Featured Events in New York in April, 2025 (June Updated)

Enamel decoration is a significant element of Chinese decorative arts that has long been overlooked. This exhibition reveals the aesthetic, technical, and cultural achievement of Chinese enamel wares by demonstrating the transformative role of enamel during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. The first transformational moment occurred in the late 14th to 15th century, when the introduction of cloisonné enamel from the West, along with the development of porcelain with overglaze enamels, led to a shift away from a monochromatic palette to colorful works. The second transformation occurred in the late 17th to 18th century, when European enameling materials and techniques were brought to the Qing court and more subtle and varied color tones were developed on enamels applied over porcelain, metal, glass, and other mediums. In both moments, Chinese artists did not simply adopt or copy foreign techniques; they actively created new colors and styles that reflected their own taste. The more than 100 objects on view are drawn mainly from The Met collection.

This timely exhibition looks back at the year the captivating Eurasian eagle-owl took to Manhattan’s skies, learned to hunt, and peered into apartment windows.

Playful, kinetic, and full of surprises, Songs of New York is an immersive interactive experience that introduces visitors to a full range of music from and about New York City, from the 1920s to the 2020s, showcasing everything from be-bop to K-pop, across genres, boroughs, and musical movements. Songs of New York will be installed in a dedicated gallery on the Museum’s second floor in February 2025. Featuring music from 100 artists, programmed with both sound and visuals, Songs of New York reflects on topics like the subway, apartments, nightlife, and neighborhoods, toggling through acts as diverse as Susanne Vega, Tito Puente, Merle Haggard, LCD Soundsystem, Yoko Ono, Lil’ Kim, and many, many others. The interactive experience will be paired with original photography from the MCNY collection, including works by notable photographers including Allan Tannenbaum, Joe Conzo, Fred W. McDarrah, and Janette Beckman, who captured images of NYC icons such as Blondie, LL Cool J, and the Velvet Underground that celebrate the city’s longstanding role as a place for music making and a source of inspiration for artists across the five boroughs.

He is one of the greatest entertainers of all time. Now, Michael Jackson’s unique and unparalleled artistry has finally arrived on Broadway in a brand-new musical. Centered around the making of his 1992 Dangerous World Tour, and created by Tony Award®- winning Director / Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, MJ goes beyond the singular moves and signature sound of the star, offering a rare look at the creative mind and collaborative spirit that catapulted Jackson into legendary status. Turn it up, Broadway — MJ is here! • MASKS OPTIONAL - All guests are strongly encouraged to wear a mask in the theatre to protect themselves and others, but it is no longer required.

Step into the heart of Cuba, beyond the glitz of the Tropicana, to a place where blazing trumpets and sizzling guitars set the dance floor on fire. Here, the real sound of Havana is born—and one woman discovers the music that will change her life forever. Inspired by true events, the new Broadway musical Buena Vista Social Club™ brings the Grammy® Award-winning album to thrilling life—and tells the story of the legends who lived it. A world-class Afro-Cuban band joins a sensational cast of musicians, actors, and dancers from around the world for an authentic experience unlike any you’ve seen or heard before. Don’t miss this unforgettable tale of big dreams, second chances, and the power of art to help us survive.

The exhibition is co-hosted by the Shanghai Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, USA. It brings together more than 200 collections from important domestic and foreign institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Museum in the UK, the Cernuschi Museum in France, the Palace Museum, the Shanghai Museum, and the Liaoning Provincial Museum. This exhibition is a friendly exchange project between the two museums. After the closing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in September 2025, the exhibition will move to the East Hall of the Shanghai Museum.

Brazilian contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes creates mural-like, abstract paintings through an innovative technique she calls “monotransfer.” She begins this process by painting her forms onto clear plastic sheets. Once dry, she layers and adheres the painted films onto the canvas, and then peels off the plastic sheets, revealing the forms in reverse. The resulting vibrant and dynamic compositions balance abstract forms, organic patterns, and geometric structures on densely textured and intricate surfaces.

