Each week, we search for the most exciting and thought-provoking shows, screenings, and events. In light of the global health crisis, we are currently highlighting events in person and digitally, as well as in-person exhibitions open in the New York area. See our picks from around the world below. (Times are all EST unless otherwise noted.)

Monday, July 12 and Tuesday, July 13

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Manhattanhenge (2001), sunset looking down 34th Street. One of two days when the sunset is exactly aligned with the grid of streets in Manhattan. Photo ©Neil deGrasse Tyson, courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History.

1. “Manhattanhenge” in New York City

The four-times-a-year phenomenon that is Manhattanhenge, when the setting sun aligns with the city’s street grid, was rained out over Memorial Day Weekend, but we get a second chance at this eminently photographable event this week. For the best Instagram fodder, post up on the east side about a half hour before sunset, and be sure that whatever street you’re on aligns with the grid—if you can’t see through to New Jersey, find a different block!

Location: Crossstreets in Manhattan
Price: Free
Time: Monday 8:20 p.m.; Tuesday, 8:21 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Wednesday, July 14

“Nrityagram: Samhāra Revisited” at the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Stephanie Berger.

2. “Women and the Critical Eye: The Intersection of Performance and Art” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

This edition of the Met’s annual “Women and the Critical Eye” series features a conversation on the intersection of performance and art with Sarah Arison, board chair of the National YoungArts Foundation; dancer and choreographer Bijayini Satpathy; and Met Modern art assistant curator Lauren Rosati, moderated by Limor Tomer, general manager of Live Arts at the Met.

Price: Free registration, but donation suggested
Time: 5:30 p.m.–6:30 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Thursday, July 15

Representation of cryptocurrencies and non-fungible token. Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images.

3. “Christie’s Art and Tech Summit: NFTs and Beyond” at Christie’s New York

In the wake of its $69 million Beeple sale, Christie’s continues to explore the NFT art space with its Art and Tech Summit, an annual one-day conference. The schedule includes topics like “NFT’s Impact on the Art Market: Democratization, Monetization, Emergence, and Sustainability” and “Creating Technology for the Metaverse.” Speakers include leading NFT artists such as Mad Dog Jones (now Canada’s most-expensive living artist, thanks to his recent Phillips sale), crypto art collector Justin Sun (who has also ventured into more traditional fine art trophies), and software engineer and NFT collector Tim Kang (who has launched a nonprofit to help artists mint NFTs).

Location: Christie’s, 20 Rockefeller Plaza, New York
Price: $250 in person/$100 virtual
Time: 9 a.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Opening Thursday, July 15

The Museum of Chinese in America. Image courtesy of Ajay Suresh via Flickr

4. “Responses: Asian American Voices Resisting the Tides of Racism” at the Museum of Chinese in America, New York

After more than a year of shuttered operations and a five-alarm fire at its collections space, the museum’s main space will reopen with a show on the historical roots of anti-Asian and anti-Asian American Pacific Islander racism from the earliest days of U.S. history. The exhibition is the culmination of the museum’s year-long “OneWorld COVID-19 Special Collection” initiative that gathered submissions of creative, artistic, and public responses to the tumultuous events of 2020 and ’21. Art, essays, videos, music, and physical artifacts were donated by people from across the U.S. and Asian diaspora.

Location: Museum of Chinese in America, 215 Centre Street, New York
Price: General admission: $12; seniors, military, educators, students and children two and over $8; members, free
Time: Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday–Thursday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Friday, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.

—Eileen Kinsella

Thursday, July 15–Friday, August 27

Ron Tarver, David’s Last Ride (1996), detail. Courtesy of Chart Gallery.

5. “Horses?” at Chart, New York

When confronted with the essential question of “What is art?” 30 Rock‘s Jack Donaghy did not have to think long to respond. “We know what art is,” he said. “It’s paintings of horses!”

While Donaghy’s definition—which he later expanded to also include “ships with sails” and “men holding up swords while staring off into the distance”—is a little narrow, it’s true, there has been a ton of great art made about our equine friends. Chart, the gallery opened in Tribeca in 2019 by Clara Ha, celebrates this long history with a show called “Horses?” that celebrates the presence of the steed across media. Patricia Cronin’s large installation Tack Room (1997-2021) will be staged at the gallery nearly 25 years after debuting at White Columns, and will feature an entire barn locker room peppered on the walls with postcards of horse-centric works by Delacroix and Degas. And Will Cotton’s work appears—the guy can paint a pretty fantastic gigantic pink unicorn, believe you me.

