The exhibitions this week show us how we shape ourselves in history’s image, and the other way around. Lotus L. Kang’s assemblages at 52 Walker draw from diasporic memory, yet her draped film sculptures form an ongoing document of the exhibition’s idiosyncrasies of light and movement. Meanwhile, Rashid Johnson’s survey at the Guggenheim Museum draws from a dense network of Black intellectual thought, offering in turn a contemporary visual vernacular.
Then, two group shows — Making Home at Cooper Hewitt and Superfine at The Met — take on the ways ordinary people construct identities, whether that be through our domestic settings or our individual style. As you can see, though three of the four shows are mere blocks apart on the Upper East Side’s Museum Mile, they span continents and centuries, and radically different systems of thought. But that’s the miracle of New York, and the miracle of art. —Lisa Yin Zhang, Associate Editor
Lotus L. Kang: Already
52 Walker, 52 Walker Street, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through June 7
“[Lotus L.] Kang evaluates what new possibilities and temporalities can emerge from engaging in processes alien or forbidden, such as exposing film to sunlight.” —Danielle Wu
Read the full review here.
Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial
Cooper Hewitt, 2 East 91st Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through August 10
“Featuring a wide-ranging medley of 25 newly commissioned installations with pliable interpretations of both home and design, Making Home takes visitors on a meander through the minds of artists and designers from the US, US territories, and Tribal Nations.” —Julie Schneider
Read the full review here.
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through October 26
“Superfine: Tailoring Black Style is a triumph not only for its expansion of Black fashion history and visual culture, but also for its stirring and substantive approach that centers ordinary individuals and their dress practices.” —Imani Wiliford
Read the full review here.
Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through January 18, 2026
“[Rashid Johnson’s] discernment is key to this exhibition of 95 works of art that are replete with references to Black identity, its rhetorical construction and historical antecedents, and its visual codes, the dense thicket of signifiers in the forest that is Blackness.” —Seph Rodney
Read the full review here.
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