Thousands of artists—including Norman Rockwell, Mark Rothko, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jacob Lawrence—have studied and taught at the Art Students League, a New York institution founded in 1875 by a group of young artists who believed that an arts education should be accessible to anyone seeking it and who envisioned an artist-run school free from dictates of process or style. To mark the 150th anniversary of the League, The New York Historical showcases works by League affiliates with featured paintings drawn from The Historical’s promised gift of 130 scenes of New York City from art collectors and philanthropists Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld. The installation is part of a larger city-wide, cross-institutional, year-long celebration programmed by the Art Students League. Curated by Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto, vice president & chief curator, in collaboration with Ksenia Nouril, gallery director and curator, and Esther Moerdler, curatorial assistant, at the Art Students League.

SMASH, inspired by the hit TV show, is finally on Broadway! A hilarious behind-the-scenes rollercoaster ride about the making of a Marilyn Monroe musical called Bombshell, it’s got all the iconic songs, kick-ass choreography, and backstage pandemonium that make Broadway the beloved institution it is today. Our cast is stacked, because who better to play a bunch of wannabe Broadway big shots than actual Broadway big shots? Among them: Robyn Hurder, Brooks Ashmanskas, Krysta Rodriguez, Bella Coppola, Jacqueline Arnold, Caroline Bowman, John Behlmann, Kristine Nielsen and Casey Garvin to name just a few.

Lorenzo Homar was a pioneering printmaker, poster designer, calligrapher, painter, illustrator, caricaturist, and costume and theatrical set designer. Active from the 1950s through the 1990s, few equal his impact and influence as a teacher of poster design and printmaking in Latin America. This exhibition focuses on his poster output over a thirty year period during which time his work reflected the complex history of Puerto Rico, encompassing elements of Taíno, Spanish, and African cultures as well as the rising tensions between tradition and modernity under the Luis Muñoz Marín government. His influence is so extensive that today he is known as the father of the Puerto Rican poster. Alejandro Anreus is Emeritus Professor of Art History and Latin American Studies, William Paterson University. A former curator at the Jersey City Museum and Montclair Art Museum, he is the author of over sixty articles and catalogue essays, and six books on Latin American and Latinx Art.

In East Asian cultures, the arts of poetry, calligraphy, and painting are traditionally referred to as the “Three Perfections.” This exhibition presents over 160 rare and precious works—all created in Japan over the course of nearly a millennium—that showcase the power and complexity of the three forms of art. Examples include folding screens with poems brushed on sumptuous decorated papers, dynamic calligraphy by Zen monks of medieval Kyoto, hanging scrolls with paintings and inscriptions alluding to Chinese and Japanese literary classics, ceramics used for tea gatherings, and much more. The majority of the works are among the more than 250 examples of Japanese painting and calligraphy donated or promised to The Met by Mary and Cheney Cowles, whose collection is one of the finest and most comprehensive assemblages of Japanese art outside Japan.

The Museum of Modern Art announces Jack Whitten: The Messenger, the first comprehensive retrospective dedicated to the groundbreaking art of Jack Whitten (American, 1939–2018), on view from March 23 through August 2, 2025, in the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions. Presented solely at MoMA, the exhibition will explore the full range of Whitten’s innovative art over his nearly six-decade career, showing more than 175 works from the 1960s to the 2010s, including paintings, sculptures, rarely shown works on paper, and archival materials. Together, these works will reveal how Whitten overturned the tenets of modern art-making to become one of the most important artists of our time. Beginning his career during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Whitten was under great pressure to create directly representational art as a form of activism, yet he dared to invent new forms of abstraction and, in the process, transformed the relationship between art, memory, and society.

