What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in August

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By Holland Cotter, Jason Farago, Jillian Steinhauer, John Vincler, Martha Schwendener, Travis Diehl, Seph Rodney and Will Heinrich

Want to see new art in New York this weekend? Check out Claire Pentecost’s monstrous photographs in Brooklyn. And don’t miss an exhibition at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, N.Y.

Upstate

Through Oct. 29. Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, N.Y.; (518) 943-7465, thomascole.org.

A placard on Thomas Cole’s porch marks where the Hudson School patriarch liked to look out at the valley and lament the loss of the wilderness. The irony is that Cole’s fantastic landscapes never quite existed: he wasn’t mourning nature, but the ideal he’d built on it. An exhibition at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site shows the extent to which the idea of landscape has been rethought. His former residence and studio host work by 13 contemporary women and collectives, including Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Wendy Red Star, and Jean Shin. A poster in the stairwell by the Guerrilla Girls demystifies the Hudson River School’s boys’ club, while Anna Plesset’s trompe l’oeil painting-of-a-painting, Thomas’s autumnal view of the Cole manse as copied by his sister, Sarah, shows the complexity of the Hudson School legacy.

Across the garden, Cole’s old studio houses the first survey of second-generation Hudson River School painter Susie Barstow — which is also the first survey of any female Hudson River School artist — and six landscape painters from her circle. While the men went big, Barstow earned her reputation specializing in the small- and medium-size canvases popular in the last half of the 19th century. A few of her paintings, like the piercing chartreuse “Sunshine in the Woods,” perform the genre’s best trick, depicting not leaves or trunks in a clearing but something more ephemeral: the air itself. In another picture, aptly titled “Landscape With Fading Tree,” a trunk blends into the sky; nature is literally disappearing. TRAVIS DIEHL

Brooklyn

Through September 23. Higher Pictures, 16 Main Street, Brooklyn; 212-249-6100, higherpictures.com.

Claire Pentecost’s recent photographs are monstrous. As in “Afterparty” (2022-23), they feature mostly human-animal hybrids: A woman in a blonde wig who is sheathed in a black ensemble lies atop another figure, with white-gloved hands who is wearing a red-and-white striped silk shirt but has the head of a deer. Close looking reveals that the “woman” in black has hooves instead of hands at the end of her emaciated arms. Is this a disheveled couple in a passionate embrace or a pair of victims clinging to each other in terror?

The 21 playful, if macabre, photos in the exhibition (all from 2022 and 2023) show characters composed of taxidermy, doll parts, clothes and mannequins. They sometimes reoccur, creating the feeling that one is viewing the pages of some exploded storybook without a logical sequence. Their dingy white-walled spaces are dramatically lit so that the shadows themselves become characters. A drawing of a wooden tall ship directly on the wall becomes a ghostly trace of its subsequent erasure in another. Many of the photographed scenes include paintings, like “Pioneer Cemetery,” which juxtaposes a painted self-portrait of the artist on the wall beside a headless mannequin in a white dress holding the head of a bison. Two feature paintings by the artist’s mother.

The recombinant beings recall the stop-motion puppetry of the Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer, and has affinities with Greer Lankton, Leonora Carrington and the painter Paula Rego’s use of puppets as models. This shadowy doll-play is Barbie’s antithesis. JOHN VINCLER

East Village

Through Sept. 3. The Ukrainian Museum, 222 East Sixth Street, Manhattan; 212-228-0110, theukrainianmuseum.org.

If you know one thing about Janet Sobel (and that is one thing more than most), it’s that she covered canvases with dripped paint in the mid-1940s — before Jackson Pollock did the same. Yet in 1942 and 1943, shortly before she embraced abstraction, this self-taught Ukrainian-born New Yorker painted small, impassioned pictures of soldiers, peasants, cannons and flowers, packed into tight compositions of agony and ardor. Nearly four dozen wartime gouaches by Sobel are at the Ukrainian Museum in the East Village, where her extremity has, to state the obvious and also the essential, a pronounced new relevance.

Sobel was born in 1893 in a shtetl near what is now Dnipro, and emigrated to Brooklyn after her father was murdered during a pogrom. Several pictures here incorporate Ukrainian folk motifs, including the vinok, or crown of flowers, that she daubed on the foreheads of three Eumenides. Many more of her figures, wired by black outlines and augmented by goggle-eyes, have a modern anonymity that recalls Dubuffet: infantrymen in profile scuttle across duckboards, and young men huddle beneath a rich curve of brown (is it a trench?). The artillery has a spare and eternal geometry, though now, on the same territory of eastern Ukraine, it is an artillery war once again.

