Curator's Choice: Museums and Exhibitions in New York City and Vicinity

NY Museums By Location
Geographical Guide
Do you want to stay near your hotel / knock around the Village or explore the Lower East Side? Plan your museum crawl geographically with our neighborhood-by-neighborhood guide.

NY Museums By Subject
Guide to Fields of Interest
Are you more drawn to dinosaurs / contemporary art or Native American history today? Search out museums in your area of interest with our subject guide.

Museums by Day / Theatre by Night!
The New York Theatre Wire
Our "sister" site, featuring news of what's playing on New York's stages.

Community Tourism
Our Neighborhood Guide
Tourists and New Yorkers alike want to know the "real New York." Thus the need for community tourism. As opposed to mass market tourism / community tourism is organized by the stewards of their communities. These tours take visitors into areas not on the typical tourist map and connect them to local music / immigrant history / parks / waterways / architecture / cuisine / artists / murals / and one-of-a-kind stores. To help popularize community tourism in New York / we have created this / the City's first online guide.

Join our Members' Privileges Club!
Members are eligible for free museum tickets / discounts on admissions / memberships / shops and dining rooms / invitations to special events / tours and lectures / special prices on art books and reproductions / and much more! To receive our (infrequent / but very exciting) invitations / CLICK HERE to send us an email. Put SUBSCRIBE_CC in the subject line and your email address as the message.

Fall/Winter 2010 Roundup
Metropolitan Museum, Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, Haremhab: The General Who Became Pharaoh, Our Future is in the Air, American Museum of Natural History, Brain: The Inside Story, Knoedler, The Grenfell Press: Thirty Years of Collaboration, Guggenheim Museum Chaos & Classicism: Art in France, Italy, & Germany, 1918-1936, Frederick Brosen: Recent Watercolors, Whitney Museum, Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork, Modern Life: Edward Hopper & His Time, Jewish Museum, Houdini: Art & Magic, Kips Bay Decorator Show House, MoMA, On Line: Drawing Through the 20th Century, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Alwin Nikolais' Total Theatre of Motion, Park Avenue Armony, IFPDA Print Fair 2010, Brooklyn Museum, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, Vilcek Foundation, Toshiko Nishikawa: Senbazuru.

The Flowering of Art on the Lido di Venezia
Each year, OPEN, one of the most entertaining art exhibitions in the art world, peppers the beautiful island of Lido with unexpected and imaginative sculptures and installations. Essentially an outdoor walking tour with a few in-hotel installations, OPEN begins the minute you disembark from the vaporetto onto the Piazzale St. Maria Elisabetta. It continues along the shop and restaurant laden Via Lepanto, morphs into the lushly planted promenade of Lungomare G. Marconi, and ends overlooking the beach, at the very chic Hotel Westin Excelsior, the infamous hangout of the Venice Film Festival crowd. This year Madonna and George Clooney, followed by lusting hordes of screaming acolytes, was all the rage. By Ed Rubin.

Big, Bold, and Undeniably Ambitious Jonathan Prince at the Sculpture Garden
The work of Massachusetts based artist Jonathan Prince, currently on view till November 18 at the Sculpture Garden in the atrium of the old IBM building in New York City under the title Torn Steel, like the artist himself who resembles Julian Schnabel, is big, bold and undeniably ambitious. But underneath the swagger of the man and his work – this based on an in-depth studio visit, a couple of wide-ranging conversations of the inquiring kind, and of course the four, eye to mind-grabbing, sculptures on view – lives a sensitive soul, albeit it on top of a simmering volcano, whose innards house an acute and restless intellect that appears to know no bounds. By Ed Rubin.

The Extravagant Constructions of Joyce Melander-Dayton
While the title of Santa Fe based artist Joyce Melander-Dayton's current outing at the June Kelly Gallery in New York City reads Extravagant Constructions, an apt title, especially when you are standing up close and studying the artist's intricately bejeweled craftsmanship and her use of materials and patterning – think Faberge Egg or the Gobelin Tapestries – it could just as easily have been labeled, depending on where you are standing in relation to her work, where your brain is at the moment, and how well you know the artist's past history, Musical Meditations, Celestial Compositions, or How I Keep My Life Together. For the exhibition is all of this and more, the more being, quietly beautiful in the extreme, and very much alive. By Edward Rubin.

Dean Project- New York. Travellers in time, Wedding banquet, Brueghel, 2010, 17” x 24” C-print, Courtesy of Dean Project.

Riding the Crest of the Latin American Art Wave
This past November, "Pinta: The 2010 Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art Show" moved its four-day, New York City celebration of Latin American art from its Chelsea habitat to pier 92 on the Hudson River, into the same location made famous by The Armory Show. With daylight streaming in from the pier's surrounding windows, the new and improved "Pinta" with larger and brighter aisles, more galleries and art installations, a bar and café for the public, and a private, upper level VIP section--with roughly four times more space than the old Pinta--generously gifted its visitors and exhibitors alike with more breathing and thinking room, as well as strolling, eating, and oh my tired feet, resting options. Although the art of legendary artists Fernando Botero, Wilfredo Lam, Lygia Clark, and Ana Mendieta, as they did in the first three editions of Pinta, took their customary bows, for the most part, it was the work of the young contemporary Latin American artists whose fresh and unique ways at looking at life that supplied the majority of the fair's visual excitement. Though many paintings, sculptures, and a few videos were on view, it was the quietly inventive work of the photographers – digital and otherwise – that depicted life, in its myriad postures, most interestingly. By Edward Rubin.

Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera
For over half a century, Norman Rockwell chronicled American life with pictures that seemed to spring from the heartland. In fact, the pictures he created appear so natural and spontaneous it's hard to believe they were carefully set up and photographed by Rockwell and his assistants, often in his studio. Brooklyn Museum's exhibit "Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera," explores the artist not as a painter or illustrator, but as a photographer who carefully set up his scenes much as a film director must work. Curator Ron Schick has displayed these study photographs, as well as drawings and tear sheets, alongside the actual pictures to give the viewer a vivid picture of how the artist worked. By Paulanne Simmons.

What Goes Around Comes Around
It is somewhat ironic that Julian Schnabel's exhibition, "Julian Schnabel: Art and Film" (September 1, 2010-January 2, 2011), at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto's version of New York City's MoMA, is following in the footsteps of the museum's King Tut exhibition, as both men are known for doing things in a very big way, King Tut with his tomb, and Schnabel, highly in evidence here, with his titanic canvases that all but dwarf the common man. For the fifty-nine year old Schnabel, who was all the rage with his smashed plate paintings during the late 70s and early 80s, before he eventually fell off his art world pedestal, this exhibition – the largest since his 1987 Whitney Museum Retrospective – is tantamount to a Second Coming. The "ball has come back into his court" as he gratefully acknowledged during his press preview. By Ed Rubin.

Murakami @ Versailles
Once again the battle between preserving classical French culture from the ugly claws of globalization has been making headlines in France. This time around it is provocateur artist Takashi Murakami, Japan’s answer to Andy Warhol, whose recent exhibition of comic based manga and anime inspired paintings, sculptures, and one rug, at the Château Versailles and its gardens (September 14–December 12, 2010), raised the hackles of Prince Sixte-Henri de Bourbon-Parme a descendent of the French king Louis XIV and the Coordination de la Défense de Versailles, an organization specifically formed to stop artist Jeff Koons from exhibiting at the palace in 2008. The suit, intending to give Koons and his giant metal dog the boot, initiated by another Royal, the prince’s nephew, was dismissed by the court. By Ed Rubin.

Cal Lane's "Ammunition"
The title of Cal Lane's show, "Ammunition,"conjured--at least linguistically--an image of the military preparing for an attack. Though it might be too fanciful, the show is a curiously elegant juxtaposition of metallic lace-like sculptures with industrial materials like steel beams, oil drums and ammunition boxes. Lane's work is hovering between loftiness of religious imagery and the poverty of the utilitarian object. All of her works have a sensual and immersive quality and like much of Lane's work, a geometric simplicity. By Eva Ostrowska.

Why not perform with a run of 33 miles?
If you are tired of superficial, quick and easy exhibitions which seem to be oriented to market desires, the work of Guido van der Werve should come as something of an antidote. A week after the N.Y.C Marathon, Dutch video artist Guido van der
Werve comes with a mission: carrying a bouquet of chamomile flowers on a run of 33 miles from the Luhring Augustine Gallery in Chelsea to composer Sergei Rachmaninov’s gravesite in Valhalla, New York. It was obvioulsy not a case of one artist running privately for over thirty miles, but truly the work of what French critic Nicolas Bourriaud could have called an "intersubjective exchange" as the "substrate" for his work. By Eva Ostrowska.

Stefanie Guthreil's "Dreckige Katze"
Stefanie Guthreil's exhibition, "Dreckige Katz," comprising installations, paintings and sculptures, felt true to her reputation for narrative vision and provocative phantasmagoria. Her new work requires an exploratory approach, as if navigating in bizarre humorous nightmares, oscillating between psychedelic violence and very bad taste. Guthreil's paintings are characterized by small and huge weird figures, caricatures of people she knows in her everyday life, that she uses to create surreal atmospheres and often grotesque pictorial stories. All her creatures, most of the time cats, are regurgitating or vomiting unexpected objects. A cow disgorging a pearl necklace, a black cat ejecting from his teeth a green, red and white rainbow; a masturbating monkey and other animals are displayed on wall-sized canvases. The whole exhibition is a muddle of sexual scatology, political references, kitchy violence and the vague depravity, giving rise to an ambiguous sense of anxiety and unease. By Eva Ostrowska.

"Yigal Ozeri: Garden of the Gods" at Mike Weiss Gallery
Yigal Ozeri explores personifications of youthful innocence, visualized as lovely young maidens cum goddesses, in his new exhibition that runs until June 11 at the Mike Weiss Gallery. Ozeri captures the essence of young girls, unaware of their true feminine nature. He masterfully transforms the Southwest landscape into a universal terrain of the mind, where red replaces green in a hot alien zone. The artist seems especially inspired by the 19th century painter Eduard Manet, who molded the subject of the female figure in the landscape with his personal stamp. Ozeri captures that indescribable time in life, when girls verge on becoming the future. By Mary Hrbacek.

