Each week, we search New York City for the most exciting and thought-provoking shows, screenings, and events. See them below. (Please check institution website for holiday hours over Thanksgiving weekend.)

Tuesday, November 26–Saturday, December 21

Vincent Desiderio, Dead White (2019–). Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Gallery.

1. “Vincent Desiderio: Recent Paintings” at Marlborough 

The gallery will present 10 new oil-on-canvas paintings created over the past two years alongside several earlier works. Desiderio’s work often plays cognitive readings against optical clues. Whether a depiction of characters “from the films of Pasolini, foreboding rocky landscapes, a sleeping child or sniper,” according to the gallery, the often mysterious narratives that result are rendered in surreal, almost dreamlike scenes with a powerful visual punch.

Location: Marlborough, 40 West 57th Street, #2
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Eileen Kinsella 

Friday, November 29–Sunday, January 12, 2020

Phil Buehler, Artworld (2019). Courtesy of the artist.

2. “Mallrat to Snapchat: The End of the Third Place” at Front Room Gallery

If you don’t feel like lining up outside a mall as soon as you’ve digested your Thanksgiving turkey, the Lower East Side-based Front Room Gallery has a very different experience for your Black Friday. Artist Phillip Buehler has been photographing some of the nation’s most deserted and decrepit sites for decades, and in his new series he’s exploring the demise of the commercial shopping mall. The timing feels especially poignant as centers like Hudson Yards and New Jersey’s forthcoming Dream Mall are cropping up.

Location: Front Room Gallery, 48 Hester Street
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 7 p.m.–9 p.m.; Thursday–Sunday, noon–6 .p.m.

—Caroline Goldstein

Through Saturday, November 30

Installation view of “Canyon Castator: Infidel” at Postmasters Gallery. Courtesy of the artist and Postmasters.

3. “Canyon Castator: Infidel” at Postmasters

The young Los Angeles-based artist’s second exhibition at Postmasters is full of exuberant, explicit paintings that look a bit like a peek into the inside of an addled person surfing the web (particularly one who spends a lot of time on Reddit), overrun with clip art and demented cartoons. The nontraditional press release—which is actually a poem by the artist titled “The Ballad of a Conspiracy Theorist”—suggests Castator is interested in how images can be remixed to obscure the truth as much as reveal it.

Location: Postmasters, 54 Franklin Street
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.; Thursday, 11 a.m.–8 p.m.

—Julia Halperin

Hannah Wilke, Gum Landscape (1975). Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Gallery.

4. “Hannah Wilke: Force of Nature” at Ronald Feldman Gallery

The late Hannah Wilke’s longtime gallery Ronald Feldman has assembled some 50 works by the artist for this show, including Wilke’s chewing gum sculptures and her “Performalist Self-Portraits,” a term she invented as a way to give credit to the assistants who helped her create the images in which she herself posed.

Location: Ronald Feldman Gallery, 31 Mercer Street
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Nan Stewart

Sunday, December 1

William Kentridge’s stage set for Wozzeck. Photo: Ruth Walz, Salzburg Film Festival.

5. “William Kentridge in Conversation” at the Morgan Library & Museum

Next month, William Kentridge, the art world’s favorite set designer, will present the stage set for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Wozzeck. The opera, which was composed by Alban Berg between 1914 and 1922, tells the bizarre and cruel tale of a group of townspeople and soldiers in a small German town, whose odd behaviors speak to the absurdity of the First World War. (For Kentridge fans, the theme will be familiar.) To mark the production, the artist will be in conversation at the Morgan Library & Museum, where he will discuss his work on the opera and “the ominous yet captivating pre-World War I setting he has created,” according to a museum spokesperson.

Location: The Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue
Price: Free, registration is required
Time: 3 p.m.

—Pac Pobric

Through Saturday, December 7

6. “The Practice of Freedom: Jordan Casteel” at Casey Kaplan

An assistant professor of undergraduate painting at Rutgers University-Newark, Jordan Casteel has turned her students into subjects for her latest exhibition at Casey Kaplan. The show draws its name from bell hooks’s 1994 book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, which encourages teachers to create a reciprocal relationship with their students. In that spirit, Casteel has let her subjects chose the setting each for their portraits.