Under its new director Peter Doroshenko, the Ukrainian Museum has a chance to become a critical site for thinking about this epochal war. (Other recent presentations here include the painter Lesia Khomenko and the photojournalist Maks Levin, who was killed last year by Russian soldiers.) The war is as much about culture as about territory, and New York takes culture seriously. JASON FARAGO

Brooklyn

Through Sept. 10. Art Lot, 206 Columbia Street, Brooklyn; artlotbrooklyn.com.

New York is a tricky place for public space. Many parks and plazas are actually privately owned, and many community gardens have limited open hours. When you’re tired, sick or homeless, the city can feel hostile, in part because it’s so hard to find a seat.

This quandary is, obliquely, the subject of David L. Johnson’s exhibition “Community Garden.” Upon first sight, the title may seem to over-promise: The show consists of 11 assorted planters lined up inside a small, fenced-off plot. The ground is covered with gravel and weeds, and there’s a single bench. But the unassuming aesthetics belie the installation’s radicalness.

All the planters were previously located elsewhere in the city. Not just decorative, they were, according to the gallery release, strategically placed to block access to shade and places of possible rest. Johnson, who was born and raised in New York, has a practice of surreptitiously removing examples of so-called hostile architecture from the streets and exhibiting them as art. Here, the transposed objects have also been repurposed: He cleaned out the detritus inside them and planted wild bergamot, which has medicinal properties and attracts pollinators.

What’s more, Art Lot, normally accessible only by appointment, is open for the run of the show. Anyone can visit anytime, and perhaps take some bergamot with them.

Johnson’s defiant gestures are acts of care and liberation. In the show, former obstructions become facilitators of life, and out in the city, I imagine people sitting where the planters once were and finding some relief. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

SoHo

Through Sept. 10. Pearl River Mart Gallery, 452 Broadway, Manhattan; pearlriver.com.

Move beyond the sphere of the blue-chip world and readily available historical accounts of modern and contemporary art in New York thin out. “Just Between Us: From the Archives of Arlan Huang,” a group show at the venerable Chinese export emporium Pearl River Mart, is a significant addition to one under-recorded narrative: the story of Asian American art and artists in this city.

The San Francisco-born Arlan Huang moved to New York in the late 1960s to study art. He became a fixture of Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood, as a practicing artist, business owner and community organizer. There, in the 1970s, he and a fellow artist, Karl Matsuda, opened, on a shoestring, an art framing business, Squid Frames, still in operation (though now in Brooklyn). Over the next two decades Huang participated in two corner-turning Asian American art collectives: Basement Workshop and Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network. Both nurtured artists who had found scant mainstream acceptance. And both expanded what Asian American, as a transnational identifier, could mean.

Huang has also been collecting art, most often through swaps with, or small gifts from, fellow artists, the sources of nearly everything in a show that is a time capsule of an era and a creative culture. Most of the work is small, desk-drawer size: prints, photographs, drawings, paintings. Some names are familiar (Tomie Arai, Ken Chu, Corky Lee, Martin Wong, Lynne Yamamoto, and Danielle Wu, who curated the show with Howie Chen); others less so. As a record of a history still growing, Huang’s archive is a necessity; item by loving item, it’s also a complete delight. HOLLAND COTTER

TriBeCa

Through Oct. 7. 52 Walker, 52 Walker Street, Manhattan; 212-727-1961, 52walker.com.

More like “The Pig Nudes.” The photographer Heji Shin is known to mix high and low — gigantic studio portraits of Kanye West one minute, hard-core gay cop porn the next; as comfortable in glossy magazines as in scrappy galleries. Fittingly, this show puns on the fine-art and fashion photographer Helmut Newton’s 1980s pictures of celebrity skin (called “Big Nudes”). With titles like “Figure Standing” and “Eat Me,” several lush large-scale photographs depict fuzzy, fleshy swine in unsettling modelesque poses, complete with coquettish rows of teats and flicks of tongue. “Reclining Nude,” its peachy subject lying trotters out on a seamless backdrop, is the epitome of porcine soft-core.

Shin’s other series is more somber: Three sets of M.R.I. scans show the artist’s brain, the layers spread out for analysis. If photographs of faces and postures come with the tantalizing promise to penetrate their subject’s essence, Shin’s brain scans represent another order of portraiture. But even as a medical imaging machine lays bare the fatty seat of consciousness, the person remains opaque. The scans push the conceit of the pig pictures into comically bleak territory. “The Big Nudes” promises highbrow titillation but delivers mortality. For Newton’s exquisite models, Shin substitutes an animal similar enough to lend us its heart valves, smart enough to spice our sausages with guilt. The cosmic pun of the pig nudes, really, is to portray both species as meat, plus magic. TRAVIS DIEHL

SoHo

Through Sept. 10. The Drawing Center; 35 Wooster Street, Manhattan; 212-219-2166, drawingcenter.org.

