Featured Events in New York in October 2024 (May Updated)

Hamilton is the story of the unlikely Founding Father determined to make his mark on the new nation as hungry and ambitious as he is. From orphan to Washington's right-hand man, rebel to war hero, a loving husband caught in the country's first sex scandal, to the Treasury head who made an untrusting world believe in the American economy. George Washington, Eliza Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and Hamilton's lifelong friend/foil Aaron Burr all make their mark in this astonishing new musical exploration of a political mastermind.

The Gazillion Bubble Show is a live, interactive performance that showcases the mesmerizing art of creating bubbles. The show features a variety of bubble-related acts, including creating bubbles within bubbles, giant bubbles that encapsulate audience members, and even bubble sculptures that float and dance around the stage. The performers use a range of props, including wands, hoops, and even their bare hands, to create an incredible variety of shapes and sizes of bubbles.

The show is a modern retelling of William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet, but with a twist - it explores an alternative ending where Juliet doesn't die and instead sets out to discover her own identity and independence.

What’s your fantasy? Ana knows that everybody has one—her especially, and she’d do anything to make it come true. And when she meets Jonah, a sweet and caring student at her boarding school, everything she’s ever wanted is finally falling into place. Except Jonah, like everything else in this moving world premiere play from Rachel Bonds, is not all that he seems. A singularly haunting and heart-racing coming-of-age tale that will keep you guessing until its final twisting moments, Jonah is about the true cost of survival, and the lengths some will travel to feel just a little less alone in the world. Danya Taymor directs.

Tosca is, ultimately, the story of a woman who wants to create beauty and to love, but who is swept up in the storm of history.

L'Elisir d'Amore is an Italian opera composed by Gaetano Donizetti. The opera tells the story of a young man named Nemorino who is in love with a beautiful and wealthy woman named Adina. In order to win Adina's heart, Nemorino buys a love potion from a traveling salesman named Dulcamara. The potion turns out to be fake, but Nemorino's belief in its power and the jealousy it inspires in Adina ultimately leads to their union. L'Elisir d'Amore is known for its beautiful arias and duets, as well as its lighthearted and humorous plot.

Kim is a bright and funny Jersey teen, who happens to look like a 72-year-old lady. And yet her aging disease may be the least of her problems. Forced to maneuver family secrets, borderline personalities, and possible felony charges, Kim is determined to find happiness in a world where not even time is on her side.

Eminent American composer John Adams returns to the Met after a decade-long hiatus for the company premiere of his acclaimed opera-oratorio, which incorporates sacred and secular texts in English, Spanish, and Latin, from biblical times to the present day, in an extraordinarily dramatic retelling of the Nativity. El Niño brings together three of contemporary opera’s fiercest champions, all of whom make highly anticipated company debuts: Marin Alsop, one of the great conductors of our time, who has led more than 200 new-music premieres; soprano Julia Bullock, a leading voice on and off stage; and pathbreaking bass-baritone Davóne Tines. Radiant mezzo-sopranos J’Nai Bridges and Daniela Mack take turns completing the principal trio.

Based on the award-winning HBO documentary, How to Dance in Ohio is a heart-filled new musical exploring the need to connect and the courage it takes to step out into the world.

Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj (born 1986 in Kostrci, former Yugoslavia) was commissioned to create a site-specific installation for the museum's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. For the artist's first major project in the United States, Halilaj transformed The Met Roof with a massive sculptural installation. Halilaj's work is closely tied to the recent history of his native Kosovo and the consequences of cultural and political tensions in the region. After studying art at the Brera Academy in Italy, he moved to Berlin in 2008, where he still lives and works. His projects span a variety of media including sculpture, painting, poetry and performance.

