8 Must-See Museum Shows in New York This Holiday Season
Mickalene Thomas, installation view of Katherine Dunham: Revelation, 2024, in “Edges of Ailey” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2024. Photo by David Tufino. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
The holidays are in full swing and New York is abuzz with twinkle lights, pop-up stores, and special attractions from the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree to the holiday train show at the New York Botanical Garden. Joining the seasonal experiences on offer are several exciting museum shows across the city.
Whether you’re a visiting tourist or a local staying in town for the holidays, there’s an abundance of exhibitions to add some culture to your agenda. From a survey of Latinx contemporary art at El Museo del Barrio to a 24-hour-long film at the Museum of Modern Art, here are the must-see museum shows to visit during the holidays.
Installation view of “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition” at the Brooklyn Museum, 2024. Photo by Timothy Doyon. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.
In this expansive group show, the Brooklyn Museum is marking its 200th anniversary with gratitude for the vibrant creative community it has called home for two centuries. Featuring over 200 artists working in an eclectic range of disciplines, from painting and photography to stop-motion animation, the exhibition is unified by its artists’ connection to Brooklyn—all have lived in or established their studio in the borough within the last five years.
The exhibition was developed through an innovative curatorial process, with artists Jeffrey Gibson, Vik Muniz, Mickalene Thomas, and Fred Tomaselli selecting many of the names included. In addition, the museum ran an open call, which received responses from over 4,000 hopefuls. The resulting presentation is a diverse, visually exciting melting pot—just like Brooklyn itself. Overlapping themes emerge, such as the intertwined nature of identity, memory, and place, as well as the power of art to create community. Included in the standout pieces is Artsy Vanguard 2025 artist Melissa Joseph’s felt portrait of her niece, Olive, giving her father an alfresco haircut during the pandemic. With remarkable skill, Joseph has meticulously recreated the image from a selfie, translating even the minute details of her family’s facial expressions with her signature dry-felted fibers.
The Brooklyn Museum will be closed on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.
Christian Marclay, still from The Clock, 2010. © 2024 Christian Marclay. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery and White Cube.
Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film The Clock (2010) is an ambitious project that earned the artist and composer the prestigious Golden Lion award at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Now, the work is returning to New York for the first time since MoMA presented it over 10 years ago. Comprised of thousands of clips from movies and television shows, the film cuts from images of watches and clocks to characters stating the time—as if time itself were part of the narrative. Marclay and his assistants spent two years editing footage to create The Clock, drawing from a wide range of sources, including High Noon (1952), The Godfather (1972), and National Treasure (2004), as well as TV series like Sex and the City (1998–2004). Arranged to match the time of day the viewer is watching, the minutes and hours pass by in a transfixing, almost meditative montage.
MoMA will be closed on Christmas Day. Entry to The Clock is limited and first come first served, with priority given to museum members. The museum is hosting a special 24-hour viewing of The Clock from December 21–22.
Egon Schiele, installation view of “Living Landscapes” at Neue Galerie, 2024. Photo by Annie Schlechter. Courtesy of Neue Galerie.
While best known for his raw, erotically charged portraits, Austrian Expressionist artist Egon Schiele was also a skilled landscape painter. “Living Landscapes” focuses on this body of work, examining Schiele’s discovery of beauty and symbolism in plants, which he approached in a similar manner to his portraits. In these paintings, the artist homes in on moments that act as reminders of the cycle of life, from verdant trees marking spring’s arrival to wilting flowers no longer in bloom. He also considered the relationship between man and nature, depicting towns with rows of homes, seen in the bird’s-eye view of rooftops sandwiched between dense tree canopies in Town among the Greenery (The Old City III) (1917). With nearly 60 works spanning Schiele’s renowned career—cut short by his death due to the influenza at just 28 years old—the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to understand the artist’s practice outside of his celebrated portraits.
Neue Galerie will be closed Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day.
Installation view, from left to right, of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Fly Trap, 2024; and Purvis Young, Love Dance, 1991, in “Edges of Ailey” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2024. Photo by Jason Lowrie/BFA.com. © BFA 2024. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Exploring the breadth and enduring influence of Alvin Ailey’s career, “Edges of Ailey” is the first large-scale museum show devoted to the leading choreographer and artist. The immersive presentation includes an extensive schedule of live performances, as well as music, video, and visual art that celebrate Ailey as an artist and founder of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
Particularly special are the rarely seen archival materials on view, which include performance footage and a range of ephemera, such as posters and performance programs, in addition to notebooks, poems, and letters. The show also features an 18-channel video installation with clips of Ailey’s life and work created by filmmakers Josh Begley and Kya Lou, with curator Adrienne Edwards. A selection of works by over 80 artists, including Rashid Johnson and Mickalene Thomas, illustrate how Ailey impacted future generations and provide context for the themes he explored, including the African diaspora, Black spirituality, and Black liberation.