Location: Casey Kaplan, 121 West 27th Street
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Through Friday, December 20

Ebony G. Patterson, …below the crows, a blue purse sits between the blades, shoes among the petals, a cockerel comes to witness…, 2019 Courtesy of Hales Gallery

7. “Ebony G. Patterson: …to dig between the cuts, beneath the leaves, below the soil…” at Hales Gallery

Make sure to get lost in Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson’s large-scale paper collage gardens at Hales Gallery before the show ends on December 20. The artist uses mixed media such as torn paper, fabric, and found objects to create these colorful floral masterpieces that according to her “investigate their relationship to beauty, dress, class, race, the body, land, and death.”

Location: Hales Gallery, 547 West 20th Street
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Neha Jambhekar

Through Saturday, December 21

Mary Corse, Untitled (White, Black, Blue, Beveled) (2019). © Mary Corse. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

8. “Mary Corse: Recent Paintings” at Pace Gallery

For anyone who missed Mary Corse’s (long-overdue) first solo museum show at the Whitney last year, Pace is offering something of a second chance by exhibiting a compact overview of her practice. On view in the ground-floor gallery is a series of epic new “Inner Band” paintings made with the artist’s signature glass microspheres, which refract incoming light so that the works’ surfaces seem to constantly shift in appearance as viewers move through the surrounding space. And on Pace’s outdoor terrace, viewers can see a new freestanding, open-air painting on steel. The gallery’s 510 West 25th Street location hosts one of Corse’s late 1960s electric-light works, powered wirelessly by a Tesla coil of her own design. (The work can be viewed upon request.) Together, the show is a worthy time capsule of where the versatile California artist has been, and where she’s headed next. 

Location: Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Tim Schneider

Through Sunday, December 29

9. “Rosson Crow: Trust Fall” at The Hole

For her debut solo exhibition at The Hole, LA-based artist Rosson Crow is showing super-packed canvases that wrestle with some of the most pressing issues facing society in 2019. Themes like fast fashion, immigration, and climate change are brought to bear in her panoramic paintings, which may look colorful and vibrant, but the devil (in this case, humanity) is in the details.

Location: The Hole, 312 Bowery
Price: Free
Time: Wednesday–Sunday, 12 p.m.–7 p.m.

—Caroline Goldstein

Through Saturday, January 11

Tony Bennett, Duke Ellington God Is Love. Courtesy of Benedetto.

10. “The Art of Tony Bennett/Anthony Benedetto” at the Art Students League of New York

The Art Students League of New York has quietly unveiled an exhibition of paintings by the beloved singer and entertainer Tony Bennett, who also happens to be a passionate visual artist, working under his given name, Anthony Benedetto. The exhibition reflects the breadth of his long career, with depictions of musical greats from Duke Ellington to Lady Gaga to Miles Davis. There is also a painting of Bennett by his friend Everett Raymond Kinstler, the great portrait artist who died in May at age 92. Timed to the show’s opening earlier this month, the league honored Bennett, a one-time student, with the Everett Raymond Kinstler Lifetime Achievement Award.

Location: The Art Students League of New York, American Fine Arts Society Gallery, 215 West 57th Street
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Through Saturday, January 18

Jessica Lange, Mississippi (2011–18). Courtesy of the artist and Howard Greenberg Gallery.

11. “Jessica Lange: Highway 61” at Howard Greenberg Gallery

Highway 61, the famed thoroughfare now largely erased, still exercises a mythic allure in the American imagination. This new exhibition of photographs (which coincides with the publication of a book of the same name) by the photographer and actress Jessica Lange proves there still something left to the strip’s gritty magic. Over the past seven years, Lange has made many trips to what remains of the road that originally ran between Chicago and Los Angeles to make these intensely lit images, street photography in the tradition of Robert Frank or Helen Levitt, which captures the violence and intimacy of everyday life.

Location: Howard Greenberg Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, Suite 1406
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Katie White