“You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief,” the Lebanese-American author Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) wrote in his best seller “The Prophet” (1923), “but rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.” Gibran’s book, a synthesis of poetry, religion and self-help inspiration, has sold more than 100 million copies. He was also an artist though, which you can see in over 100 works in this overdue show organized by Claire Gilman, chief curator at the Drawing Center.

In the same way “The Prophet” plumbed the human experience, looking for universal truths, Gibran’s artwork focuses on people. There are charcoal and graphite portraits of famous artists like Auguste Rodin, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Claude Debussy, as well as the psychoanalyst Carl Jung and unidentified mystics. In works like “The Summit” from around 1925 or “The Waterfall” (1919), bodies intertwine and earthly connection suggests uniting with the divine.

Gibran drew from a number of obvious sources: Symbolist art, with its otherworldly aims; the hazy aesthetics of Pictorialist photography; and the idealizing classicism of the Pre-Raphaelites. He mostly rejected the abstraction that reigned in 20th-century art, which partly explains why he was overlooked as an artist. But there is also an unbridled sweetness and fragility to his work that would have been deemed kitsch by many hard-boiled modernist critics (not unlike, for instance, how they viewed Marc Chagall). In our own crisis-riddled moment, Gibran’s art, like his words, is a balm and a portal for rising unbound above the daily strife. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Lower East Side

Through Sept. 17. New Museum, 235 Bowery, Manhattan; 212-219-1222, newmuseum.org.

For her first solo museum presentation in the United States, the young Korean artist Mire Lee houses her ambiguous body-horror forms in a PVC room within a room, its translucent sides cloudy with mud and curtained with tattered, clay-soaked shrouds. It’s unclear whether Lee’s bulbous, stringy kinetic sculptures are growing or dying. Electric motors and hydraulic hoses, gurgling and twitching and leaking, animate taupe gobs of silicone, hung with chains and impaled with pipes. It’s a little theatrical on one (rational) level, but on another (psychosexual?), there’s pleasure in the conceit. Like the rubbery wounds in a B horror movie, these faux viscera work on a gut level.

The New Museum show is especially effective, in its humid, muddy quarantine, at provoking the senses: the tent’s raised utility floor, crusted with mud and admitting tubes and wires, clanks under your shoes; the air tastes like sour mud; motors grind and pumps rasp. Outside the tent, along its periphery, are the routers, tanks and transformers, the electronic organs that produce the scenography inside: water periodically trickling down the crankshaft in “Black Sun: Horizontal Sculpture”; the dry suction from a pipe in a cement cauldronlike sculpture with an unprintable title. Stashed around the back of the structure are the mop and vacuum needed to keep the clay inside the tent, out of the rest of the museum. The unsettling power of Lee’s work comes from its refusal to accept boundaries — of sculpture, of obscenity. TRAVIS DIEHL

Newburgh

Through Sept. 24. Elijah Wheat Showroom, 195 Front Street, Newburgh, N.Y. ; 917 -705-8498, elijahwheatshowroom.com.

It might take an exhibition offering more than just crafty visual trickery to pull New Yorkers from their urban warrens up the Hudson Valley in the sweaty days of late summer. “Souvenirs of the Wasteland,” a collaboration between Caitlin McCormack and Katharine Ryals at the Elijah Wheat Showroom in Newburgh is such a show, rewarding the visitor aesthetically and intellectually. It is a slightly satirical take on the universal survey museum, with a wall text by Cara Sheffler that claims the quest for knowledge is essentially “a path of infinite progress” and vitrines containing strange, hybrid creatures that may be fossils, taxidermied specimens or renderings of defunct species. There is also a celebratory nod to horror and the abject — for example, a crocheted piglike creature that sprouts mushrooms from its back, and a “shadow farmer” made of black velvet, wearing a fedora with appliquéd branches and leaves all over its body, like some ghostly goth dryad. Additionally, there is a foreshadowing of the consequences of our ecological crisis, with the depiction of various life-forms, amalgams of cheap jewelry, artificial hair, beads, microplastics and silicone, that here appear as though they have been recovered after extinction. The partnership between McCormack, who supplies the crochet, and Ryals, who does the sculptural work, makes each artist more strangely wonderful.

Since Elijah Wheat was opened in Newburgh in July 2020 by the artists and life partners Carolina Wheat and Liz Nielsen, they have consistently mounted shows that are worth the trip out of the city, especially for the perversely paradisiacal wilderness that is this show. SEPH RODNEY

Queens

Through Sept. 10. Queens Museum, New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens; 718-592-9700; queensmuseum.org.