The Whitney Museum will be closed Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
“Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon”
MoMA PS1
Through Mar. 24, 2025
Ralph Lemon, installation view of “Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon” at MoMA PS1, 2024. Photo by Steven Paneccasio. Courtesy of MoMA PS1.
Over the last several decades, choreographer, writer, and visual artist Ralph Lemon has established a practice that is as expansive as it is acclaimed, including earning him a MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 2020. While Lemon emerged in the New York art scene in the 1980s, this major institutional solo show brings together a diverse range of his works made over the last 10 years, showing his enduring exploration of choreography, as well as a recent shift to abstraction in gestural, expressionist paintings. Included in the show are paintings, dance, sculpture, photographs, and video, as well as a robust program of live performances that illustrate his continued interest in storytelling. Indeed, throughout Lemon’s career, he has explored the expressive potential of the body as an archive of the human experience, from race and identity to spirituality and emotion, and the power of movement to express and challenge our understanding of the world around us.
MoMA PS1 will be closed Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.
Maria A. Guzman Caprón, installation view of En Tu Mirada [In Your Eyes], Las Curlies, and Aquí Para Ti [Here for you], all 2024, in “Flow States, LA TRIENAL 2024” at El Museo del Barrio, 2024. Photo by Matthew Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and El Museo del Barrio, New York.
For its second large-scale triennial of Latinx contemporary art, El Museo del Barrio is showcasing 33 artists from the U.S. and Puerto Rico, as well as diasporic communities in the Americas, Asia, the Caribbean, and Europe. Organized by the museum’s chief curator Rodrigo Moura, curator Susanna V. Temkin, and guest curator María Elena Ortiz, the exhibition showcases an expansive idea of place.
While coming from different backgrounds, the artists explore similar themes, including the complexities of identity and the fluidity of cultural exchange in a world defined by globalization, displacement, and migration. The works on view span a range of disciplines, from mixed-media paintings and sculptures to immersive presentations, like Widline Cadet’s striking photographic portraits that consider the hybrid, fractured nature of identity inherent in diaspora. The materials in the show are equally diverse. In particular, several artists use nontraditional components, like the air fresheners Chaveli Sifre incorporated in the neon sign Perpetual Renewal (2024)—one of 10 works specifically commissioned for the triennial. Emitting scents of coconut and pineapple through the gallery space, the air fresheners, which viewers can take home, create an atmosphere reminiscent of a tropical island.
El Museo del Barrio will be closed Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.
Installation view of “Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2024. Courtesy of the Met.
The two-artist show “Floridas” explores the many connotations of the Sunshine State, from tourist paradise to fragile landscape at the frontline of climate change. Photographs and mixed-media paintings by Miami-based contemporary artist Anastasia Samoylova are on view alongside historic, documentary-style photographs and paintings by Walker Evans.
A visitor to Florida for decades, Evans was a pioneer of documentary photography, shooting landscape, architecture, and vernacular visual culture, such as beach signs reading “boats for rent.” In his four-decade career, he captured everything from palm trees and the Everglades to Gilded Age mansions and trailer parks. Since 2016, Samoylova has taken a similarly broad approach to portraying Florida, highlighting vibrant seaside buildings and the devastation caused by hurricanes and rising sea levels, as well as evidence of political extremism. Undoubtedly a significant career milestone, “Floridas” takes on greater weight for Samoylova, as it marks the first time a living female photographer has had a major exhibition at the museum in over 30 years, following Helen Levitt in 1992.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art will be closed Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.
“Pets and the City”
The New York Historical
Through Apr. 20, 2025
Charles Willson Peale, The Peale Family, 1773–1809. Courtesy of New York Historical Society.
Over the holiday period, the city’s oldest museum is staging a playful exhibition celebrating pets in the lives of New Yorkers. “Pets and the City” traces centuries of animal companions in visual culture, illustrating how their domestication developed in tandem with the growth of New York itself. In photographs, paintings, sculptures, and a range of ephemera and archival materials, the show demonstrates how humans have a long history of documenting their relationships with pets.
The presentation begins with Colonial-era prints and written documents of working animals, like dogs hunting alongside the Indigenous Lenape and Haudenosaunee people. As the city evolved from Native land to early settlement, so, too, did the role of pets and their depictions in art. While some may still have assisted on the hunt, animals were also increasingly portrayed on laps of their aristocratic owners or hiding under tables waiting for food scraps in stately homes, like the dog in Charles Willson Peale’s painting The Peale Family (1773–1809). The show continues through decades of industrialization and globalization until reaching today’s pets. Contemporary representations depict exotic and service animals, alongside quirky images of domestication, like William Wegman’s humanized dog portraits.
The New York Historical will be closed Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day.
