10 Exhibitions to See in New York City This May

As Frieze New York kicks off, Ocula’s editors select the best of the city’s exhibitions, including a Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera, the wilfuly strange sculptures of Erwin Wurm, and the evocative paintings of Emily Kam Kngwarray.

Marcel Duchamp (until 27 June) at Gagosian at 980 Madison

Andy Warhol is often cited as art’s Nostradamus for the 21st century, predicting the democratisation of celebrity and the flattening of high and low culture into one surface. But it was French-American artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) who showed that “it is not tradition, but the artist who…decides what the work of art is,” as critic Okwui Enwezor put it. Duchamp’s invention of the readymade set art on a course that would eventually rid it altogether of the need for surfaces. An untitled exhibition of key works by Duchamp, most of them 1964 remakes of lost or destroyed originals made between 1913–1920, inaugurates Gagosian’s new space at 980 Madison Avenue, complementing a concurrent MoMA retrospective. While MoMA’s selection includes more than 300 works, Gagosian’s tight focus highlights Duchamp’s most iconic offerings, including Fountain (1964) and Roue de Bicyclette (1964). The uninitiated may roll their eyes at urinals repurposed as art, but for those who find the mind of the artist more compelling than the hand, a visit feels akin to a pilgrimage.—Aimee Walleston

Josiane M.H. Pozi, In Pursuit of Feeling (until 3 July) at the American Academy of Arts and Letters

When galleries install monitors, often the wires are hidden. In In pursuit of Feelings, these cables are designed to form a network of artery-like patterns along the gallery wall, connecting video screens like bloodlines. They coagulate and spread to form the shape of a house with cross-pane windows and a peaked roof. London-born artist Josiane MH Pozi has long been pre-occupied with the domestic, the digital, and the boredom of sitting alone in a house full of people. In one work in this exhibition at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two miniature versions of typical home furniture act as stands for iPhones playing her video work Pingey (2019), which documented alienating exchanges between members of Pozi’s family. In another, she has placed a red, high-gloss Ikea Bestå Burs TV bench with a three-tier retail or display riser. Pozi writes that “[people] can’t sit in the discomfort of not knowing, or even the discomfort of not resonating” with these arrangements of technology and homely scenes. Here, it is frustrating, but also generative, to encounter something so personal, and be locked out at the same time. But also necessary.—Lydia Eliza Trail

Sophie Rivera, Double Exposures (until 2 August) at El Museo Del Barrio

Born in 1938 in Brooklyn, photographer Sophie Rivera is best known for her black-and-white Latino Portraits series (1978–1979), wherein she asked random passers-by if they were Puerto Rican. If they said yes, she photographed them against a black wall at a local diner; she then manipulated her images in the darkroom to emphasise a subtle, halo-like glow around her subjects. When work that documents marginalised communities is shown, writers typically like to commend it for emphasising the dignity of the subject. And while Rivera’s portraiture represents her subjects honourably, the broad-scale retrospective at El Museo Del Barrio reveals an artist pushing beyond the role of documentarian. The exhibition, the first of its kind for Rivera (who died in 2021), includes her experimental self-portraits, often nude, and subway and graffiti scenes from the late 1970s. Also shown is a lesser-known body of work, Bowl Study (c 1976–78), wherein the artist documented her own bowel movements in situ. It taps into something of a faeces renaissance: two Venice Biennale pavilion artists, Florentina Holzinger and Aline Bouvy, have also highlighted human waste in their exhibitions.—Aimee Walleston

Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Frida and Diego: The Last Dream (until 12 September) at Museum of Modern Art

Do we need another exhibition of work by art’s most mythologised couple, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo? Well, The Last Dream, currently at the MoMA, is different. The exhibition is paired with the Metropolitan Opera House’s production of El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, a magical-realist portrait by Gabriela Lena Frank and libretto by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz (running until 5 June). It stages an imaginary posthumous encounter, Wuthering Heights-style, between Frida and Mexican Socialist painter Rivera. MoMA’s show has been designed by Jon Bausor, who is responsible for the opera’s set and costumes. Works on show include Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940) and My Grandparents, My Parents and I (1936). Because her oeuvre is small, and she endured chronic pain throughout her life, the self-portraits exude an otherworldly stoicism. Their placement alongside works by Rivera, such as Flower Festival: Feast of Santa Anita (1931), all set within Bausor’s theatrical set design, creates an immersive theatrical experience. After all, theatrics, as seen in the paintings of both artists, and passion, as seen in the couple’s love letters, were a central part of Rivera and Kahlo’s relationship.—Lydia Eliza Trail

Agnes Martin, Painting is not making paintings (until March 2027) at Dia Beacon

Agnes Martin tried to paint abstract work for 20 years before she was satisfied she had created something she felt was truly non-representative. What emerged after those decades of graft were the gridded and pale-striped canvases, often washed in soft blues and greys, for which the late Canadian-American artist became known. This slow progression towards abstraction is charted in an exhibition at Dia Beacon in New York, titled Agnes Martin: Painting is not making paintings, which will run for a year. It follows the organic forms and oils of Martin’s work during the 1950s, through to her acrylics, characterised by horizontal planes and soft grids of colour, and eventually her Black Paintings, made around 1989, with their deep grey stripes of paint. In Martin’s telling, these paintings were often born from meditating on different feelings or states of being (happiness, innocence, the sublime) and seeing what emerged in her mind. “We have a tremendous range of abstract feelings,” Martin said in a video interview before her death in 2004, “but we don’t pay any attention to them”.—Baya Simons

