Histories are at the heart of some of our favorite shows, from queer video art to the cultural and familial traditions invoked by Candida Alvarez and Thomas Holton.

Thomas Holton photographed the Lam family for two decades, drawing attention not only to where but also how they live.

From Saya Woolfalk’s hyperrealism to Ben Shahn’s Social Realism, our favorite shows at the moment are all about building and improving worlds.

Umber Majeed’s work cuts deep for those who saw their diasporic culture meld queasily with early internet culture.

From Julia Margaret Cameron to Chloe Dzubilo, to 150 years of the Art Students League of New York, “visionary” is a theme in the shows below.

A show at the Art Students League leans on the names of its alumni and the aura of its environs, but that’s enough.

Spirituality, magic, and transformation are recurring themes in some of our favorite exhibitions on view, from Mestre Didi to Renée Stout.

The magic of Stout’s artworks does not feel contingent on a viewer’s comprehension — it feels auratic, as if emitting an electrical current of meaning.

Dig into new and upcoming tomes on the long lineage of LGBTQ+ art, from Beauford Delaney’s bond with James Baldwin to iconic lesbian photographer JEB and Alice Austen.

Across painting, sculpture, installation, and video, these five group shows are excellent — no qualifiers about “student work” needed.

From ceramic alligators to Nordic traditions, artists focusing on personal concerns and identity are making some fascinating work.

People of color are often called upon to perform their identities, but Nguyen’s lush tapestries largely avoid that trap.

From local concerns in the Bronx to global issues in Queens, plus a trip to see Indigenous art in New Jersey, our favorite art is far-reaching right now.

An exhibition argues that human production — its surplus and waste — is a rising influential force in contemporary art.

The invite-only fair includes downtown stalwarts, as well as emerging Tribeca galleries.

The feminist artist probed, mimicked, and remixed mass media to explore how information is disseminated, transformed, and assimilated.

The art of Marsha P. Johnson, Yoko Ono reappraised, Jack Whitten’s studio notebook, a fictional curator’s Greece trip goes awry, and more to read this season.

From historical shows about labor to investigations of color to John Singer Sargent’s renderings of hands, we’re enjoying a variety of art this week.

What comes through most strongly in the Met Museum exhibition is his humanistic bent: Sargent loved people, and it shows.

Among our favorite shows at the moment are ones that feature strong, talented women, like Patty Chang, Myrlande Constant, and Amy Sherald.

The artist meditates on motherhood, and more broadly, on empathy, connection, and violence across space, species, and time.

The artist’s rooftop commission extends her translations between music and the physical world across sculptural forms inspired by the museum’s collection.

Our favorite shows of the week all center individual creators, from big names like Tatlin and Kafka to contemporary artists like Judy Linn.

The first North American exhibition of one of Ukraine’s most important artists reclaims his legacy while the country weathers Russia’s war.

The role of dreams in Latin American art, Gertrude Abercrombie’s homegrown surrealism, essays on Celia Paul, new catalogs and monographs, and more.

The exhibitions below, featuring such artists as Deborah-Joyce Holman and Luis Fernando Benedit, ask viewers to spend time with art that’s slower to reveal itself.

The injunction of a group show centered around the multivalent flower is to wander the field and pluck what suits you.

Much like the iconic piece, a suite of five “never-before-seen” works tackles big emotions.

The policy is the museum’s newest attempt to shift its financial burden onto its lowest-ranking staff and the public.

Catherine Murphy, Dorothy Hood, and David Kennedy Cutler are among the artists who are taking us off the path of the everyday and into the inexplicable this week.

David Kennedy Cutler captures a time in which image has fully metastasized into reality — a mediated world where everything is always on and calling for you.

Nick Cave leaves behind his Soundsuits, Ericka Beckman reimagines a fairy tale, American Artist explores the sci-fi world of Octavia E. Butler, and more.

A group show curated by Hilton Als meditates on words in the visual arts, but wields silence in ways that verge on obstinate obscurity.

From Norman Bluhm’s reinvented abstraction to the history of Barbie at the Museum of Arts and Design, we’re looking at a diverse array of art this week.

“The Gates” was an artwork within an artwork, inscribing the populist impulse of Central Park into 7,500+ neon orange armatures with billowing fabric.

Delve into Lucy Lippard’s short fictions, Tamara Lanier’s indelible memoir, The White Pube’s tales of absurdity in the art world, new perspectives on Mucha, and more.

See socially and politically engaged art, Trenton Doyle Hancock paired with Philip Guston, plus geometric abstraction and some medieval treasures.

The US deployed the largest aerial bombardment in history during the Vietnam War. Here, the artist tells the plaintive story of those unexploded weapons.

The show argues that caring for unhoused and dispossessed people is not a task to be sloughed off to the “city,” but rather a responsibility each of us shoulders.

Sylvia Sleigh, Kenneth Tam, Christine Sun Kim, Paul Gardère, and Rudy Burckhardt are ideal for anyone who desires a glimpse into an artist’s personal life and worldview.

The artist takes up the devastation of those whose lives have been shattered by the plummeting value of the taxicab medallion.

The artist makes the air hum with the previously unperceived dimensions of ordinary things, from the linework of movement to the music in everyday situations.

From AbEx giant Cy Twombly to explorations of assimilation by Serena Chang to the politics of prettiness in the portraits of Marie Laurencin, these shows deserve close looking.

His works are distinctly earthly endeavors, showcasing the human hand in all its striving.

Make sure to check out shows by the Guerrilla Girls and Etel Adnan this week, along with a collection of imagined books and other great exhibitions.

It’s clear that this exhibition was put together by a bunch of absolute nerds — and that’s a compliment of the highest order.

Kamari Carter’s political art, visionary Shaker art, and Esther Mahlangu's colorful geometries, along with many other in-person and online shows will beat your winter blues.

This year, we’re rereading a fictional dialogue by Oscar Wilde, bell hooks’s book of art criticism, prose poetry by Etel Adnan, and more titles that won’t make it onto most industry lists.

The Argentinian-born artist crafted riverbed sculptures and palimpsestic canvases, painstakingly layered paintings that have the effect of a well-worn memory rubbed away.

Hyperallergic editors round up the trends and habits we hope will be left behind in 2024 — and those we want to embrace more fully in the new year.