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie radically reimagines the story of European porcelain through a feminist lens. When porcelain arrived in early modern Europe from China, it led to the rise of chinoiserie, a decorative style that encompassed Europe’s fantasies of the East and fixations on the exotic, along with new ideas about women, sexuality, and race. This exhibition explores how this fragile material shaped both European women’s identities and racial and cultural stereotypes around Asian women. Shattering the illusion of chinoiserie as a neutral, harmless fantasy, Monstrous Beauty adopts a critical glance at the historical style and its afterlives, recasting negative terms through a lens of female empowerment. Bringing together nearly 200 historical and contemporary works spanning from 16th-century Europe to contemporary installations by Asian and Asian American women artists, Monstrous Beauty illuminates chinoiserie through a conceptual framework that brings the past into active dialog with the present. In demand during the 1700s as the embodiment of Europe’s fantasy of the East, porcelain accumulated strong associations with female taste over its complex history. Fragile, delicate, and sharp when broken, it became a resonant metaphor for women, who became the protagonists of new narratives around cultural exchange, consumption, and desire.

In her first solo museum exhibition, Whitney Claflin (American, b.1983) features a focused selection of works tracing her distinctive approach to painting and ongoing engagement with notions of infatuation, misrecognition, and waywardness. The exhibition includes over twenty new and recent paintings, which careen between subjects and styles ranging from lyrical abstractions and breezy sketches to snippets of text, renditions of logos, and scraps of mass-produced textiles. Following the associative logic of a mixtape or poem, they express transient states of intensity. References and subcultural symbols—such as nods to 1970s flower-power paraphernalia, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, beloved New York bars, and the late-90s DIY scene of her teens in Providence, Rhode Island—suffuse her work with varying degrees of legibility. In addition to paintings, the exhibition also includes drawing, photography, video, and sculptural interventions, highlighting Claflin’s multifaceted approach.

Ramin Karimloo, Jinkx Monsoon, and David Hyde Pierce lead the crew in Pirates! The Penzance Musical, this must-see Roundabout reimagining of The Pirates of Penzance. Scott Ellis (Doubt; Kiss Me, Kate) directs and Warren Carlyle (Harmony; Kiss Me, Kate) choreographs with a hilarious new adaptation by Rupert Holmes (The Mystery of Edwin Drood), musical direction by Joseph Joubert (Caroline, or Change), and orchestrations by Joubert and Daryl Waters (Memphis). Gilbert & Sullivan’s pirate ship docks in New Orleans in this jazzy-bluesy vision of the crowd-pleasing classic, in an outrageously clever romp sizzling with Caribbean rhythms and French Quarter flair. With the tongue-twisting Major-General, the rabble-rousing Pirate King, newly-imagined young lovers, daring daughters, footloose pirates and fleet-footed police, there's a shipload of musical comedy delights on board to dazzle first-timers and G&S aficionados alike.

The River is a Circle is a software-driven animation by Marina Zurkow (b. 1962, New York, NY) that presents a view of the Hudson River as a horizontal split between the world above and below the water. The dynamic composition of the animated elements is driven by algorithmic probability and reflects the current weather and season in New York. The work brings together a mix of river ecology, researched with the help of Hudson River Park Trust, and references to the history of the Meatpacking District, including its time as a trading post for the Lenape people, a hub for meat processing plants, a haven for queer night life, and a site for the sculptural works by Gordon Matta-Clark and David Hammons across from the Whitney. The River is a Circle extends the underwater environment to the terrace with maritime wreckage and oyster reef balls, structures used to provide a habitat for oysters. It speculates on circular systems and a potentially positive cyclical flow back to modest strategies of maintaining ecological networks.

This exhibition presents a bold new history of American photography from the medium’s birth in 1839 to the first decade of the 20th century. Drawn from The Met’s William L. Schaeffer Collection, major works by lauded artists such as Josiah Johnson Hawes, John Moran, Carleton Watkins, and Alice Austen are shown in dialogue with extraordinary photographs by obscure or unknown practitioners made in small towns and cities from coast to coast. Featuring a range of formats, from coast to coast. daguerreotypes and cartes de visite to stereographs and cyanotypes, the show explores the dramatic change in the nation’s sense of itself that was driven by the immediate success of photography as a cultural, commercial, artistic, and psychological preoccupation. In 1835, even before the nearly simultaneous announcement of the invention of the new art in Paris and London, the American philosopher essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson noted with remarkable vision: “Our Age is Ocular.”

