Ten Art Exhibitions to See in January 2024

We know that January can feel a bit bleak when all the excitement from the holidays is over, but don’t worry, we’ve got a guide full of wonderful art exhibitions to keep you occupied and uplifted! (Don’t forget to get your Culture Pass for free admission to many of these —and more!)

The Met Fifth Avenue

• Manet/Degas (until January 7, 2024) Friends, rivals, and, at times, antagonists, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas forged one of the most significant dialogues in nineteenth-century art. Their groundbreaking bodies of work would have been vastly different without the creative exchanges that punctuated their careers. Examining their works in direct juxtaposition for the first time, this exhibition highlights the intersections of their artistic production and reveals the contrasts, conflicts, and divergent paths that shaped modern art from its origins.
• Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism (until January 21, 2024) Over an intense period in 1905 on the French Mediterranean, Henri Matisse and Andre Derain embarked on a partnership that led to a wholly new, radical artistic language later known as Fauvism. Their daring, energetic experiments with color, form, structure, and perspective changed the course of French painting; it marked an introduction to early modernism and introduced Matisse’s first important body of work in his long career.
• Women Dressing Women (until January 7, 2024) The Costume Institute’s exhibition explores the creativity and artistic legacy of women fashion designers from The Met’s permanent collection. It traces a lineage of makers from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day by highlighting celebrated designers, new voices, and forgotten histories.

Museum of Modern Art

• ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN (until January 13, 2024) In 1956, Ruscha moved to LA study commercial art where he drew inspiration from the city’s architecture, colloquial speech, and popular culture. Ruscha has recorded and transformed familiar subjects—whether roadside gasoline stations or the 20th Century Fox logo—often revisiting motifs, sites, or words years later. Tracing shifts in the his life, this exhibit underscores the continuous reinvention that has defined his work.
• Picasso in Fontainebleau (until February 17, 2024) Picasso spent much of the summer of 1921 in a garage in Fontainebleau, France where he worked prolifically to create a startling body of work. Among his most astonishing creations were two radically different, six-foot-high canvases that he painted side-by-side within weeks of each other: Three Women at the Spring and Three Musicians. This exhibition reunites these two paintings and other works from the artist’s stay at the improvised studio, complemented by photographs and archival documents.

The Morgan Library and Museum

• Spirit and Invention: Drawings by Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo (until January 28, 2024) This exhibition provides a comprehensive look at the Tiepolos’ work as draftsmen, focusing on the role of drawing in their creative process and the distinct physical and stylistic properties of their graphic work. At the core of the collection and exhibition are substantial groups of Giambattista’s drawings that relate to major ceiling fresco projects of the 1740s and 1750s. 

American Folk Art Museum

• Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North (until March 24, 2024) Through 125 remarkable works including paintings, needlework, and photographs, this exhibition invites visitors to focus on figures who appear in—or are omitted from—early American images and will challenge conventional narratives that have minimized early Black histories in the North, revealing the complexities and contradictions of the region’s history between the late 1600s and early 1800s.  
• Marvels of My Own Inventiveness (until March 24, 2024) This immersive exhibition of paintings by five contemporary Black artists in the American Folk Art Museum collection (Leonard Daley, Claude Lawrence, J.B. Murray, Mary T. Smith, and Purvis Young) explores the artistic self-expression of Black makers working in and around abstraction.

Brooklyn Museum

• Spike Lee: Creative Sources (until February 4, 2024) Take a rare glimpse into the world of Spike Lee, one of the most influential and prolific American filmmakers and directors. Through an immersive installation of objects drawn from Lee’s personal collection, you’ll discover the sources of inspiration that have fueled his creative output.

The Whitney

• Henry Taylor: B Side (until January 28, 2024) For more than thirty years, Henry Taylor has portrayed people from widely different backgrounds—family members, friends, neighbors, celebrities, politicians, and strangers—with a mixture of raw immediacy and tenderness. His improvisational approach to artmaking is hinted at in this exhibition’s title, which refers to often lesser-known, more experimental songs. 

New Museum

• Judy Chicago: Herstory (until March 3, 2024) This exhibition spans Judy Chicago’s sixty-year career to encompass the full breadth of the artist’s contributions across painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, textiles, photography, stained glass, needlework, and printmaking. The exhibition places six decades of Chicago’s work in dialogue with work by other women across centuries in a unique Fourth Floor installation. Entitled “The City of Ladies,” this exhibition-within-the-exhibition features artworks and archival materials from over eighty artists, writers, and thinkers, including Simone de Beauvoir, Hildegard of Bingen, Artemisia Gentileschi, Zora Neale Hurston, Frida Kahlo, Hilma af Klint, and Virginia Woolf.

Frick Madison

• Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits At The Frick (until January 7, 2024) Barkley L. Hendricks revolutionized contemporary portraiture with his vivid depictions of Black subjects that emphasize the dignity and individuality of his sitters. This exhibition celebrates and explores the remarkable work of this pioneering American painter with an unprecedented display of paintings drawn from private and public collections.

New York Public Library

• New York Subways 1977: Alen MacWeeney (until January 6, 2024) Alen MacWeeney regularly rode the subway between his East Village apartment and locations uptown with his camera, taking photographs along the way. This exhibition features diptychs from the series New York Subways 1977, in which MacWeeney adjoins two images that share formal similarities or emotional resonances to create subtle and surprising new relationships of movement, gazes, bodies, and architecture.
• A Dickens Christmas (until January 6, 2024) This holiday season, The New York Public Library is celebrating with a special installation featuring Dickens’s heavily annotated prompt copies, which he used in his performances of A Christmas Carol and other holiday books, including The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth, together with original photographs, first editions, and ephemera.

The Guggenheim

• Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility (until April 7, 2024) This exhibit by a group of twenty-eight artists, the majority of whom are Black and more than half of whom are women, presents works that feature partially obscured or hidden figures, positioning them at the “edge of visibility.”

Fancy something a little more off the beaten track? Check out Art in Dumbo’s First Thursday Gallery Walk or grab a friend and experience LES Gallery Nights. Want to keep up to date on what’s on in the smaller gallerys? Thirsty Gallerina has an awesome guide to openings around the city.