Aliza Nisenbaum grew up in Mexico and now lives in New York. So do many of the people in Corona, Queens, whom she’s spent years painting in their homes and workplaces, in her studio at the Queens Museum or while they were enrolled in a class she once taught called “English Through Feminist Art History.” The museum’s wonderful “Queens, Lindo y Querido” (Queens, Beautiful and Beloved), a wide-ranging show of her work, includes portraits of Delta Air Lines and Port Authority employees; of Hitomi Iwasaki, the show’s curator, in her plant-filled office; and of an art class that Nisenbaum offered to food pantry volunteers at the museum, displayed along with a selection of the volunteers’ own works (“El Taller, Queens Museum”).

It’s worth mentioning all of this because Nisenbaum’s interest in people, her need to connect with them, doesn’t just provide content for her paintings — it comes through in their form. Realistic but with heightened colors and flattened planes, they’re homey and glamorous at once, capable of absorbing any number of idiosyncratic details. “El Taller” (The Workshop) presents 10 budding artists, five working on self-portraits with the aid of small mirrors, against the unreal purple mists of Flushing Meadows Corona Park. And then there are the paintings-within-the-painting, each with its own distinctive style, not to mention 19 naïve, multicolored games of “exquisite corpse.” It’s a tribute to Nisenbaum’s generosity — and to her skills with composition — that it all inhabits a single room in harmony. WILL HEINRICH

Columbus Circle

Through Aug. 27. Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, Manhattan; 212-299-7777, madmuseum.org.

As a rule, contemporary art takes itself too seriously, which is why I’m delighted when I see pieces that lampoon society or make me laugh. Such work is increasingly visible today, much of it made with clay — a material whose associations with craft and childhood (and poop) are perfect for upending preconceptions of what “real” art should be.

Few exhibitions have examined the historical context for this current boom in weird ceramics. “Funk You Too!” does, and in doing so, deepened my understanding and appreciation of it.

Curated by Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, the show departs from a 1967 exhibition that attempted to define a Bay Area-centered style known as Funk art. What exactly Funk was is still being debated, but based on the terrific examples here, it was strange, funny, lewd and sometimes pointed. Robert Arneson emerges as its godfather; his “Portrait of the Artist as a Clever Old Dog” (1981), the centerpiece of the current show, features a sculpture of his weary face on the body of a dog, surrounded by clumps of colorful turds.

Arneson is better known than the rest of his cohort, whose works — like Patti Warashina’s surreal stela “Pitter-Podder” (1968) — are a revelation. The show also includes contemporary artists whose identities and sensibilities are far more diverse than the older generation. From Yvette Mayorga’s disarming riff on Polly Pocket to Natalia Arbelaez’s terra-cotta sculptures with cartoonish faces, today’s artists often use Funk aesthetics for more overtly political ends. They’re a testament to how serious silliness can be. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Brooklyn

Through Aug. 26. Picture Theory, Greenpoint (address available with an appointment), Brooklyn; 917-765-9762, picturetheoryprojects.com.

Apartment galleries offer intimate experiences with art that the blue-chip behemoths of Chelsea cannot. At Picture Theory in Greenpoint, a record played on a turntable in what would normally be a sitting room. The music was familiar: the distinctive fingerpicking style of the guitarist John Fahey — folk and blues flecked with traditional Indian raga — whose artwork rather than music I came to see.

The phrase “American primitive,” used for Fahey’s music, equally fits his visual art: All 17 works on paper or poster board were made in the last few years of his life when he was on the road touring or at home in Salem, Oregon. (He died in 2001.) Tempera, spray paint and markers are mostly employed to render layered fields of poured, soaked, sprayed and impressed color. Emergent forms in the compositions are occasionally outlined with a marker. Two jotted drawings, in marker only, are vaguely surrealist. The other untitled and largely undated works tend toward primary colors or, less frequently, pastel tones. Some incorporate glitter or iridescent materials.

Despite the exhibition’s title, “Fields of Reptiles and Mud,” the work is bright and joyous, a vivid and fascinating contrast with his vast body of music. The exhibition is the result of collaboration between Picture Theory’s founder, Rebekah Kim, and John Andrew, the manager of Fahey’s painting archive — two former colleagues at David Zwirner gallery who bonded over a shared appreciation for outsider art. It’s worth seeing what spills onto the page when a musical genius turns to another medium. JOHN VINCLER

East Village

Through Aug. 27. Swiss Institute, 38 St. Marks Place, Manhattan; 212-925-2035, swissinstitute.net.

In the 1990s, a Swedish businessman, Johan Wang, opened a Chinese restaurant that was also a three-story ship, replete with dragon head and tail. The Sea Palace sailed from Shanghai to Europe, docking in various cities, but ended up shuttered in Gothenburg, Sweden. Recently, the ship was moved to Stockholm and repurposed as a haunted house.