Close to Home is an installation that honors the domestic space as a custodian of cultural and spiritual traditions by providing support and comfort to forge appreciation for heritage and their continuity. Modeled after Nsenga Knight’s family residences from their past six years living in Cairo, Egypt, the installation’s eclectic atmosphere reflects the historic and cosmopolitan. While furnished in various materials and styles, old and new, this family home is also adorned with artifacts from the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair as well as artworks by Knight, including paintings, prints, videos, and wallpaper. A Brooklyn-born Afro-Caribbean American Muslim artist, Knight researched the Queens Museum’s 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair Archives with a focus on the representations of the then-newly postcolonial Islamic African and Caribbean nations. The historical trajectory of these nations and their influence on Black Americans has emerged as the central focus of her exhibition. Knight presents this exhibition as both a home and a forum for “Peace Through Understanding,” echoing the theme of the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair. She extends this concept into the exterior section of the installation. Hovering above are words initially spoken by martial arts masters at the SWAM Academy of Modern Martial Arts in South Jamaica, Queens. Transcribed by Knight word-by-word, these “poems” encapsulate their wisdom about self defense, spirituality, and ethical integrity imparted at the renowned Black Muslim-owned dojo. The act of safe-keeping and hope for peace extends to the toy paragliders in the exhibition. These airborne devices carry complex yet arbitrary layers of symbolism related to the Museum’s building history. The New York City Building housed the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1947 when they passed Resolution 181 to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. By juxtaposing SWAM poetry with paragliders and parachutes, Knight considers how to position peace and safety amidst conflict and oppression. Food culture also played a pivotal role in the World’s Fair. Close to Home will host a scheduled series of social gatherings by serving tea and coffee in this installation. With this act of hospitality, Knight calls on viewers to consider the power of sensorial and experiential engagement to foster understanding, connection, and appreciation among people from various corners of the world. Close to Home is curated by Hitomi Iwasaki, Director of Exhibitions/Curator. Nsenga Knight (b. Brooklyn, New York, 1981) is an In Situ Artist Fellow at the Queens Museum. She earned an MFA from University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Howard University. She has exhibited her work internationally, including: Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo, Egypt (2022); Drawing Center, New York, NY (2017, 2016); Project Row Houses, Houston, TX (2015); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY (2011); among others. Knight is a recipient of grants from Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2019), Foundation for Contemporary Art (2016), Brooklyn Arts Council (2007). She was an artist-in-residence at BRICworkspace, Brooklyn, NY (2019); and Film/Video Arts Center, New York, NY (2005) among others. She lives and works in New York.

Exploring the intersection of art making and play, Cas Holman designs innovative toys and tools that inspire participatory imagination. Prototyping Play experiments with the different modes of intuitive and child-directed free play in an art museum environment by extending the body’s movements with uniquely crafted elements and prompts. Released in two phases, Holman’s open-ended playthings and playspaces foster collaboration, inventive thinking, and interactivity. Prototyping Play invites artists of all ages to create, exchange, cooperate, and leave your mark through these new devices. Tracing Play (launching May 19, 2024): Drawing Tools and Drawing Pads invite collective acts of drawing. The awkwardly shaped, human-sized Drawing Tools are equipped with large-scale crayons which challenge users to collaborate in figuring out how to use them. The fun is in the creative process. You can make marks using these tools on the Drawing Pads, or Tyvek paper surfaces, where your drawings will inspire future markmakers. Alternatively, you can collaborate with markmakers who visited the exhibition beforehand. Critter Party (launching July 2024): For this playscape, Holman has created different elements: the Mama Critter, Baby Critters, and Thingies. The arched Critters invite various types of interaction and opportunities for transformation, while the add-on objects, or Thingies, offer the possibility to adapt each structure with new narratives and identities. Encouraging crawling, sliding, building, storytelling, pretending, and more, the assorted sizes of Critters demonstrate how scale can change our relationship with shapes and spaces. Each critter, as well as the open-ended, reconfigurable Thingies, accommodate various types of play, depending on the desired sensory and social engagements. Here, Holman creates inclusive environments where many different types and ways of playing can coexist together. Prototyping Play will activate the Skylight Gallery as the Queens Museum prepares for a children’s museum that encourages intergenerational learning experiences. This playscape will further the Museum’s knowledge of its audiences and facilitates test thinking for future family programming. Prototyping Play is curated by Lauren Haynes, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Programs, and Kimaada Le Gendre, Director of Education.

