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

After the resounding success of Alioune Diagne’s Senegalese pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale international art exhibition, TEMPLON New York unveils the very first show of this rising star of the African art scene on American soil. “Jokkoo”, which means connection or linking in Wolof, features a group of approximately thirty canvases, that offer a cross-examination between of the artist’s home country and the United States.

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.

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.

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.

In a landmark theatrical event, two-time Academy Award® winner George Clooney makes his Broadway debut in Good Night, and Good Luck , an electrifying stage adaptation of the critically acclaimed film. Tune in to the golden age of broadcast journalism and Edward R. Murrow’s (Clooney) legendary, history-altering, on-air showdown with Senator Joseph McCarthy. As McCarthyism casts a shadow over America, Murrow and his team at CBS choose to confront the growing tide of paranoia and propaganda, even if it means turning the federal government and a worried nation against them. Under the direction of Tony Award®-winner David Cromer, from the original screenwriters Clooney and Grant Heslov, Good Night, and Good Luck chronicles a time in American history when truth and journalistic integrity stood up to fearmongering and disinformation - and won.

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.

One of the most prominent features of art from the late eighteenth century onwards, particularly after World War II, is artists’ tendency to evolve traditional artmaking methods outside the studio’s boundaries. This exhibition examines the ways in which contemporary artists enacted new ideas formed by the social and historical contexts of their time and pushed the boundaries of artmaking and materials as a result. By Way Of offers a suite of works from the museum’s permanent collection inspired by the D.Daskalopoulos Collection Gift. Major artists from the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and 1970s, like Jannis Kounellis and Mario Merz share the galleries with artists working today, such as Rashid Johnson, Mona Hatoum, and Senga Nengudi.

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.

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.

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.

A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical is a stage show celebrating the life and music of the legendary singer-songwriter Neil Diamond. The musical takes the audience on a journey through Diamond's life, from his early days as a struggling songwriter to his rise to fame in the 1960s and beyond. Along the way, the show explores the stories behind some of Diamond's most beloved songs and the moments that inspired them.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin takes the podium to lead two exceptional casts in Mozart’s breathless and breathtaking comedy. Baritone Christian Gerhaher and bass-baritone Gerald Finley share the role of the philandering Count, opposite Golda Schultz and Federica Lombardi as the dignified Countess. The wily maid Susanna is sung by sopranos Lucy Crowe and Aida Garifullina, and bass-baritones Ryan McKinny and Christian Van Horn share the title role of the foolhardy valet.

Before the world turned upside down... Hawkins, 1959: a regular town with regular worries. Young Jim Hopper’s car won’t start, Bob Newby’s sister won’t take his radio show seriously and Joyce Maldonado just wants to graduate and get the hell out of town. When new student Henry Creel arrives, his family finds that a fresh start isn’t so easy…and the shadows of the past have a very long reach. From Netflix and the multi-award-winning Broadway producer Sonia Friedman Productions comes Stranger Things: The First Shadow . Winner of two Olivier Awards including Best Entertainment, this landmark production is brought to life by an award-winning creative team including director Stephen Daldry ( The Crown , Billy Elliot , The Inheritance , The Hours , The Reader ) and co-director Justin Martin ( Prima Facie , The Inheritance ). With stunning special effects, extraordinary performances, and a storyline that will keep you on the edge of your seat, this gripping, stand-alone adventure will take you right back to the beginnings of the Stranger Things story.

A dazzling showcase of more than 60 jewelry creations that celebrates our enduring fascination with the cosmos. For millennia, people have been moved by the grandeur of space to explore the workings of our universe—and to create captivating works of art. From the early astronomical observations of Galileo to iconic space missions such as Apollo 11, along with new findings made possible by cutting-edge tools like the James Webb Space Telescope, discoveries about the universe have influenced and inspired artistic expression. A stunning assemblage of astronomically inspired jewelry is the focus of the new exhibition Cosmic Splendor: Jewelry from the Collections of Van Cleef & Arpels.

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.

Textiles touch every aspect of our lives and connect us to history. “Threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning,” the artist Anni Albers wrote in 1965. Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction reveals the links between this art form and abstraction. Incorporating basketry, apparel, and more than a century of other textile works that challenge accepted divisions between fine art and craft, this exhibition broadens the story of abstraction, suggesting that not only ideas but materials—like woven, knotted, and braided fabric—are crucial to its understanding and success. Spanning early-20th-century works by Sonia Delaunay, Hannah Hoch, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, whose textile practices parallel their painting and drawing, mid-century works by Albers and Ed Rossbach, and contemporary works by Rosemarie Trockel, Andrea Zittel, and Igshaan Adams, this exhibition brings together more than 150 diverse, interdisciplinary objects. Highlighting issues of labor and identity that are intertwined with modern textile production, Woven Histories argues that weaving and textiles are the quintessential link between lived experience and art.

