Each week, we search for the most exciting and thought-provoking shows, screenings, and events, both digitally and in-person in the New York area. See our picks from around the world below. (Times are all ET unless otherwise noted.)

Tuesday, January 18–Sunday, March 27

Max Colby, They Consume Each Other (2018–21), supported in part by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and YoungARTS Microgrant. Photo courtesy of Art Production Fund.

1. “Art in Focus: Max Colby” at Rockefeller Center, New York

Max Colby, known for her highly embellished works exploring craft and themes of domesticity and gender, kicks off the Art Production Fund’s 2022 exhibitions at Rockefeller Center. Three mirrored vitrines in the lobby of 45 Rockefeller Plaza will display 27 beaded and embroidered sculptures from the series “They Consume Each Other” on custom glass plinths. The campus-wide presentation will also include a 125-foot mural recreating 18th- and 19th-century Crewel embroidery works. “Popular in colonial America and Elizabethan and Victorian England, ‘crewel’ style is known for its pastoral floral imagery, bringing a connection between ‘natural history’ and gendered labor and aesthetics,” Colby said in a statement.

Location: Rockefeller Center, 10 Rockefeller Plaza, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, 45 Rockefeller Plaza, and 50 Rockefeller Plaza
Price: Free
Time: On view daily at all times

—Sarah Cascone

Tuesday, January 18–Sunday, March 6

Sadie Barnette, The New Eagle Creek Saloon. Photo courtesy of the artist.

2. “Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon” at the Kitchen

The Kitchen teams up with the Studio Museum in Harlem on the first East Coast presentation of Sadie Barnette’s The New Eagle Creek Saloon, an installation reimagining San Francisco’s first Black-owned gay bar. The artist’s father, Rodney Barnette, who founded Compton’s chapter of the Black Panther Party, operated the bar between 1990 and 1993, providing a marginalized multiracial queer community a safe space to call its own.

Location: The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Tuesday, January 18–Sunday, April 24

“Hugh Hayden: Brier Patch” at Madison Square Park. Photo by Yasunori Matsui for the Madison Square Park Conservancy.

3. “Hugh Hayden: Brier Patch” at Madison Square Park, New York

Hugh Hayden has transformed four lawns at Madison Square Park into surreal classrooms, building 100 wooden elementary school desks topped with tangles of tree branches. The show’s title is a reference to the brier patch in the fictional Br’er Rabbit stories, where the title character tricks a fox into throwing him into a thicket of pricker bushes, allowing him to escape. Hayden’s message is about disparities within the education system, which is meant to nurture and support students, but can become a dangerous place for some children.

Location: Madison Square Park, between Broadway and Madison Avenue and East 23 Street and East 26 Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: On view daily at all times

—Sarah Cascone

Thursday, January 20–Saturday, March 5

Kelsey Shwetz, Untitled (2021). Courtesy of Dinner Gallery.

4. “Fertile Plains” at Dinner Gallery, New York

What does it mean to be a landscape painter in the world of climate disaster? This exhibition brings together three contemporary painters—Madeleine Bialke, Saskia Fleishman, and Kelsey Shwetz—who have devoted themselves to redefining the genre. Each artist brings their own strange, and at times disquieting sensibilities to their paintings, from fluorescent paints to shifted horizon lines. Throughout many of the world’s mythologies, women have been symbolically tied to the earth, and here these painters embrace the legacies of ancient goddesses, with a vision of lands filled with hidden meanings they are trying to communicate.  

Location: Dinner Gallery, 242 West 22nd Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, Thursday, 4 p.m.–8 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m. and by appointment

—Katie White 

Thursday, January 20–Saturday, March 19

Lance de los Reyes, Untitled. Courtesy of Vito Schnabel Gallery.

5. “Lance de Los Reyes” at Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York

The artist Lance de los Reyes died last year at the age of 44. Best known for his street art, De Los Reyes also left behind a complex oeuvre of paintings and drawings that explored motifs linked to mysticism, the divine, and parallel universes through an intricate lexicon of symbols. (He was also a lifelong friend of the dealer Vito Schnabel.) This exhibition brings together many of De Los Reyes’s visions, which synthesized styles from Street Art, medieval manuscript illumination, and Surrealism. 

Location: Vito Schnabel Gallery, 455 West 19th Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday,10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Katie White

Through Saturday, January 22

Larissa de Jesús, Quieting Noise (2021). Courtesy of the artist.

6. “Larissa De Jesús, Moises Salazar, and Olivier Souffrant: DM me ” at Kravets Wehby Gallery, New York

This is the last week to catch “DM me”, the three-person group exhibition of emerging stars Larissa De Jesus, Moises Salazar, and Olivier Suffrant. Each artist’s personal style is a nod to their background and communities. The works depict their personal ideas of luxury—freedoms that may have been denied to their ancestors. Though their three styles are so disparate, together they add up to make a fantastic and thought-provoking show.

Location: Kravets Wehby Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Neha Jambhekar

Julie Green, Thank God I’m Home said Marcel Brown (ca. 2019). Courtesy of Elizabeth Houston Gallery, New York.

7. “Julie Green: At Home With Family” at Elizabeth Houston Gallery, New York

Artist Julie Green died in October by physician-assisted suicide following treatment for ovarian cancer. For decades, she had made paintings of final meals of death row prisoners on plates, in the hopes of continuing the series until the death penalty had been abolished in the U.S. for 20 years. Instead she stopped “The Last Supper” when she hit 1,000 plates, in September. While a selection of 800 of those works take center stage at the Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, Washington, through June 5, a companion series, “Who did you eat with? What did you have?,” is currently on view here in New York. It features acrylic-on-Tyvek paintings illustrating the first meals wrongfully convicted persons ate once they were released from prison. Elizabeth Houston Gallery presents 13 of the 30 works in the series that the artist made over the past three years.

Location: Elizabeth Houston Gallery, 190 Orchard Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: Wednesday–Saturday, 11 a.m.–7 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Through, Saturday, January 29

Aliza Sternstein, Choose to Move Like Water (2021). Courtesy of Olympia.

8. “Aliza Sternstein: Don’t Move Stones” at Olympia, New York 

Brooklyn-based abstract painter’s Aliza Sternstein solo solo at Olympia presents a series of canvases with loosely painted shapes such as hearts and flowers. The canvases are worked with layers of gesso that make them so absorbent as to retain every fingerprint and wipeout during their creation, filling the works with lively and energetic feeling.

Location: Olympia, 41 Orchard Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: Thursday–Sunday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Neha Jambhekar`