In Buenos Vecinos, which translates to “good neighbors,” Catalina Schliebener Muñoz confronts the impact of two Walt Disney animated films: Saludos Amigos (1942) and Los Tres Caballeros (1944). Both films emerged from Disney’s state-sponsored research trips to South and Central American nations as part of The Good Neighbor Policy, which sought to discourage Nazi influence and improve the United States’ public image in Latin America following its numerous military invasions throughout the early 20th century. Disney and his team of artists toured Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Mexico to generate visual motifs and storylines for recognizable characters like Donald Duck and Goofy, as well to create new characters, songs, and dances based on local customs and archetypes. Schliebener Muñoz examines how these films functioned as a form of soft power, enlisting children’s media towards the economic and geopolitical interests of the United States. Through installation, collage, sculpture, and murals, the artist subverts reductive and exoticized representations of Latin American cultures in the films to center its secondary characters and rebellious underdogs. Schliebener Muñoz also contends with Disney’s depictions of gender, sexuality, race, and Indigeneity by appropriating and fragmenting the films’ imagery to create critical narratives of resistance. Acknowledging the capacity of stories to shape value systems, the exhibition employs mirroring, queer coding, ambiguity, and humor to challenge the imposed boundaries between the real and fictional, natural and synthetic, spectacular and grotesque. As World War II gave way to the Cold War, the United States abandoned Pan-American unity to support coups and dictatorships in many of the countries depicted in Disney’s films. Schliebener Muñoz incorporates archival materials that address the aftermath of The Good Neighbor Policy, U.S. interventionism, and imperialist ideology through the history of the Queens Museum’s site. This building hosted the former United Nations, where decisions ranged from the 1947 partition of Palestine to the creation of UNICEF, and is also located on the grounds of the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair where Disney premiered the “it’s a small world” attraction. For Schliebener Muñoz, this context becomes integral to understanding the legacy of Disney’s films alongside hostile foreign policies, and how the imagination of children became a vehicle for the projection of American innocence and exceptionalism on the global stage. Buenos Vecinos is curated by Lindsey Berfond, Assistant Curator and Studio Program Manager.

Edward C. Moore (1827–1891), the creative force that led Tiffany & Co. to unparalleled ingenuity and success in the second half of the 19th century, amassed an extensive collection of decorative arts of exceptional quality and in a wide variety of materials, from Greek and Roman glass and Japanese basketry to metalwork from the Islamic world. These objects served as a source of inspiration for Moore, a renowned silversmith, and the designers he mentored. Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co. will feature more than 180 objects from Moore’s extraordinary personal collection donated to the museum, as well as 70 magnificent pieces of silver designed and crafted at Tiffany & Co. under his direction. Drawn primarily from the Met’s collection, the exhibition will also include rare specimens from more than a dozen private and public lenders. An iconic figure in the history of American silver, Moore played a key role in shaping the legendary Tiffany design aesthetic and in the evolution of the Met’s collection.

“I think of myself, standing in a world that is never standing still,” the artistRobert Frankonce wrote. “I’m still in there fighting, alive because I believe in what I’m trying to do now.”Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue—the artist’s first solo exhibition at MoMA—provides a new perspective on his expansive body of work by exploring the six vibrant decades of Frank’s career following the 1958 publication of his landmarkphotobook,The Americans. Coinciding with the centennial of Frank’s birth, the exhibition will explore his restless experimentation across mediums including photography, film, and books, as well as his dialogues with other artists and his communities. It will include some 200 works made over 60 years until the artist’s death in 2019, many drawn from MoMA’s extensive collection, as well as materials that have never before been exhibited. The exhibition borrows its title from Frank’s poignant 1980 film, in which the artist reflects on the individuals who have shaped his outlook. Like much of his work, the film is set in New York City and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where he and his wife, the artist June Leaf, moved in 1970. In the film, Leaf looks at the camera and asks Frank, “Why do you make these pictures?” In an introduction to the film’s screening, he answered: “Because I am alive.” Organized by Lucy Gallun, Curator, with Kaitlin Booher, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, and Casey Li, 12 Month Intern, Department of Photography