Before the world turned upside down... Hawkins, 1959: a regular town with regular worries. Young Jim Hopper’s car won’t start, Bob Newby’s sister won’t take his radio show seriously and Joyce Maldonado just wants to graduate and get the hell out of town. When new student Henry Creel arrives, his family finds that a fresh start isn’t so easy…and the shadows of the past have a very long reach. From Netflix and the multi-award-winning Broadway producer Sonia Friedman Productions comes Stranger Things: The First Shadow . Winner of two Olivier Awards including Best Entertainment, this landmark production is brought to life by an award-winning creative team including director Stephen Daldry ( The Crown , Billy Elliot , The Inheritance , The Hours , The Reader ) and co-director Justin Martin ( Prima Facie , The Inheritance ). With stunning special effects, extraordinary performances, and a storyline that will keep you on the edge of your seat, this gripping, stand-alone adventure will take you right back to the beginnings of the Stranger Things story.

Sargent is one of the greatest painters of the early 20th century, on par with Whistler. This exhibition, co-hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musee d'Orsay, brings together more than 90 works by Sargent, focusing on his time in France. In 1874, the 18-year-old Sargent arrived in Paris as a student. In the mid-1880s, his portrait "Madame X" was a great success at the Paris Salon. This was the peak of Sargent's creation in Paris and also the highlight of the exhibition.

Welcome to the OVC 2025 Expo! The OVC Business Partnership Conference is a pivotal event uniting African professionals, innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, and policymakers from across the global diaspora to foster collaboration, share insights, and drive technological advancements. To be held in New York in May 2-3, 2025, this conference serves as a bridge connecting the African diaspora with various business stakeholders, government officials, investors, and industry leaders to explore opportunities for collaboration and partnership. Additionally, it will be a platform for networking, and knowledge sharing. Information Source: One Voice Consortium | eventbrite

Dialogues All PEN World Voices Festival tickets are non-refundable. Please confirm the time and location of your event before finalizing your purchase. From the moment pen is set to paper, all literature is inherently in dialogue: with predecessors, peers, canons, and its readers alike. Some literature goes a step further, though, centering the act of conversation as a core facet of the work. Join poets Dunya Mikhail ( Tablets: Secrets of the Clay ) and Radu Vancu , for an exciting discussion on the power of dialogue in poetry. Moderated by poet and translator Nancy Naomi Carlson (transl. When We Only Have the Earth ) these poets will explore how their poems engage in dialogue with other artists, writers, poets, and forms. From meditative discourses with ancient Sumerian tablets to ekphrastic poems, these works expose the poignance of exchange and dialogue in poetry. As literary translators, these poets will also reveal how translation informs their approach to writing poetry. The 2025 PEN World Voices Festival, the 20th anniversary of the festival, will be a celebration of world literature and free expression. Over four days, over 80 writers from over 35 countries will be featured in engaging talks, panels, readings, and performances in New York City and greater Los Angeles. Visit https://worldvoices.pen.org/ for more information about the entire festival, as well as PEN America. ACCESSIBILITY: AIA Center for Architecture is ADA compliant. The basement floor is accessible via elevator. ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only . Please reach out to our Box Office team at publicprograms@pen.org by April 21st to request. Please ask a Box Office Attendant or festival representative upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred. For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact publicprograms@pen.org COVID-19 2025 Festival Policy: While not required, per public health official guidelines, the World Voices Festival recommends being fully vaccinated, and wearing masks in all public indoor settings as a precaution against the spread of Covid-19, as well as around crowds. If you are feeling unwell, please do not come to the event. Reach out to publicprograms@pen.org for assistance if you have already purchased a ticket. We thank you for ensuring our speakers, guests and venue workers feel safe and comfortable at all World Voices Festival events. If you have questions or concerns please contact publicprograms@pen.org Information Source: PEN America | eventbrite

Indie Lit Fair This is a free event, but registration is required. Join us for the ninth annual Indie Lit Fair, co-presented by the PEN World Voices Festival and the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). This year, the Indie Lit Fair will take place south of Astor Place, on the sidewalk of Lafayette Street, between Astor Place and Joe’s Pub. Free and open to the public, the Indie Lit Fair celebrates the vitality and diversity of independent literary publishing, showcasing new and established poetry presses, fiction and creative nonfiction publishers, and innovative literary magazines. Stop by to browse, buy, and bask in the breadth of the literary arts being published today. The 2025 PEN World Voices Festival is a celebration of world literature and free expression. The 2025 edition will be the 20th World Voices Festival. Over four days, over 80 writers from over 35 countries will be featured in engaging talks, panels, readings, and performances in New York City and greater Los Angeles Visit https://pen.org/world-voices-festival/ for more information about the entire festival, as well as PEN America. ACCESSIBILITY: For detailed information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact publicprograms@pen.org COVID-19 2025 Festival Policy: While not required, per public health official guidelines, the World Voices Festival recommends being fully vaccinated, and wearing masks in all public indoor settings as a precaution against the spread of Covid-19, as well as around crowds. If you are feeling unwell, please do not come to the event. Reach out to publicprograms@pen.org for assistance if you have already purchased a ticket. We thank you for ensuring our speakers, guests and venue workers feel safe and comfortable at all World Voices Festival events. If you have questions or concerns please contact publicprograms@pen.org Information Source: PEN America | eventbrite