The best museum exhibitions in NYC right now

“This isn’t a conventional exhibition. But then the Frick isn’t a conventional house or museum or gallery,” says Edmund de Waal, the ceramicist whose site-specific installation Elective Affinities opens at The Frick on May 30. The show is made up of sculptures that were created in conversation with the objects on display from the museum's permanent collection. “The process of working with a historic collection or archive is always different,” the artist explains. “The most valuable insights come in the margins of texts, in the throwaway comments of curators. Much of my work is a kind of conceptual scribbling in the margins, too.”

Mika Rottenberg’s first solo museum show in New York, Easypieces, opens on June 26. Curator Margot Norton gets you up to speed on the multimedia artist:

What’s in the show?
The exhibition mixes past work (including a video that premiered at the Venice Biennale) with the premiere of a new piece called Spaghetti Blockchain in a disorienting immersive exhibition where visitors will “weave through tunnels, walls of multicolored garlands, a hallway filled with fans” and other surreal spaces, Norton says.  

What’s it about?
“Employing absurdist satire to address the critical issues of our time, Rottenberg creates videos and installations that offer subversive allegories for contemporary life,” Norton explains of Rottenberg’s work, which blend documentary with fiction, often with protagonists who toil “in factory-like settings to manufacture goods ranging from cultured pearls (No Nose Knows, 2015) to the millions of brightly colored plastic wholesale items sold in Chinese superstores (Cosmic Generator, 2017).”

Why now?
Rottenberg examines the shifting ways we think about value and, well, stuff, as tech paves the way for an increasingly virtual world, Norton says. “Rottenberg’s works highlight the absurd qualities of labor practices in our globalized economy and shed light on how seemingly insignificant or immaterial items can affect change to our climate, our universe, and the ways we connect and communicate with one another.”

Since a fateful trip to New Orleans in 1978 introduce her to the world of cross dressing, Mariette Pathy Allen has photographed a wide spectrum of gender expression. Through September 8, the Museum of Sex looks back on four decades of creative collaborations, like this one (above) with an artist named Toby.

“Toby is a drag artist, an entertainer, and was the [opener for] Ethyl Eichelberger. I photographed many drag artists in the '80s and the '90s—these were playful collaborations, fantasy. Drag artists usually have a great sense of humor, and know how to take up space. This photograph came together at the end of a long day of shooting. By this time, Toby's make-up was askew, and she was tired. At the end, it felt right for her to wind up in this fetal position. I hope this exhibition will inspire people. Young viewers in particular might be astonished by the difficulties gender nonconformists experienced in the past, and how creative and determined we all were to create tolerance, and even appreciation, for people who have been stigmatized for so long in the USA and most of the rest of the world.”

This summer, The New-York Historical Society commemorates a half-century of the gay liberation movement with the Stonewall 50 slate of programing. Here, assistant curator of material culture Rebecca Klassen gives the scoop on Stonewall.

Why is the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising so important?
The Stonewall uprising was a moment in which LGBTQ people, who could be arrested for expressing their identities, resisted a commonplace raid by the police on a gay bar. Over the past 50 years Stonewall has been invoked as a rallying call for action, as a point of inspiration, and as an historical marker for a battle that was fought.

What are some exhibition highlights?
Some of my favorite objects in the three exhibitions are footwear: sneakers worn by the artist Keith Haring, roller skates worn by the activist and disco personality Rollerena, and Dr. Martens boots worn by Christina McKnight to several years of Dyke Marches. To me, all of them represent physical movement as an expression of liberation.  

What do you hope visitors take from these exhibitions?  
First, that gay life didn’t begin with Stonewall. Second, that if you've attended a Pride parade in New York, you were celebrating the anniversary of the uprising.

The song “The Moon Represents My Heart” by Taiwanese pop star Teresa Teng stirs emotions for Chinese-speaking people around the world. “It has a visceral connection to Chineseness for people of a certain generation,” explains Herb Tam, curator of the Museum of Chinese in America, where a new exhibition named for the 1977 hit looks at the emotional connection between music and memory in immigrant Chinese communities as far back as the 1850s. Guest curated by New Yorker writer Hua Hsu, the exhibition is a “a big mixtape of music that matters to Chinese in America,” explains Tam, whose personal playlist for the show includes 1927 pop song “The Drizzle,” 1960s Chinatown doo-wop group The Fortune Cookies, and Y2K-era rapper MC Jin’s “Learn Chinese.”