A mandala is a diagram of the universe—a map of true reality that in Tibet is used to conceptualize a rapid path to enlightenment. This exhibition explores the imagery of the Himalayan Buddhist devotional art through over 100 paintings, sculptures, textiles, instruments, and an array of ritual objects, mostly dating between the 12th and 15th centuries. This dazzling visual experience provides a roadmap for understanding Himalayan Buddhist worship through early masterworks, juxtaposed with a newly commissioned contemporary installation by Tibetan artist Tenzing Rigdol.

This focused exhibition presents a selection of superlative drawings from the courts and centers of India and Pakistan (with a few related Persian works) dating from the late sixteenth to the twentieth century. These works are mainly selected from The Met collection in partnership with film director James Ivory, whose recent gift to the Museum of nineteenth-century photograph albums will also be featured in the exhibition (2021.381.1-16). The drawings will include fresh and informal preparatory exercises for paintings as well as beautifully finished works in their own right. The photographs will present the subject matter and styles that came about in the contexts of royal patronage and ceremony; views of architecture, cities, landscapes, and people, among others. As an artist and filmmaker, James Ivory will help us appreciate this material through his unique gaze. A short film — An Arrested Moment — directed by Dev Benegal, will accompany the show.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape artists often sketched outdoors in oil paint on paper to capture nature from direct observation. Yet as natural as these scenes look, the vantages were chosen or augmented to draw the viewer into the composition. Whether through adding a prescribed path, capturing flecks of light glinting off a winding river, or presenting a series of plateaus receding into the distance, artists created a point of entry and route along which the viewer could journey. These small-scale oil sketches—including a work by one of the few female European landscape painters of her era, Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont—illustrate how artists synthesized the real and ideal to evoke the experience of encountering nature.

United by their assertive, sometimes insistent, political messages, the fifty-two works by thirty-three artists included in this exhibition offer a select and lively perspective on American elections, politicians and social power dynamics. Spanning more than five decades, the works not only refer to political subjects and social issues specific to their time, but also resonate with ideological and humanistic themes amazingly relevant today. This exhibition invites the viewer to compare and contrast many visual strategies that explore issues of racism, demagoguery, oppression, war, climate change, among others. Some artists employ tools such as satire, propaganda, and the portrayal of newsworthy events or utopian ideals. Others utilize more iconic subjects—such as U.S. presidents, Uncle Sam, the Oval Office, and Old Glory—to celebrate, examine, and critique American governance and policy.

Kline is known for charged, visceral installations that evoke contemporary retail environments, the starchitecture of global financial centers like New York and London, a disintegrating Western middle-class, ruinous floods, and surveillance zones. Mobilizing iconic elements of design, style and architecture that are both site and time-specific, his installations are immersive period pieces set in the present or all too possible futures. Kline’s earliest installations were made against the backdrop of and in response to the financial crisis and great recession, that also saw the first flowering of the smartphone-enabled social media platforms which would transform our lives. Now in this exhibition, Kline returns to the subject of his earliest installations: creative labor. In that body of work, produced between 2009-2014, the focus was on the challenges faced by creative workers – DJs, graphic designers, publicists and art directors – as they navigated promoting themselves as a persona online. Works such asCreative Hands(2011) reproduced the hands of these workers as silicone casts, each clutching a tool that reflects the merging of their personal and professional identities, from an iPhone to a bottle of Advil or a computer mouse. In this new body of work, Kline abandons surrogates and uses his own image, focusing on the place of the artist in an art world increasingly described by its participants as “the art industry.” The sculptures that will debut at Lisson Gallery update core interests from that earlier body of work: the commodification, promotion, and disposal of the self in a society shaped by social media.