Emily Kam Kngwarray, The Turning Season (15 May–14 August) at Pace Gallery

No one seems to know who gave Emily Kam Kngwarray the name “Emily”; almost certainly not her family. Many such colonial names were convenient instruments used by missionaries and administrators to assimilate Aboriginal people into the “new system”. Her name “Kam” refers to the yam plant growing on her land—the name her people called her by, and Kngwarray’s batiks and paintings remained inseparable from the land that shaped her life. It’s the paintings and batiks she made between 1981–1995 that are on show at Pace: the dense fields of dotted lines and sprawling root-like forms speak to the soil, wind, light and seasonal movement of her land of Anmatyerr. Looking at them, one feels not distance but contact—as though her paintings allow us, briefly, to touch the ground from which they emerged, and perhaps, through that force, return us to our own. “Mer anem tha atyenh urlertarrp arrernepernem. Mern kamarl anganek ra,” she wrote, which has been translated as: “I keep on painting the place that belongs to me—I never change from painting that place.”—Shanyu Zhong

Erwin Wurm, Double Dream (until 6 June) at Lehmann Maupin

Erwin Wurm’s sculptures operate like visual one-liners with existential side effects. You see an empty hoodie, a swollen jacket or a pair of trousers standing upright, and your brain starts filling in the blanks. Do these hollow clothes channel HG Wells’s The Invisible Man, his 1897 novel about a scientist who rendered himself invisible? Or maybe they’re ghosts. For Double Dream, the Austrian artist populates Lehmann Maupin’s New York City gallery with these spectral figures and sleepy absurdities. Bronze hoodies and aluminium suits stand frozen, mid-gesture, while his Dreamers, a new body of work, appear with pillows for heads, as though they’ve drifted so deeply into sleep that they can’t stop dreaming. Some look less asleep than desperate to disappear into the pillow entirely—insomniacs trying to smother consciousness itself.—Zian Chen

Matt Dillon, Porto Novo to Abomey (until 23 May) at The Journal Gallery

I once asked a group of art school students to identify what they would personally consider “bad art”. Their unanimous answer was: “Adrien Brody”. In recent years, the actor has joined a coterie of overly confident leading men in turning his hand to producing almost universally terrible canvases. I will say that actor Matt Dillon’s Bill Traylor-dupe paintings, which are confusingly referred to as collages but which are mainly oil, acrylic or Flashe on paper, are not that bad. And when compared to those of, say, Jim Carrey and Johnny Depp, they are, actually, great. New York-born Dillon, best known for his role in Crash (2004), began making these works while traveling in Senegal and Benin filming The Fence (2025) with the legendary Claire Denis. Maybe because I find Dillon a more interesting and enduringly attractive actor, I find these less offensive than other actorly offerings (his grandmother and father were both painters, so perhaps nature and nurture have come to the rescue). And while I do cringe a little learning that his practice began while he was at a friend’s apartment and started doodling with crayons left out for children, he is certainly not the only faux naïveté-addled artist showing work in NYC right now. And he’s far from the worst.—Aimee Walleston

The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York (until 31 May) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ojibwe artist George Morrison’s White Painting (1975) recently sold in the Native American painter’s home state of Minnesota for $562,500 USD (£416, 250), beating his previous auction record of $300,000 USD (£222,000) achieved last November. This growth in recognition is long overdue. It also coincides, in a way that is likely not incidental, with his largest institutional show to date. The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art explores an artist who overcame poverty, prejudice and life-threatening illness to become a defining force in American Abstract Expressionism. Morrison arrived in New York in 1943 to study at the Art Students League and quickly became embedded in the city’s arts scene. Working alongside peers including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Lois Dodd and Louise Nevelson, he brought a distinct and essential Indigenous perspective to the movement. In rarely seen archival pieces, this intimate show surveys Morrison’s love of New York, captures his ties to his homeland and presents a unique cultural legacy shaped by a perspective that is still too often overlooked.—Philippa Kelly

Statics of an Egg (until 27 June) at David Zwirner, Walker Street

What connects artists across generations? This wide-ranging group exhibition teases out the often-unseen threads which link the multidisciplinary work of 15 seemingly disparate Japanese-born artists, whose works span the 1950s to the present day. Set against the backdrop of major economic change in postwar Japan and the nation’s sociopolitical realities today, these artists are brought together by curator Martin Germann around the theme of gravity—as a force that both grounds us and leads to a push and pull that can see things fall, break apart and decay. Yet it is the passage of time that infuses all of the works on display. The show’s title, Statics of an Egg, nods to the 1973 film of the same title by Fujiko Nakaya, in which the artist makes futile attempts to balance an egg upright on a flat surface. A hazy languor infuses the scenes depicted in Daisuke Fukunaga’s paintings, such as Time Stretched (2026) in which resplendent figures recline and appear to float across the canvas, at once unmoored from the weight of gravity and held down by it in their stupor. Nearby, Natsuyuki Nakanishi’s Compact Object (1962–1968), an assemblage of broken watches contained within a transparent egg-shaped form, literally compresses history and freezes these various relics of timekeeping in resin. The slippage between nostalgia, trauma and memory is never far out of sight in this exhibition, which performs its own delicate balancing act throughout. —Louise Benson

Main image: Agnes Martin, Untitled #12 (1975). ©Agnes Martin/Artists Rights Society, (ARS), New York. Studio, New York, courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Bill Jacobson.