Each week, we search New York City for the most exciting and thought-provoking shows, screenings, and events. See them below. 

Tuesday, June 25

“How Many of Us Will Be Thriving for Stonewall 100?” Image courtesy of the High Line.

1. “HOW MANY OF US WILL BE THRIVING FOR STONEWALL 100?” at the High Line

The High Line is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots with a conversation on queer well-being, hosted in collaboration with the collective What Would an HIV Doula Do? The evening will include readings with artists and activists that consider what the queer community might look like in 50 years—and their hope not only for it to survive, but to thrive.

Location: The High Line at West 14th Street
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Tuesday, June 25 and Wednesday, June 26

Tama Ettun, Dead Sea. Photo by Charlie Rubin, courtesy of Pioneer Works.

2. “Tamar Ettun: Dead Sea” at Pioneer Works

Sculptor and performance artist Tamar Ettun will take over two floors at Pioneer Works for this newly commissioned work, two years in the making. Her largest production to date, Dead Sea uses complex sets featuring massive sails and lifeguard stands to tell the Magical Realism-infused tale of Abigail, a struggling Israeli woman who has never been to the sea.

Location: Pioneer Works, 159 Pioneer Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn
Price: $5–20
Time: 8 p.m.–10 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Wednesday, June 26

Portrait of Vince Aletti by Steven Haas, courtesy of Phaidon.

3. “Issues: Critic Vince Aletti on the Photographic History of Fashion Magazines” at the Cooper Union

Author and critic Vince Aletti will be discussing his new book Issues: A History of Photography in Fashion Magazines with graphic designer Ruth Ansel and art director Sam Shadid. Aletti, who served as art editor and photo critic for the Village Voice until 2005 and frequently contributes to the New Yorker, and will be signing copies of his new book on a first-come, first-served basis.

Location: Cooper Union Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, 41 Cooper Square
Price: Free, reserve a space here
Time: 6:30 p.m.–8 p.m.

—Caroline Goldstein

Thursday, June 27

TREVORSHAUS curators Caitlin Baucom and Charlotte Doh. Photo by Elizabeth LoPiccolo.

4. “Permanent Water” at the Wythe Hotel 

To celebrate Pride, the Wythe Hotel and TREVORSHAUS are creating “an immersive wonderland of queer performance” featuring performances and a complimentary hour of welcome cocktails from Milagro Tequila. A portion of ticket sales will go to Immigration Equality, a group that supports LGBTQ and HIV-positive immigrants.

Location: Wythe Hotel, 80 Wythe Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Price: $20
Time: 8 p.m.–late

—Tanner West

Thursday, June 27–Friday, August 2

5. “Abstract by Nature” at Sean Kelly

Sean Kelly is going in a bit of an unusual direction with its summer group show, painting historic Chinese, Korean, and Japanese ceramics along with contemporary painting, sculpture, film, and video works by the likes of Callum Innes, Markus Karstieß, Hyun-Sook Song, Su Xiaobai, and Wu Chi-Tsung.

Location: Sean Kelly, 475 Tenth Avenue
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Thursday, June 27–Sunday, August 18

6. “Frank Zadlo: Ad Astra” at Victori+Mo Gallery

New York-based artist Frank Zadlo presents three new series of works for his second solo show at the gallery. “Moonscapes,” made of hand-dyed indigo linen, concrete, and silicon carbon, a material used in sidewalks, reference the history of landscape painting. The works are part canvas and part sculptural vessel with concrete pours in suspended animation. For the artist’s “Flat Screen” sculptures, Zadlo pours wet concrete into television screens, forcing material transmutations. The show is bookended with two related works, a sculpture made of three blocks of broken concrete resting on each other on a hand truck in the front room and colored powder-coated steel sculptures in the backyard.

Location: Victori+Mo, 242 West 22nd Street
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m. and by appointment

—Eileen Kinsella 

Friday, June 28

Rashaad Newsome, When You’re Talking to Someone and You Know They are Lying but You Keep Listening (2015). Courtesy of De Buck Gallery.

7. “Proud Mary” at Gibson + Luce at Life Hotel

James Beard Award-winning chef JJ Johnson is putting together a week’s worth of Pride events at the Henry and Gibson + Luce, his restaurant and speakeasy at midtown’s Life Hotel. On Friday night, artist Rashaad Newsome is hosting a Proud Mary party, where he’ll be providing the music along with art-world publicist and DJ April Hunt.