Perrotin is pleased to present the gallery’s second exhibition with London-based painter Oli Epp, titled Fire the Menu. Presenting a new suite of surrealist paintings, he depicts opulence as performance and captures the unsaid paradoxes the inhabit our lavish desires.

Timothy Taylor is pleased to present Out of Chaos, a new series of paintings by Daniel Cruise-Chab. This is the artist’s third collaboration with the gallery, presenting large and medium-sized paintings as well as works on paper. Characterized by rapid mark-making and vivid atmosphere, the works in the exhibition explore how compositions emerge from chaos, with the human figure as the main subject. The title of the exhibition, Out of Chaos – which also bears the title of the series of paintings on display – is taken from the concept in ancient Greek mythology that chaos is an undifferentiated state of matter from which the universe was born. Cruise-Chab’s paintings are driven by the idea that infinity is a cycle between chaos and order, and that energy is not destroyed but transformed.

Gagosian is pleased to announce Out of Country, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Mark Grotjahn at the gallery’s 980 Madison Avenue location in New York. Opening on September 10, Out of Country represents the culmination of the Backcountry series that has occupied the artist since 2021, and features never before exhibited paintings on white grounds, alongside a single black-ground painting. A press preview and tour with the artist will take place at 10:30am on Monday, September 9. In his paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, Grotjahn investigates color, perspective, seriality, and the sublime. The concluding entries in the Backcountry series featured in this exhibition see him again draw inspiration from the experience of rural American landscapes, specifically those from his ski and fly-fishing tours in the remote backcountry of western Colorado. While the works contain an element of pictorial representation, hinting at a snowy mountain descent or starlit nocturnal pass, their primary commitment is still to abstraction, specifically the nuanced layering of line, tone, and texture. Continuing to produce variations on an identifiable style and format, Grotjahn builds on a dynamic rhythm that transcends simple visual record to achieve a unique formal and emotional complexity.

The exhibition features new large-scale sculptures made from sand-based material, constructed using the artist’s signature technique. Pinhassi creates sensuous sculptures and large-scale installations that explore the politics of architectural spaces as they relate to the human body. His anthropomorphic sculptures, often standing up to eight feet in height, examine individual vulnerability within the built environment, probing new possibilities for coexistence. Pinhassi’s haptic and immersive spaces redefine the relationship between viewer and environment, provoking a visceral interaction with the art object that yields a heightened awareness of humankind’s place within an ecosystem of co-creation, where we in turn are shaped by the objects and architecture around us. In Losing Face, Pinhassi harnesses the logic of the eponymous idiom and turns it on its head, making it a positive proposition: what happens when we strip away our ego and individuality? The works on view gesture towards a willingness to relinquish one’s familiar perception of the world—to “lose face” would be to lose access to the sensory organs—and in this way, Pinhassi allows for transformation and vulnerability in the construction of the works. Against the rapid-fire spread of information and the speed at which new events unfold in contemporary society, Pinhassi’s new work asks the viewer to slow down and consider the interdependence necessary to imagine possible collective futures.

Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois presents the first exhibition of seminal Nouveau Réalisme artist Jacques Villeglé’s work in New York in over 20 years and the first since his passing in 2022. The show is a survey exhibition of 10 important paintings and one sculpture. Villeglé is a forerunner of pop art and street art. His mixed media paintings consist of layering and lacerating street posters to build up his images. The show in New York is accompanied by a second show at the Vallois gallery in Paris.

David Zwirner is pleased to present a new light installation by American artist Doug Wheeler at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York. Over the past six decades, Wheeler has become known for his innovative constructions and installations that engage with the experience of light, space, and sound. On view will be an immersive environment by the artist that further expands on his groundbreaking investigations of the possibilities of luminous space. This will be Wheeler’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery and the first major presentation in the United States of his work since his 2020 exhibition at David Zwirner New York. The exhibition presents DN ND WD 180 EN - NY 24 (2024), which is among Wheeler’s most ambitious installations to date. Upon entering the gallery, the viewer first encounters two luminous, rectangular thresholds or “walls” of light, which function as points of entry into an expansive environment that simulates the experience of limitless space, or a “ganzfeld,” where light appears to shift from day to night and back again. The viewer’s perception is heightened to a degree in which, as the artist articulates, “space appears as a volume, almost as matter.”