If this sounds like a contemporary ghost story about capitalism and orientalism, it is — which also makes it the perfect starting point for Lap-See Lam’s “Tales of the Altersea,” her first U.S. solo show. Starting in 2014, Lam 3-D scanned the interiors of several Chinese restaurants in her home country of Sweden, including Sea Palace and the one founded by her grandmother, who immigrated from Hong Kong.

The glitchy ruins of Sea Palace are just barely recognizable in “Tales of the Altersea” (2023), the 10-channel video at the heart of her exhibition. Lam turns the ghost story into a fable involving twins and characters from Chinese mythology, who swim through a murky ocean to the sounds of rhyming narration and haunting music. The work unfolds as a digital shadow play projected on the walls and floor of the Swiss Institute’s basement. It’s a transportive melding of old and new stories and technologies, with what sometimes feel like too many moving parts. But just let the dazzling video wash over you. The details are less important than the outline they create: of being trapped in the phantoms of history, until you find a way to break free. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Greenwich Village

Through Aug. 27. Institute of Arab & Islamic Art, 22 Christopher Street, instituteaia.org.

Behjat Sadr, who died in 2009, was a prominent painter in Iran before moving to Paris in the early 1980s. Her work demonstrates how artists absorbed a dizzying array of influences after World War II. For Sadr, this meant the earthy approach of European Informel painters like Alberto Burri and Jean Dubuffet, but also the systemic geometries of Islamic architecture — and even the exaggerated, Pop brushstrokes of Roy Lichtenstein. This show at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art shows off her range with paintings, installations and haunting collages.

Sadr studied in Rome in the mid-1950s and the canvases from that period, many painted on thick, toothy surfaces like Burri’s, are charged with carefully controlled formal energy. Later, she would scrape patterns into the “abstract” image, creating what looks like wood grain or that Lichtenstein brushstroke. The buoyant stripes in a kinetic work from the late 1960s, made with window blinds attached to the surface of a canvas, appear and disappear, depending on your perspective. The collages made in Paris feature photographs of arid Iranian landscapes, but also one of an unidentified man, seemingly silenced by a criss-cross pattern plastered over his mouth.

At root, many of the works are charged with subversive politics. Sadr left Iran after the 1979 revolution and her work reverberates with radical poetry and powerful histories. It feels vitally important now, at a moment when women are leading a protest movement in that country, to see the visionary work of this groundbreaking woman artist. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Chelsea

Through Aug. 19. Silverlens Gallery, 505 West 24th Street, Manhattan; 646-449-9400, silverlensgalleries.com.

One of the first artworks encountered in “Shrines” is a rough-hewed wall display made from faded photos, vintage saltshakers and scrap-wood boxes: materials that might bring Joseph Cornell to mind. But it’s clear that the work’s creator, the Philippines-based artist Norberto Roldan, means to pay homage to a fellow countryman too. The piece is from a series Roldan calls “100 Altars for Roberto Chabet,” a venerated pioneer of Conceptual art in the Philippines.

Roldan’s work and the other pieces in “Shrines” — a group show featuring 16 Filipino and Filipino diaspora artists — seem to pose two questions: In the secular world of contemporary art, is there any space for reverential artworks? And who, or what, can be the object of that reverence? Spirits, people, places, memories: The show’s answers range. References to specific elements of Filipino culture abound. Still, “Shrines” is accessible to a broader New York audience. It is a show full of feeling.

While its title is devotional, no one religion gets singled out. A neon-letter sign by Lani Maestro adapts a quotation from St. John of the Cross, paying heed to a history of local Catholicism entwined with Spanish colonial rule. Southeast Asian spirit houses and prefab apartments alike are evoked in a pair of architectural scale-models by Stephanie Comilang, a talent to watch. In “God to Go,” by Eric Zamuco, even modern-day consumerism brushes up against the divine. An ornate, transparent column, on closer inspection, turns out to be a stack of carryout containers: single-use plastic made rapturous. DAWN CHAN

TriBeCA

Through Aug. 19. Artists Space, 11 Cortlandt Alley, Manhattan; 212-226-3970, artistsspace.org.

The entrance to rafa esparza’s exhibition “Camino” is flanked by two paintings. In order to face either one head on, you must stand on a small, uneven platform of homemade adobe bricks. This is a message from the artist: He’s not interested in a seamless viewing experience. He wants you to think about the ground you’re walking upon.

The Los Angeles–based artist may be best known for his extreme performances. For example, at Art Basel Miami Beach last December, he turned a coin-operated pony ride into a lowrider bike outfitted for his body, so that participants rode him. By comparison, his first solo show in New York is tame. It recalls his contribution to the 2017 Whitney Biennial, where he created a room of adobe bricks. That installation was more immersive; this one is conceptually tighter.