Location: Life Hotel, 19 West 31st Street
Price: Free
Time: 10 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Friday, June 28–Sunday, July 28

Macon Reed, Mean Girl Shark Tank (2019). Courtesy of A.I.R. Gallery.

8. “Letters to My Imagination: Macon Reed” at A.I.R. Gallery

Macon Reed’s cheerful bright colors and handmade aesthetic stand at odds with her subject matter: The way in which capitalism and the labor system are destroying our imaginations. This is the artist’s first exhibition dedicated primarily to  photography, featuring images of sculptures and performances staged in Reed’s large-scale dioramas

Location: A.I.R. Gallery, 155 Plymouth Street
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Wednesday–Sunday, 12 p.m.–6 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Friday, June 28–Wednesday, September 18

The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire with Canaletto’s Venice: A View of the Doge’s Palace and the Riva Degli Schiavoni From the Piazzetta (Shown Left) and Venice: A View of Santa Maria Della Salute and the Entrance to the Grand Canal From the Piazetta. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.

9. “Treasures From Chatsworth” at Sotheby’s 

Sotheby’s is pulling out all the stops for this selling exhibition of work from the Chatsworth House Collection. Designed by Broadway’s David Korins, the show draws on architectural details from the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s historic UK home, blowing them up to larger-than-life scale to create an immersive environment in which to display such masterpieces as a Leonardo da Vinci  drawings, a Rembrandt portrait, and a diamond wedding tiara.

Location: Sotheby’s, 1334 York Avenue
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday, Monday-Saturday,10 a.m.–5 p.m., Sunday, 1 p.m.–5 p.m.

—Nan Stewert

Through Saturday, June 29

Kiki Kogelnik, Friends. Photo courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

10. “Kiki Kogelnik” at Mitchell-Innes and Nash

Don’t miss Mitchell-Innes and Nash’s first solo show for artist Kiki Kogelnik (1935–1997), whose feminist take on Pop art often reduces the human form into colorful silhouettes. Paintings and sculptures from the early 1960s to the late ’80s reflect the post-war era, with all its technological advancement and political instability, as experienced by an Austrian artist who spent most of her life in New York City.

Location: Mitchell-Innes and Nash, 534 West 26th Street
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Zoya Cherkassky, Mama (2019). Courtesy of Fort Gansevoort.

11. “Zoya Cherkassky: Soviet Childhood” at Fort Gansevoort

Born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1976, Zoya Cherkassky was part of the last generation of Soviet children to emigrate to Israel in 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed. Her formative years have become a major source of inspiration for the artist, as previously seen in her 2018 survey at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Her bold figurative paintings of a Soviet childhood are nostalgic; a young girl walking to school with her mother before dawn, or waiting at the window for her to come home from work in the evening. The artist has set the stage for these beautiful, often intimately personal works with swatches of traditional floral curtains in the gallery, but the tension of the Soviet Union’s final days comes across in signs of Western influence, such as a teenager’s rock band posters, or a man carrying a coveted plastic bag with the Coca-Cola logo.

Location: Fort Gansevoort, 5 Ninth Avenue
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Prunella Clough, Natural History (1988). Photo courtesy of PPOW.

12. “Prunella Clough: Blast” at PPOW

From her beginnings as a engineering draftsman, the artist Prunella Clough (1919–1999) was inspired by the post-industrial British landscape. Her first New York solo show focuses on her experimental paintings, which incorporate glazes, sand, silicone carbide dust, and found objects to create canvases that straddle the boundary of abstraction and figuration.

Location: PPOW, 535 West 22nd Street
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Through Sunday, June 30

installation view of “Something to Say: Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine, Deborah Kass, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Hank Willis Thomas” featuring OY/YO by Deborah Kass and DO NOT DISAPPEAR INTO SILENCE by Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine, at the Brooklyn Museum. Photo by Jonathan Dorado; 2018 Deborah Kass/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

13. “Something to Say: Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine, Deborah Kass, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Hank Willis Thomas” at the Brooklyn Museum

It’s your last chance to catch the Brooklyn Museum’s show of free public art installations on the museum plaza, entrance pavilion, and main lobby. The works are all text-based, such as Deborah Kass’s bright yellow OY/YO, a witty monument to New York slang, and Hank Willis Thomas’s hopeful neon piece LOVE RULES.

Location: The Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway
Price: Free
Time: Wednesday, Friday–Sunday,11 a.m.–6 p.m.; Thursday, 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Sunday, June 30

Gabriel Garcia Román, Yves, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist and the Leslie-Lohman Museum.