The rich tradition of Mexican printmaking—ranging from the 18th to the mid-20th century—is explored in this exhibition of works drawn primarily from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among the early works on display are those by Mexico’s most famous printmaker, José Guadalupe Posada, whose depictions of skeletons engaged in different activities helped Mexican art establish a global identity. After the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), printmaking proved to be an ideal medium for artists who wanted to address social and political issues and express resistance to the rise of fascism around the world. Artists also turned to printmaking to reproduce Mexican murals from the 1920s and to produce exhibition posters, prints for mass media, and portfolios celebrating Mexican costumes and customs.

The Enemy of All Mankind: Nine Scenes from John Gay’s Polly presents a new series of photographs by Stan Douglas. On view at the gallery’s 525 West 19th Street location, this is the artist’s eighteenth exhibition at the gallery. In this stand-alone group of nine images, Douglas stages scenes from the comic opera Polly, written in 1729 by the English dramatist John Gay, using the narrative as a vehicle through which to engage a wide range of themes that remain highly relevant today, including race, class, gender, and media.

Over the course of Mary Corse’s six-decade career, Corse has explored the phenomena of light, space, and perception in both the sublime across mediums and boundary-spanning abstraction. A key member of the Los Angeles artist community from the 1960s to the present day, she is often associated with the Light and Space movement, but has always been committed to the possibilities of painting, which remains her primary focus. As part of her empirical and highly tactile approach to art-making, Corse continually investigates the ways in which light is both subject and material. In the late 1960s, while searching for ways to embed light into her paintings, Corse experienced an epiphany. Driving along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu at sunset, she noticed that the road signs gradually became illuminated by headlights as she drove. While researching industrial applications that would make this effect possible, she discovered glass microspheres—a material used to enhance the visibility of road signs. In 1968, Corse began applying these refracting microspheres to the surfaces of her white light paintings, giving these works a sense of illumination projected from the picture plane itself. Corse will debut a series of new diamond paintings at her exhibition at Pace in New York this fall that continue her long-standing practice of incorporating microscopic glass spheres into her painted surfaces. Corse has been experimenting with the physical structure of her canvases since she studied at the Chouinard Institute of Art in Los Angeles from 1964 to 1968. Although she created her first diamond paintings in her twenties, this series of works are the first diamond canvases she has created since the 1960s. Corse's return to the diamond form highlights a hallmark of her practice: an interest in recursion and returning to earlier ideas. With her new diamond paintings, the artist delves deeper into the foundational concepts that originally inspired her practice. She expands the scope of her inquiry into the metaphysical dimensions of her work through new versions of these ideas that have long been central to her work.

A defining Black woman artist of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) has not received the mainstream art-world attention afforded many of her peers. The Brooklyn Museum, in partnership with the National Gallery of Art, closes this gap with Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies, an exhibition of over 200 works that gives this revolutionary artist and radical activist her due. A deft sculptor and printmaker, devout feminist, and lifelong social justice advocate, Catlett was uniquely committed to both her creative process and political convictions. Growing up during the Great Depression, she witnessed class inequality, racial violence, and U.S. imperialism firsthand, all while pursuing an artistic education grounded in the tenets of modernism. Catlett would protest injustices for nearly a century, via both soaring artworks and on-the-ground activism. Born in Washington, DC, Catlett settled permanently in Mexico in 1946 and for the rest of her life she worked to amplify the experiences of Black and Mexican women. Inspired by sources ranging from African sculpture to works by Barbara Hepworth and Käthe Kollwitz, Catlett never lost sight of the Black liberation struggle in the United States. Characterized by bold lines and voluptuous forms, her powerful work continues to speak directly to all those united in the fight against poverty, racism, and imperialism.