Here, a winding path of bricks connects life-size portraits of members of esparza’s largely queer community. The paintings are also on adobe, referencing his Mexican heritage and accentuating his subjects’ brown skin. On the walls hang renderings of L.A.’s 110 Freeway, featuring concrete tunnels and embankments. This sets up a tension over how we build society — in concert with people and the earth or with little regard for them?

A striking painting at the back depicts P-22, the mountain lion that famously crossed two L.A. freeways. Its stride and stare mimic those of the human figures, all coalescing to issue a kind of challenge: What would it take to embrace a more sustainable way of life? JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Chelsea

Through Aug. 15. Marlborough, 545 West 25th Street, Manhattan; 212-541-4900, marlboroughnewyork.com.

When the paintings of the blockbuster Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, who died in 1944, were first shown publicly in the 1980s, some critics argued that the works looked more like diagrams illustrating occult ideas than abstract paintings. Later audiences and critics disagreed. Tastes have changed perhaps — but so has our relationship to diagrams, as John Bender and Michael Marrinan asserted in their book “The Culture of Diagram” (2010).

“Schema: World as Diagram” focuses on artists — mostly painters — who use the diagram in formal, conceptual and sometimes playful ways. Some use it to describe social, political and personal structures, such as Mike Cloud, Alan Davie, David Diao, Thomas Hirschhorn, Mark Lombardi and Loren Munk. Grids, networks and circuit boards appear in works by Alfred Jensen, Paul Pagk, Miguel Angel Ríos. Maps are a touchstone for Joanne Greenbaum and the aboriginal painters Jimmy and Angie Tchooga. More cosmic diagrams appear in paintings by Chris Martin, Karla Knight, Paul Laffoley, Trevor Winkfield and Hilma’s Ghost (the artists Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray), who take af Klint as an inspiration.

For Raphael Rubinstein, who organized the show with his wife, Heather Bause Rubinstein, the diagram, which only became important in the 20th century in European and American art, closes the gap between abstract and representational art. Maybe this rich, dense show signals a shift, though: Who cares about abstraction anymore? Viva the diagram! Like painting itself, diagraming is a way of thinking and organizing information — speedier than the written word, more graphic and visual. In a chaotic, overstimulating world, no wonder diagrams are so popular. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Upper East Side

Through Aug. 12. Meredith Rosen, 11 East 80th Street, basement level, Manhattan; 212-655-9791, meredithrosengallery.com

It doesn’t take much for clowns to be creepy — the unnatural colors and rictus grins do the heavy lifting — an effect that’s been exploited by schlock horror for eons. Happily, the clowns in Catharine Czudej’s installation here never materialize, but one gets the sense, descending to a fluorescent-lit basement gallery, of entering the lair of some sinister Bozo who’s just stepped out for a smoke.

The dread never relents, not that it would have anywhere to go; color-wheel parachute tarps assault the walls and blanket the floor, strewn with bottles of irradiated-purple soda, giving the whole space the claustrophobic toxicity of a Chuck E. Cheese fever dream, or a house under a fumigation tent.

Puffy, cast-aluminum daisies and attenuated balloon animals creep along the floor, their color drained into cold gray. It is as if Giacometti did birthday parties, or if Jeff Koons stopped smiling. Elsewhere, two glittering wall works make up the deficit. Czudej melts down bismuth and lets it act on an aluminum frame, producing craggy accretions of stunning color. They mimic the shape of paintings, mocking the form: They look acid-eaten in places, or perhaps in revolt, returning to nature. An overly chirpy ad for a smoking cessation pharmaceutical plays on an upturned screen, its deranged tenor contributing to the deadpan darkness. Czudej’s fun house might be a place where only she’s having fun, but maybe that’s all right. Her berserk immersive environment taunts our endless consumption — of art, amusement, drugs, aspartame — our constant need for yucks. MAX LAKIN

Chinatown

Through Aug. 11. Magenta Plains, 149 Canal Street, Manhattan; 917-388-2464, magentaplains.com.

The ground floor gallery at Magenta Plains is configured as a chapel — but of what faith? The New York artist Rachel Rossin is as much a programmer as a painter, and her exhibition embroiders the boundaries around “the human” with knowing reverence. On a round LED screen mounted to the ceiling, the video “The Maw Of” pans and zooms through 3-D renderings of disembodied nerves and skeletons, glowing networks, and the orange and blue blobs of bodies viewed in infrared. It’s a celestial tondo of the posthuman, a portal to the angels or their digital avatars. It turns the room red.

On the curved back wall hang five portraits of “mechs” — robotic suits of anime armor. Their purplish, blurred silhouettes seem printed on top of the ridges of milky paint depicting pale, layered figures and puddling abstractions. In “Just like Velveteen Rabbit, Mech Standing,” the largest and center panel, the mech’s beatific pose echoes an obscure, winged shape sketched into the pulsing lavender shadows in butter yellow and grass. Several, such as “SCRY. 1 Corinthians 13:12.,” a picture in minty pastels where the mech’s pilot’s face punches through the haze, incorporate line drawings of dragons labeled Bad or Good in a naïve hand; others feature angels. The apostle Paul had heaven in mind when he wrote, in 1 Corinthians, that “now we see as through a glass darkly”; Rossin’s cyborg icons hold out that true vision might require a higher power, a congestion of human and machine. TRAVIS DIEHL

Lower East Side

Through Aug. 11. Candice Madey, 1 Rivington Street, Manhattan; 917-415-8655, candicemadey.com

For many young artists in the cash-poor, art-rich East Village of the 1970s and very early 1980s, bathtub-in-kitchen tenement apartments were also studios. You get an immediate sense of forced spatial economy in “Luxe, Calme, Volupté,” a salon-style group show of some 70 works from that time and place, each small enough to have been done on a kitchen table.

The show is a piquant tasting menu of a moment when realist art was suddenly in high flood after a long Minimalist/Conceptualist-induced drought. For a sense of new possibilities explored, or revisited, check out a 1981 Times Square cityscape by Jane Dickson, or Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt’s 1986 altar boy valentine, or a sculpted pair of spike heels (real spikes!) by the great Greer Lankton, or a companionable 1988 trifecta in the form of Gail Thacker’s photograph of Mark Morrisroe photographing Rafael Sánchez.

More than anything, this is a portrait show, of artists’ lovers and friends, almost all artists themselves. Together they define a brief, bright community occupying a gentrifying bit of turf, and a dolorous passage in time: Several of the artists represented here would die of AIDS, with Richard Brintzenhofe, Luis Frangella, Peter Hujar, Nicolas Moufarrege and the experimental photographer Darrel Ellis among the early losses. (The Madey show has been organized by Antonio Sergio Bessa and Allen Frame; the Darrel Ellis retrospective, now at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, was curated by Bessa and Leslie Cozzi.) Happily, illusions of “luxe, calme and volupté” were still possible when much of what’s here was made. HOLLAND COTTER

Hudson Yards

Through Aug. 11. Sean Kelly Gallery, 475 10th Avenue, Manhattan; 212-239-1181, skny.com.

For the concluding exhibition of NXTHVN’s graduating fellowship cohort, the artists in this program founded in 2019 by the painter Titus Kaphar and two partners in New Haven, Conn., have produced work that is visually arresting, materially inventive, and takes real risks.

In the group show, “Reclamation,” Donald Guevara has fashioned collages of human limbs, animal appendages and bits of popular iconography mounted amid a rabble of multicolored shards titled “Glitches” (2023). His installation, which reads as a stop-motion blur of activity, brings to mind Sylvia Plath’s line from “Elm”: “a wind of such violence will tolerate no bystanding.” Another highlight is Anindita Dutta’s assemblages that combine black boots and shoes in which the heels are replaced by cruelly curved horns paired with sumptuous leather, cloth and feather textiles. Her series “Sex, Sexuality, and Society” (2023) finds that sweet seam between the phallic and the feminine, making it obvious that clothing really is talismanic conjuring in disguise.

Edgar Serrano’s paintings flirt with horror, but with a light, comical touch. The red-eyed ghoul shrieking underneath a Stahlhelm military helmet in “Doctor Hardcore” (2023) seems both silly and disturbing. Lastly, in the downstairs gallery, Ashanté Kindle’s circular paintings of hairstyling strips and acrylic on wood panel expound on her fascination with Black people’s hair. Her previous work was mostly obsidian, but now has added variegated pigmentation and objects such as hair bows and beads that give the paintings more visual voltage. The entire exhibition is like this work: sensuality embedded in intellectual curiosity. SEPH RODNEY

Tribeca

Through Aug. 11. Klaus von Nichtssagend, 87 Franklin Street, Manhattan. 212-777-7756; klausgallery.com.

Oranges are uniquely at home in the imagination. You can easily look past their surface texture and treat them simply as shapes, and they share their name, if not their very identity, with a color. There’s also their history as symbols of exotic luxury. In other words, they’re the perfect subject for “Mirror Grove,” the latest seminar in perception and design from the Brooklyn-based painter’s painter Graham Anderson.

In eight modestly scaled paintings with evocative titles like “Masks Without Owners” and “The Chimeric Mesh,” Anderson makes oranges look like hazy spotlights, paper cutouts, hovering planets, bouncy Art Deco ornaments, office-supply stickers, glowing buttons and elements of ancient Roman frescoes. He does all this with a combination of flat, saturated color, trompe l’oeil shadows and tiny, overlapping daubs of paint that split the difference between TV static and Ben-Day dots.