Elsewhere, Ron Tarver’s photos document the culture and history of black cowboys in Philadelphia and East Texas, while David Wojnarowicz snaps a male sex worker dressed as a hat-clad John Wayne type to dig at the idea of the cowboy as a hyper-straight trope. The idea of the “horse girl” is toyed with in Laurel Nakadate’s self-aware on-saddle self-portraits. And, of course, there’s a contribution from Susan Rothenberg, the late artist who spent decades exploring and abstracting the horse as symbol and shape. Clearly, this summer group show isn’t held back all that much by sticking to one subject. Maybe Jack Donaghy was right. Here’s to hoping for a ships-with-sails group show before the summer ends.

Location: Chart, 74 Franklin Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: Monday–Friday 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

—Nate Freeman

Though Sunday, July 18

Isaac Peifer, White Boy Summer (2020). Courtesy of THNK1994.

6. “Cringe: Portraits from the Pandemic by Isaac Peifer” at THNK1994, New York

Isaac Peifer’s painted portraits of celebrities are all a little off in an uncanny valley sort of way. It’s as if they were copied from an iPhone covered in vaseline. There are practical reasons for this: the artist just started painting in 2019, for one, and most of his canvases are completed in one sitting—a hyper-reactive form of making that echoes the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of the artist’s meme-orable subjects.

But the distortions are thematic, too: “My use of portraiture is a commentary on the role notoriety, disgrace, and ‘cringe’ increasingly play in capturing public interest (however briefly) in the digital age,” the artist wrote in a statement for his new show at THNK1994, a roving gallery now operating out of a residential building’s basement in Chinatown.

Each of Peifer’s paintings in the show was made during lockdown—and it’s obvious. On view are portraits of people that, for better or worse (usually for worse), dominated our timelines at various points in the last year: Chet Hanks, Ghislaine Maxwell, Anna Delvey. “Cringe” is the name of the exhibition; it’s also a description of what you’ll probably do upon seeing the work therein.

Location: THNK1994, 9 Monroe Street, basement, New York
Price: Free
Time: Friday–Sunday, 12 p.m.–6 p.m.

—Taylor Dafoe

Adolph Gottlieb, Black and White On Pressed Wood (1950). Photo © Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/licensed by VAGA at ARS, N.Y., courtesy of Pace East Hampton.

7. “Thomas Nozkowski” and “Adolph Gottlieb” at Pace, East Hampton

New Yorkers who have decamped to the Hamptons for the summer can enjoy a pair of solo shows at the Pace outpost, featuring Thomas Nozkowski and Adolph Gottlieb. The former offers never-before-seen abstract, colorful paintings on paper; the latter features eight pictographs by Gottlieb, a pioneering Abstract Expressionist who spent much of his later years, beginning in the 1960s, living and working in East Hampton.

Location: Pace, 68 Park Place, East Hampton
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday—Saturday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m.; Sunday, 12 p.m.–5 p.m.

—Tanner West

Through Sunday, August 1

Mark Van Wagner, Greenie (2020). Photo courtesy of Marquee Projects.

8. “John Perreault and Mark Van Wagner” at Marquee Projects, Bellport, New York

Beverly Allan Starke and gallery owner Mark Van Wagner co-curated the inaugural exhibition at Bellport’s Marquee Projects, with a retrospective of work from the late artist, poet, and art critic John Perreault. Now, Starke has convinced Van Wagner to show his work in conversation with pieces by his friend. She’s paired Perreault’s “Scratch Paintings”—made by applying white acrylic paint to insulation panels and scraping it off to created abstract line drawings— with Van Wagner’s “Sandboxes” sculptures, made from recycled cardboard boxes covered in beach sand.

Location: Marquee Projects, 14 Bellport Lane, Bellport
Price: Free
Time: Thursday–Saturday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Through Saturday, August 21

Benjamin Langford’s flowers are installed on the walls of the gallery’s courtyard in “但聞人語響：Yet, Only Voice Echoed” at Fu Qiumeng Fine Art. Photo courtesy of Fu Qiumeng Fine Art.

9. “但聞人語響：Yet, Only Voice Echoed” at Fu Qiumeng Fine Art, New York

Our colleague Cathy Fan, editor-in-chief of Artnet News China, is the curator of this group photography show featuring work by Michael Cherney, Lois Conner, Shen Wei, Su Jiehao, Cheng Ronghui, and Benjamin Langford. The unifying theme is imagery drawn from Tang Dynasty poem “Deer Enclosure,” by Wang Wei, an ode to the beautiful scenery of a mountain with a deer pen, which lends the show its title. Like the poem, the photographs in the show don’t have a narrative, instead capturing the sensory experience of a given moment, like Langford’s larger than life sculptural prints of flowers and fruits.

Location: Fu Qiumeng Fine Art, 65 East 80th Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone