We live in a time of suppression — by governments, by corporations, by culture. What do we do against it?
Let us show you. Below, we take you into a revolutionary photo studio in Mali that chronicled a nation's independence. A document of a city devastated by the AIDS crisis through portraits not just of people but of inanimate objects. A meditation on grief and death, and also a monument to the city's first Arabic-speaking enclave.
These are artists who made or are making works from all kinds of places, from an attic during World War II, to the California state psychiatric system, to the very center of the art world. Here is art that is playful, cerebral, feral — art that offers a way through.
Ryan Lee Gallery, 515 West 26th Street, Chelsea, ManhattanThrough May 9
I was glad to learn, upon entering this exhibition, that I was still capable of revelation. Metcalf Chateau was a group of Hawaiian artists of Japanese descent who exhibited together in the 1950s; many of their works haven't been shown on the mainland since around that time, if they were shown at all. Satoru Abe (1926–2025), with his organic oil-on-canvas paintings and copper sculptures, and Tadashi Sato (1923–2005), who contributes biomorphic, semi-abstract paintings, are particular highlights. They were something like the pioneers of the group — two of its four original members, and the first to travel to New York in the 1960s. Across these works, nature, the body, and the picture plane itself coalesce into one; lines and forms seem like they were drawn from a collective psyche — what feels good to the hand, to the eye. Maybe I'm just hallucinating after a long New York winter, but many works, particularly postcard-sized paintings by second-generation member Harry Tsuchidana, felt like they captured the sun glinting sharply off water. They made me feel warm and happy. —Lisa Yin Zhang
Given the convenience of snapping a quick photo today, it can be easy to take for granted the power of an image. But in mid-20th century Bamako, in Mali, pictures were rare opportunities, and photographer Seydou Keïta’s studio was a site that proved their revolutionary potential. Generations of Malians poured into his studio, where he fashioned simple but striking sets from printed fabrics. Sitters styled themselves in grand outfits and accessories, and the resulting portraits are an important chronicle of Mali’s political history as it gained independence from French colonial rule through fashion and cultural agency. The images have simple compositions, but striking, maximalist outcomes, and their aesthetic influence on contemporary photography is undeniable. —Jasmine Weber
Bortolami Gallery, 55 Walker Street, Tribeca, ManhattanThrough May 16
In 1993, Green moved into a “modernist ruin”: a Le Corbusier housing project in decay. Secret is the resulting multimedia project: a document of her time camping out there, including writings, video, and photographs. It’s a “self-styled autoethnography,” we learn from a soothing, disembodied voice reading her materials — from a synopsis to journal entries describing her meals — over a speaker in the gallery. In a three-channel video, we see scenes of her life in the building. Every day, she wears the same uniform, a vest stamped “IMMIGRATION,” a gesture that engages concepts of colonialism and diaspora. She reads, listens to music, turns restlessly in bed at night, and chats with a crew carrying boom mics and big cameras, all teetering on the line between staged scene and reality. In her words, the neglected apartment is a “workspace, living space, and exhibition space” in one. —Jasmine Weber
601Artspace, 88 Eldridge Street, Lower East Side, ManhattanThrough May 17
Curated by Sara Reisman, this four-person exhibition of Liz Magic Laser, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Aliza Shvarts, and Jaro Varga probes the idea of free speech in a world increasingly inundated with limitations brought on by governments, corporations, and culture. While the subject sounds serious, many of the works are far more playful and tongue-in-cheek than the description suggests. For instance, Laser’s “Peace Power” (2026) consists of a wall sculpture that uses reproductions of the tacky moldings from the Trump White House renovation to fashion another type of symbol of power. —Hrag Vartanian
Artists Space, 11 Cortlandt Alley, Tribeca, ManhattanThrough May 23
David Armstrong began photographing in the 1970s, and his oeuvre is definitively marked by the impact of the AIDS crisis on New York City — his lens turned from portraiture toward the inanimate as his community was devastated. This exhibition surveys the expanse of his career, showing intimate portraits of presumed paramours, friends, and muses, alongside blurred shots of landscapes and interior scenes: chairs, plants, statues. The intentionally distorted images stand in obvious contrast to his elegant portraits of mostly men, often in bed or various states of undress. They are beautiful — intimate, sensual, erotic — but there is a striking sense of shared loneliness, a longing, in both sets of images. —Jasmine Weber
Peter Blum Gallery, 176 Grand Street, Floor 2, Nolita, ManhattanThrough May 29
Marina Adams’s abstractions seem to buzz with an inner hum. When presented together in large groups, as in several installations throughout this drawing survey, her shapes sizzle, crackle, and dance before our eyes like a jazzy riff. Individually — my preferred mode of taking in Adams’s deceptively simple permutations of color and form — they conjure the warmth and solace of looking out at a sun-drenched field. —Valentina Di Liscia, senior editor
Berry Campbell Gallery, 24 West 26th Street, Chelsea, ManhattanThrough May 30
I saw Louisa Chase's massive "Sunset Grip" (1983), with its mostly soft Monet-esque color and nearly rabid mark-making, through a window on 26th Street and thought, Okay, fine. You've got me. As a viewer, one can sometimes forget that painting is a very physical act. Not so with Chase. In her works, the words "stroke," "carve," "slash," and "gouge" each take on a distinctive meaning as well as mark. Chase was a main figure of 1970s and '80s New York, running around with the likes of Marilyn Minter, Judy Pfaff, and Julian Schnabel, and a mentee of Philip Guston, whose work is also on view in the city in a show John Yau will tell you all about below. This is the largest and most comprehensive showing of her work in more than a quarter-century, and it just might stop you in your tracks. —Lisa Yin Zhang
David Nolan Gallery, 24 East 81st Street, 4th floor, Upper East Side, ManhattanThrough June 6
Mel Kendrick's ninth solo exhibition at David Nolan consists of free-standing pieces, as well as wooden sculptures and cast paper-pulp works mounted on the wall. Each sculpture is made by cutting and rejoining a single board or excavating parts from a solid piece and reorganizing them to make a new form. Nothing is thrown away or added to the source, which invites viewers to disassemble them in their mind's eye until they arrive at what the form might have originally looked like. That interplay — a reversal of Kendrick's process — is one of the delights of engaging with his work. Within that experience, the viewer senses Kendrick's independence from fabrication and dependence on assistants and high-tech machinery, and all that capitalist access calls up in this disparate world, in favor of a pared-down aesthetic engagement with ordinary materials. —John Yau
One half of Andrew Kreps Gallery is dedicated to the work of the late British-Argentine artist Eileen Agar, one of the few women included in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London; the contours of Surrealism are evident in her exquisitely layered collages evoking the sea, the body, and the organic world. On the other side, Brazilian contemporary sculptor Erika Verzutti has curated a show of works by artists in her shared studio building in São Paulo. Paintings, drawings, and Verzutti’s own distinctive ceramics are hung with a salon-style camaraderie, and one can almost hear them whispering and giggling among themselves. Texture, surface, and material bridge two very different exhibitions, each worthwhile. —Valentina Di Liscia
Hauser & Wirth, 443 West 18th Street, Chelsea, ManhattanThrough July 10