In “Advice From the Sun,” an enormous disc hangs like Pharaoh Akhenaten’s abstracted sun god between two gently rolling spheres. A smaller disc, nearby, is adorned with a sprig of schematic leaves. The fact that each of these planetlike orange circles is itself made up of tiny orange circles makes clear that the music of the spheres is also the music of atoms, and vice versa. But Anderson isn’t using his painting to illustrate this familiar, if always mind-boggling, truth. He’s using the truth to adorn his painting. WILL HEINRICH

TriBeCa

Through Aug. 4. Chapter NY, 60 Walker Street, Manhattan; 646-850-7486, chapter-ny.com.

Two drawings by Lee Lozano, both untitled from 1964 and 1969, anchor this group show, which consists otherwise of recent paintings, sculptures, installation pieces and photographs by living artists. Lozano’s drawings of abstract but vividly spatial forms vibe with Philip Guston’s cartoonish figurative style from the same period.

At the gallery’s entrance, cameron clayborn’s sculpture “a short list of grievances” (2022), a gathering of dyed and stuffed muslin like oversized sausages, hangs above the wood floor feeling bodily, akin to Louise Bourgeois. The carbine red of two works by the Beirut-based artist Dala Nasser frame the back and a side wall. Hung like paintings, the large cloth-based works are like skin grafts of a landscape, as the artist exposes her materials outside to the elements before bringing them back inside to be hung. Here the landscape conjured is American. The works, “Cochineal I” and “Cochineal II” (both 2023), are named for the beetle, found on prickly pear cactus, used to make red dye.

The five silver gelatin photographs by Sam Moyer (all 2023) give the exhibition serious heft. Four depict giant slabs of composite stone, perhaps segments of an eroded sea wall, the fifth a field of long undulating grass — all in concrete frames inset with Long Island beach stone aggregate.

Summer group shows often feel motivated more by a desire to gather the participating artists together for the opening night party, but here the works cohere: a weighty whole, a sustained event. JOHN VINCLER

Queens

Through Aug. 7. SculptureCenter, 44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, Queens; (718) 361-1750; sculpture-center.org.

In important ways the New York contemporary art world was a much bigger place three decades ago than it is today, not in size but in its thinking. For a few multiculturalist years our smaller, adventurous art spaces experimented with bringing spirituality into their premises, not just as an object of study but as an active practice, a way to think about what art is, or can be.

The first institutional solo show of the artist Edgar Calel, titled “B’alab’äj (Jaguar Stone),” is a reminder of this. Born in 1987 in Guatemala, where he lives and works, Calel is of Mayan Kaqchikel ancestry and that heritage shapes the character of his monumental SculptureCenter installation of raw earth, rough stone and fire in the form of burning candles. In appearance, the piece suggests an altar, a memorial, and mazelike garden. Its content interweaves cultural, political and personal histories.

Obliquely, poetically, Calel refers to Mayan views of the earth as a dynamic, responsive, sacred being. He offers a lament for an Indigenous people historically persecuted in their own land. And he presents a tribute to continuity in the form of family, his own. (Sections of molded soil spell out the syllable “tik,” the sound he remembers his grandmother making to call wild birds for feeding.) The resulting SculptureCenter piece, beautiful to see, isn’t a “religious” work in any narrow sense. It’s a spiritual charging-station, multipurpose, real. HOLLAND COTTER

An earlier version of a review of “Schema: World as Diagram” described incorrectly the show’s curators. Heather Bause Rubinstein is the wife of Raphael Rubinstein, not his daughter.

An earlier version of the “Luxe, Calme, Volupté” review misidentified a curator

of the Darrel Ellis retrospective at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. The show was curated by Antonio Sergio Bessa and Leslie Cozzi, not by Bessa and Allen Frame.

An earlier version of the “Souvenirs of the Wasteland” review described incorrectly the collaboration between two artists. Caitlin McCormack supplies the crochet, and Katharine Ryals does the sculptural work, not the other way around.

How we handle corrections

Holland Cotter is the co-chief art critic of The Times. He writes on a wide range of art, old and new, and he has made extended trips to Africa and China. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2009. More about Holland Cotter

Jason Farago, critic at large for The Times, writes about art and culture in the U.S. and abroad. In 2022 he was awarded one of the inaugural Silvers-Dudley Prizes for criticism and journalism. More about Jason Farago

Jillian Steinhauer is a critic and reporter who covers the politics of art and comics. She won a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant and was previously a senior editor at Hyperallergic. More about Jillian Steinhauer

Seph Rodney is a curator and art critic in Newburgh, N.Y. He is co-curating a show on sports that should open at SF MoMA in 2024. More about Seph Rodney

Will Heinrich writes about new developments in contemporary art, and has previously been a critic for The New Yorker and The New York Observer. More about Will Heinrich

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