The exhibition is drawn from the Museum’s collection, as well as through key loans from organizations including: Institute of Jazz Studies, Louis Armstrong House Museum & Archives, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, Celia Cruz Foundation, Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Centro), Royal House of LaBeija, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Remix⟷Culture, CUNY Center for Dominican Studies, Apollo Theater, Karla Flórez School of Dance, Think!Chinatown, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, Brooklyn Contra, and private lenders such as Rubén Blades, DJ Rekha, Judy Santos, Hellotones, and many more.

For the 2025 Roof Garden Commission, Jennie C. Jones (born 1968, Cincinnati, Ohio) will produce Ensemble. Only her second outdoor sculptural installation, the project will explore the sonic potential of stringed instruments as well as their formal possibilities. In the artist's unique response to modernism, these acoustic sculptures propose the line of the string as a proxy for art history, unbroken and continuous. In her paintings, sculptures, works on paper, installations, and audio compositions, Jones uses sound to respond to the legacy of minimalism and to modernism itself. Drawing on her immersion in Black improvisation and avant-garde music, she deploys sound and listening as important conceptual elements of her practice, from the acoustic fiberglass panels she affixes to canvas, which absorb sound and affect the acoustic properties of the environment, to the lines and bars she creates through her compositions that refer to elements of musical notation. Her work across media offers new possibilities for minimalist abstraction, challenging how—and by whom—it is produced.

This spring, the Guggenheim Museum’s iconic rotunda will fill Rashid Johnson’s Anxious Men, spray-painted text works, large-scale sculptures, films, and more in a highly anticipated mid-career exhibition. Rashid Johnson: Poems for a Deep Thinker will bring together nearly 90 works that showcase the Chicago-born, New York-based artist’s wide-ranging practice, exploring themes ranging from history and literature to black pop culture and music.

Mike King is America’s most prolific gig poster artist. What began as a means of promoting his own bands’ shows in the late 1970s gradually morphed into a full-time specialty in the art of the eye-catching concert poster. Today, there are few major venues or bands that have not worked with him—his imagery has saturated into the tapestry of American music culture, appearing on album covers, t-shirts, and, most importantly, posters. The posters in this exhibition are a mere slice of a much larger visual pie—a taste of some of Mike’s rarest posters from a thirty-year spread within his ongoing career. They highlight shifts in both the available technology for making posters, from fully analog to digital, as well as how the function of gig posters has evolved from advertisements to collectible merchandise. Rather than being presented strictly chronologically, each section focuses on Mike’s process for creating the paste-up or digital file necessary to produce each type of poster.

Di Donna Galleries presents The Surrealist Collage: Where Dreams and Reality Meet. Organized in collaboration with Timothy Baum-a renowned poet, essayist, collector, and expert in Dada and Surrealism-the exhibition showcases a significant collection of collages by leading Surrealist artists.The Surrealist Collage celebrates the evocative power of collage as a unique medium and explores how it embodied both the imagination and ingenuity of the Surrealists. By assembling fragments of printed images, photographs, and other ephemera, they created dreamlike compositions that merged the boundaries between reality and the imagination.

A large art project called Day's End now stands in the Hudson River near Pier 52. Created by David Hammond, it's made of slender steel pipes and pays tribute to artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who transformed an abandoned shed on the same pier in 1975. The sculpture changes with the light, connecting to the history of the waterfront as a shipping hub and a gathering place for the gay community. It took seven years to complete the installation, and it's now open to the public for free. The Whitney Museum collaborated with the Hudson River Park Trust on this project, and they will work together on a maintenance plan. To celebrate its completion, the Whitney offers free admission on May 16, and there will be family workshops throughout the day. You can find Day's End at Hudson River Park, across from the Whitney Museum, on the southern edge of the new Gansevoort Peninsula, where it will remain permanently.