Cloth Sculptures Set to Music in Anne Ferrer's "Billowing Beauty"
French-born Catalan artist Anne Ferrer presents her first exhibition in New York City "Billowing Beauty" at the LAB Gallery on Lexington Avenue and 47th Street through June 3. Curated by Edward Rubin and with musical accompaniment by Los Angeles Carol Worthey, Ferrer's new series of colorful cloth sculptures break the boundary between the gallery viewers adn the curious public who stop to wonder at the eye-catching array of indescribable shapes and forms. The organic shapes, warm harmonious hues, and rhythmic organization interact, infused with vivid joyous fun. By Mary Hrbacek.

Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour fou, an intimate and new journey of Picasso's art
With "Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L'amour fou," the Gagosian Gallery, situated in Chelsea, brings us into the secret intimacy of Pablo Picasso, the man and the artist. You don't have to be French to understand "Crazy love," the meaning of "l'amour fou," and why it is a fitting title for the exhibition. The entire gallery is filled up with renderings of Marie-Thérèse in drawings, paintings and sculptures from 1927 to 1940. Picasso's love leaks out of each piece of art. By Agate Elie.

Mary Hrbacek at the CREON Gallery in New York City
Working in this naturalist mode is artist Mary Hrbacek whose anthropomorphic portraits of trees are currently on exhibit at the Creon Gallery in New York City through April 30. Curated by Richard Pasquarelli, under the title Entwined, Hrbacek's tree paintings are not only transcendent but speak directly to the heart, reminding us, a bit surreptitiously at that, that we are all walking trees. Our spines are trunks, our legs and arms are branches, and sooner or later, with twisted limbs and weathered bones, we too shall be planted. By Edward Rubin.

Painting and photo by David Fludd, 6'x5'. Acrylic on canvas 2005.

Hatch Billops Collection presents David Fludd for "Artist and Influence"
The Hatch Billops Collection is a not-for-profit research library founded in 1975. Its mission is to collect and preserve materials about Black Cultural Art for artists, scholars and the general public. Throughout the year, Hatch Billops presents "Artist & Influence." This event hosts African American, Asian and Spanish artists talking about their work in the form of an interview. These oral stories are recorded and become part of the Hatch Billops Collection archives. By Agate Elie.

No More Rights in Republicanland
Michael Patterson-Carver's new solo exhibition, "Loose Lips Do Sink Ships," is more than a dozen small drawings hanging on walls and all looking like the work of children, but only for the first quick look. As we get closer to these cartoonlike drawings, we understand that there's a childish drawing style, but the content is clearly satire against Republicanism and Right-Wing Authoritarianism of all stripes. Suddenly the work is no longer naïve. By Eve Jégou.

Exhibition by Qiu Shihua and Shi Jing, the Magic of Imagination and Interpretation's Possibilities
Entering Chambers Fine Art's gallery was like being in an empty white room. Yes, you could see painting shapes hanging on the walls but nothing visible on the actual canvases. The “Fugitive Visions” painting exhibition by Qiu Shihua and Shi Jing will surprise you along your journey. Both artists are from China: Qiu Shihua from the Sichuan Province and Shi Jing from the Yunnan Province. At first glance, their work seems to have the same monochromatic palette but the closer you get, the stronger color nuances reveal and shapes appear on the canvas. By Agate Elie.

New Solo Exhibition of California Artist Christian Vincent
When we push the door and step in to the Mike Weiss Gallery, we enter a place that is very austere, impersonal and unwelcoming, which probably influences our interpretations of "Christian Vincent: Tunnel Vision," the new solo exhibition of the California artist Christian Vincent at the Mike Weiss Gallery, 520 West 24th Street, until February 12th, 2011. By Eve Jégou.

Carlo Pittore's paintings and pastel drawings
Carlo Pittore, who died in 2005, was a gallery owner and painter who also worked as an advocate for gay artists in New York and Maine. The first major New York exhibition of his paintings and pastels is being presented through January 22 at Leslie Lohman Gay Art Foundation, 26 Wooster Street in SoHo. By Eve Jégou.

An evocative fine art installation, dedicated to the healing professions, a minyan of ten chairs within a scrim-paneled chamber provides sanctuary and reflection. An evocative fine art installation, dedicated to the healing professions, a minyan of ten chairs within a scrim-paneled chamber provides sanctuary and reflection.

Jewish Museum of Florida
One enters the 2007 restoration of the oldest synagogue in Miami Beach, originally built in 1929, and becomes surrounded by an airy inner-sanctuary of art! PSALMSONG, a multi- media Installation by Carol Hamoy, reveals itself as a multi-media, multi-cultural, Jewish feminist, post-modern sanctuary of fragile translucent fabric. One immediately becomes enchanted by a creation of visual poetry by artist Carol Hamoy. It's creation took three years from the first stitch to complete the work. Hamoy's work is hand-made; which she feel is enormously important in the computer era, in order for the viewer to feel the hand of the artist.