum in the United States dedicated to the global history of posters.

What does home look like? A new photography exhibit at Museum of the City of New York will explore the concept of how we live now. 

"New York Now: Home - A Photography Triennial" features the work of 33 contemporary photographers. Their images range from social documentary to conceptual, examining the way homes cross geographic borders, how homes are havens of safety for some but not all, and the fact that homes are chosen as much as they are inherited. Works also explore the experience of the home made within the human body.

This is the first in an ongoing photography exhibition series, which will occur every three years as a way to document different themes and issues of the contemporary city. See this year's show beginning on March 10, 2023 at the Upper East Side museum.

A new exhibit at The Rubin Museum of Art opening this spring will explore the concept of death and the afterlife through the art of Tibetan Buddhism and Christianity. See 58 object spanning 12 centuries in this new show. 

"Death Is Not the End" features prints, oil paintings, bone ornaments, thangka paintings, sculptures, illuminated manuscripts, and ritual objects, inviting "contemplation on the universal human condition of impermanence and the desire to continue to exist," as the museum described.

The exhibition focuses on three major themes: The Human Condition, or the shared understanding of our mortality in this world; States In-Between, or the concepts of limbo, purgatory, and bardo; and (After)life, focusing on resurrection, ideas of transformation, and heaven.

"Death Is Not the End" will be on view from March 17, 2023 through January 14, 2024 at the museum in Chelsea.

Three years ago, Broadway's theaters went dark amid the burgeoning COVID-19 pandemic. Actors no longer graced Manhattan's iconic stages, theater-goers clutching playbills couldn't pack into seats and the excited hubbub of the Theater District fell silent. 

While the streets were empty, Mark S. Kornbluth got to work photographing the theaters in stunning detail. The photos document a moment that's hard to imagine now as theaters are back once again. His photos are now on view in a new exhibit called "DARK" at Cavalier Galleries in Chelsea.

Kornbluth's photos document the state of suspended animation when one of the busiest places on earth went silent, when "unprecedented" became a common refrain. Though it's a tough moment to relive, the photos in "DARK" chronicle an important moment in time captured beautifully for the archives of our collective memory.

See the show at Cavalier Galleries in Chelsea (530 W 24th Street in Manhattan). It's on view through Saturday, April 15, 2023 on Tuesdays-Saturdays, 10am-6pm. 

The first exhibit to ever focus on Georgia O'Keeffe's drawings will open at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on April 9, 2023. Set up on the museum's third-floor south galleries, "Georgia O'Keeffe: To See Takes Time," will stay on view through August 12, 2023.

Visitors will get to look through over 120 works developed over 40 years using charcoal, watercolor, pastel and graphite, among other materials. Included in that roster is be No. 8 - Special (Drawing No. 8), from 1916, a "drawing [that] features a spiraling composition that would recur throughout the artist's decades-long career," according to an official press release about the upcoming exhibit. Fun fact: O'Keeffe named some of her pieces "specials" as an indication of her belief in their success.

"O'Keeffe's works on paper are the perfect expression of her belief that 'to see takes time,'" said Samantha Friedman, MoMA's associate curator, in an official statement. "She recognized the necessity of slowing down for her own vision and, in turn, her sequences of drawings invite us to take time in looking."

You may not know the name J.C. Leyendecker, but his artwork shaped American visual culture in the early 1900s. As a preeminent illustrator and commercial artist, Leyendecker created captivating advertisements and countless covers for the Saturday Evening Post.

"As a queer artist whose illustrations for a mainstream audience often had unspoken queer undertones, his work is especially revealing for what it says about the cultural attitudes towards homosexuality of the period," the New-York Historical Society wrote. The Historical Society will display the artist's works this spring.

You'll see 19 of the artist’s original oil paintings, from magazine covers to roadside billboards. His aesthetic influence extended to Norman Rockwell, his colleague and eventual successor as the Post’s premier illustrator. 

"Under Cover: J. C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity" will be on view May 5-August 13, 2023 on the Upper West Side.

For the first time in more than a century, two of Van Gogh's most beloved paintings—"Wheat Field with Cypresses" and "The Starry Night"—will be on display together in a new exhibition at The Met starting this spring.

The show, titled "Van Gogh's Cypresses," will be the first to focus on the artist's fascination with the flamelike trees.

Presented on the 170th anniversary of Van Gogh's birth, this show will bring together 40 works by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890). With a focus on the towering cypress trees featured in Van Gogh's work, the exhibition will explore one of the most famous trees in art history.

In addition to "Wheat Field with Cypresses" and "The Starry Night," the show will also feature "Country Road in Provence by Night" as well as drawings, with a deep focus on how the artist represented cypresses.

The show will run from May 22-August 27, 2023.

Indigenous plants will fill The Morgan Library & Museum's garden this summer, complementing an exhibit on Lenape teacher and herbalist Nora Thompson Dean.

To create the exhibit on Indigenous heritage, The Morgan is partnering with the Lenape Center, a Manhattan-based arts, culture and community center. This summer, native plants such as amaranth, Lenape squash and pumpkins will begin blooming in the museum's garden. Inside the museum's rotunda, visitors can explore the life of Nora Thompson Dean, "a Lenape elder who devoted her life to maintaining and sharing Lenape culture, language and knowledge, including knowledge about the natural environment of Lenapehoking, the land on which the Morgan is located," said Sal Robinson, a curator at The Morgan. Dean was one of the last fluent speakers of Lenape.

The exhibit will include Dean's letters and photographs as a way to explore her teaching, especially the knowledge she shared about the role of plants and planting in the Lenape worldview. Music by native composer Brent Michael Davids will accompany the exhibition. The show will be on view from June 6-September 17.