Edra Soto (b. 1971, Puerto Rico) explores the relationship between our private, interior lives and shared public history and culture. Graft is the latest in an ongoing series of installations based on rejas, wrought iron screens frequently seen outside homes in Puerto Rico. Rejas often feature repeating geometric motifs that can be traced to West Africa’s Yoruba symbol systems, in contrast to the Spanish architecture celebrated in official Puerto Rican tourism. Graft investigates how Puerto Rican cultural memory often masks the Black heritage of the island as folklore.

Photography has played a key role in structuring systems of power in society, including those related to crime and punishment. This exhibition presents immersive contemporary installations by the artist Jesse Krimes (American, b. 1982) alongside nineteenth-century photographs from The Met collection by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, who developed the first modern system of criminal identification before the adoption of fingerprinting. Krimes’s image-based installations, made over the course of his six-year incarceration, reflect the ingenuity of an artist working without access to traditional materials. Employing prison-issued soap, hair gel, playing cards, and newspaper he created works of art that seek to disrupt and recontextualize the circulation of photographs in the media. Displayed at The Met in dialogue with Bertillon, whose pioneering method paired anthropomorphic measurements with photographs to produce the present-day mug shot, Krimes’s work raises questions about the perceived neutrality of our systems of identification and the hierarchies of social imbalance they create and reinscribe. An artist for whom collaboration and activism are vital, Krimes founded the Center for Art and Advocacy to highlight the talent and creative potential among individuals who have experienced incarceration and to support and improve outcomes for formerly incarcerated artists.

Based on the 1960 film by Roger Corman and featuring a book by Howard Ashman, music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Ashman, Little Shop follows meek plant store attendant Seymour, his co-worker crush Audrey, her sadistic dentist of a boyfriend and the man-eating plant that threatens them and the world as we know it.

From a young age, acclaimed Pop artist David Hockney (British, b. 1937) cemented his reputation as one of the most innovative and experimental artists of his generation. Hockney/Origins: Early Works from the Roy B. and Edith J. Simpson Collection examines the early period of Hockney’s career in depth, from his time as a student at the Royal College of Art in London during the early 1960s to his formative years in the 1970s.

New York’s age of graffiti began on the city streets in the early 1970s. This new movement, often consciously artistic despite its unsanctioned origins, came of age over the next 20 years. Above Ground centers on the many artists who transitioned from illegally writing on subway cars to creating paintings on canvas and exhibiting in galleries and museums. Their works embody an important transitional moment for the movement’s evolution, as it permeated into broader consciousness and significantly influenced global culture. The exhibition provides a window into a vibrant subculture of young creators and highlights previously unseen treasures from the Museum’s major collection of graffiti-based art. The collection, which was donated by the artist Martin Wong 30 years ago, comprises more than 300 canvases and works on paper. Among the highlights on view in this exhibition are works in aerosol, ink, and other mediums by seminal figures in the street art movement, including Rammellzee, Lee Quiñones, Lady Pink, and Futura 2000. Together, they capture the passions and ambitions of artists transitioning from the street to the walls of prominent galleries in New York and around the world.

Design is a fundamental element of life, an enzyme necessary to our evolution. It helps us cope with change and permeates our personal and social lives, embodying both our strengths and weaknesses. Many designers are intent on creating new behaviors, focusing on habits and circumstances most in need of change. Pirouette: Turning Points in Design features objects—from Post-Its to Spanx—that embodied experiments with new materials, technologies, and concepts; offered unconventional solutions to conventional problems; and had a deep impact both on design and the world at large.

Design is a fundamental element of life, an enzyme necessary to our evolution. It helps us cope with change and permeates our personal and social lives, embodying both our strengths and weaknesses. Many designers are intent on creating new behaviors, focusing on habits and circumstances most in need of change. Pirouette: Turning Points in Design features objects—from Post-Its to Spanx—that embodied experiments with new materials, technologies, and concepts; offered unconventional solutions to conventional problems; and had a deep impact both on design and the world at large.