Cold weather in New York City has a silver lining: it's prime museum-hopping season, and the current slate of exhibitions runs from giant videomontages to centuries-old dolls. Here's what's worth building a trip around.
The reopened New Museum has two strong shows. Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony, his first solo exhibition, spans four decades of work across two floors, anchored by the eight-minute montage Love is the Message, the Message is Death. Also on site, Bowery: Devil's Mile traces four centuries of the downtown street — from Lenape footpath to saloon strip to punk-era haunt — with sideshow flyers and Jacob Riis photographs.
At the Guggenheim, Taryn Simon's Father Country I Do Love You fills the famous spiraling rotunda with roughly a thousand images, texts, videos and sculptures spun from meetings with an ex-FBI agent. It's the largest body of work ever to debut there.
MoMA has a double bill: The Surrealist Book: Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors, featuring rare André Breton and Max Ernst material plus photomontages by Claude Cahun, and Teresa Margolles' forensic examination of violence in the US. Part two of Margolles sits two subway stops away at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City — an easy two-museum day.
Fashion fans should head to the Museum at FIT for Doll Dressing, which uses three centuries of dolls — Barbie, Bratz, boudoir dolls, Takara — to trace how miniature figures shaped the way we dress, with nods to Margiela, Loewe and Marc Jacobs. Over at the Brooklyn Museum, Art of Manga is the first major US exhibition on Japanese graphic novels, with more than 600 original drawings including work by One Piece's Eiichiro Oda and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure's Hirohiko Araki. Its fourth floor adds Hopi Kachina Dolls, showing 53 carved wooden figures.
If you'd rather explore off the Museum Mile, Amant in East Williamsburg hosts Sentient Earth, a campus-wide installation asking 28 artists to imagine what the planet would say to us — and its restaurant Zoli has become a destination in its own right. And for music history, the New York Historical's You Should Be Dancing: New York, 1976 and Beyond rounds out its America at 250 series with a CBGB awning, handwritten lyrics from Patti Smith and Richard Hell, a Studio 54 invite, and an early Saturday Night Fever screenplay.
Nearly everything runs well into 2027, so even a spontaneous winter city break can slot in two or three of these. Brooklyn alone could fill a weekend: the Brooklyn Museum in the morning, Amant after lunch, done by dinner. Story via Condé Nast Traveler.