14. “Gabriel Garcia Román: Queer Icons” at the LGBT World Pride March

In conjunction with Deutsche Bank, the Leslie-Lohman Museum will transform artist Gabriel Garcia Román’s Queer Icons series into a processional performance piece integrated into the Pride March. The works apply the visual vocabulary of Christian icons to portraits of queer and trans people of color who contribute as activists, social workers, artists, and a variety of other roles within the community. To expand the concept, Román will also make an array of banners for march participants to present alongside the original Icons.

Location: See the Pride March route here
Price: Free; register to be a part of the march here
Time: Noon–3 p.m.

—Tim Schneider

Through Wednesday, July 10

Some of the works in “Rags and Riches” at Maggi Peyton Gallery. Image courtesy of Jean Sonderand.

15. “Rags and Riches” at Maggi Peyton Gallery

Did you know that the Manhattan borough president’s office hosts monthly exhibitions in a dedicated art gallery? To celebrate Pride and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, they’ve turned the space over to artist and curator Jean Sonderand, who has put together a group photography show celebrating the city’s LGBTQ art and performance community.

Location: Maggi Peyton Gallery, Manhattan Borough President’s Office, David N. Dinkins Municipal Building, 1 Centre Street, 19th floor
Price: Free
Time: 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Through Sunday July 14

Angela Dufresne, Kerry Downey (2016). Courtesy of the artist and the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art.

16. “Just My Type: Angela Dufresne” at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art

The fantastical and the sensual bleed together in Brooklyn-based artist Angela Dufresne’s paintings of mythical creatures, ambiguous bodies, and physical intimacies. “Just My Type,” a solo exhibition curated by Melissa Ragona and Anastasia James, brings together a group of rarely exhibited portraits of the artist’s friends and family. Here, Dufresne’s subjects, many of whom are queer, appear against saturated, often monochromatic fields of color with seemingly spontaneous ease (the artist collaborates with her sitters on how they will be presented). Dufresne deftly operates in this sphere of hybridity and fluidity, of genders certainly, but phantasm and reality, with an enlivening sense of limitlessness.

Location: Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, 1 Hawk Drive, New Paltz
Price: $5 suggested donation
Time: Wednesday–Sunday: 11 a.m.–5 p.m.

—Katie White

Courtesy of Melissa Brown.

17. “Highway Blues” at Underdonk

Have you always wanted to go on a road trip but have yet to get your driver’s license? (Native New Yorkers, I hear you.) Then take the L train to Jefferson Street for a group show that “addresses themes of the traveler, the landscape, and characters that color their journey,” featuring artists Melissa Brown, Kevin McNamee-Tweed, and Alan Prazniak, among others.

Location:  Underdonk, 1329 Willoughby Ave. #211, Brooklyn
Price: Free
Time:  Saturday–Sunday: 1 p.m.–6 p.m. and by appointment

—Cristina Cruz

Through Sunday, July 28

“Rachel Libeskind and Carmen Winant: sensation—sensitivity—creativity—productivity—communication,” installation view, 2019. Courtesy of signs and symbols.

18. “Rachel Libeskind & Carmen Winant: sensation—sensitivity—creativity—productivity—communication” at signs and symbols

A dialogue about bodily representation plays out in this exhibition of new works by Rachel Libeskind and Carmen Winant, two artists who each operate at the intersection of mixed-media assemblage, sculpture, and found photography. For her part, Libeskind contributes a series of tie-dyed collages that mix and match images of facial features culled from a 1940s British board game. Winant answers with a group of her own collages, each of which features vintage pictures of women in some form of therapeutic exercise.

Location: signs and symbols, 102 Forsyth Street
Price: Free
Time:  Wednesday–Sunday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Taylor Dafoe

Miao Xiaochun, Crossing this vast earth at the moment of ten seconds, 2019, Courtesy of Eli Klein Gallery

19. “Miao Xiaochun: Gyro Dance” at Eli Klein Gallery

Eli Klein Gallery presents a solo exhibition of painting, sculpture, and video by Chinese artist Miao Xiaochun. The artist is an important figure in China’s new media art scene and the current works, more than a decade’s worth of monochromatic sculptures and paintings, are a “response to the increasing acceptance of a new breed of subversive technologies—particularly 3D printing.”

Location: Eli Klein Gallery, 398 West Street
Price: Free
Time: Monday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Neha Jambhekar