December 25 and January 1: The Jewish Museum is open: New York | 1962-1964

This exhibition explores explores a pivotal three-year period in the history of art and culture in New York City, examining how artists living and working in New York responded to their rapidly changing world. Installed across two floors, the exhibition presents more than 150 works of art—all made or seen in New York between 1962-1964—including painting, sculpture, photography, and film, alongside fashion, design, dance, poetry, and ephemera. Above: Marisol (Marisol Escobar); Self-Portrait, 1961-62. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL. Copyright © 2022 Estate of Marisol / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The design of the exhibition by Selldorf Architects features material from popular culture, including newspapers, magazines, television clips, popular music, consumer products, furniture, and fashion, as well as vernacular objects salvaged from the city.

 The exhibition is accompanied by 350-page catalogue edited by Germano Celant, designed by 2x4, and co-published by the Jewish Museum and Skira Editore.

Closing January 8, 2023. The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Info

Wednesday, December 21, 2-5 pm: Cosmic Projection | Astrology at NYPL 42^nd Street

Celebrate the winter solstice by exploring some of the most fascinating and unexpected materials on astrology in the Library's collections. In this drop-in collection viewing, trace star lore through illuminated Islamic manuscripts, historical celebrity star charts, 18th-century almanacs, scandalous trial transcripts, infamous public forecasts, the queer and feminist press, and advice columns spanning 400 years. Sign up

New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue between 41st and 42nd Streets, New York NY Info

Closing December 22: Sue Coe | Political Television at George Adams

This exhibition of drawings and prints spans the artist’s career from the early 1980s to the present and features several monumentally scaled drawings that touch on themes such as police brutality and the capitalism inherent in our political system. Also on view is a series of linocuts that exhaustively chronicles the Trump presidency and its aftermath, a period Coe refers to as “The Age of Authoritarianism.” 

Since Coe moved to New York from London in the early ’70s, her work – both commercial and otherwise – has been vehemently political, tying together what she understands to be the fundamental crimes of our modern society: cruelty, fascism and greed. Deriving from her training as an illustrator, Coe’s graphic and emotive style lends itself to a deeply expressive body of work, encompassing a number of serial projects and stand-alone pieces.

Many of these projects have culminated in books or pamphlets, her drawings adding urgency to the issues at hand. Regardless of her medium however, Coe is brutally honest, her aim: to provide an unflinching picture of instances of the disregard for life. While her early drawings are direct in that they are commenting on recent events, they are also timeless in their reminder of how easily society can infringe on basic rights under the guise of justice and order. 

George Adams Gallery, 38 Walker Street, New York, NY Info 

Closing December 23: Blair Saxlon-Hill | City Dip at Pace Prints

This exhibition of large-scale monotypes is the culmination of a year-long residencey for the artist, funded by the Ford Family Foundation. Working across mediums, Blair Saxon-Hill creates figurative assemblages and fabric collages on panel that are pedestrian and raw, turning the viewer to a visceral material world of paint and matter to register current cultural and political realities.

Saxon-Hill expanded her practice during her residency at Pace Prints by collaborating with master printers Sarah Carpenter, Justin Israels, and Mackenzie Kimler as well as master papermakers Emily Chaplain, Rachel Gladfelter, and Akemi Martin; collectively, they pushed the historical limitations of both print and papermaking. The innovative approaches to making monoprints (singular, unique prints) and collages was grounded by the Portland, Oregon, artist’s consideration of her surroundings. Saxon-Hill’s work reflects the freedom of an artist to be an observer in a new place with New York City as her muse. Watch her video presentation here

Pace Prints, 536 West 22^nd Street, New York, NY Info

Closing December 23: Theaster Gates | Vestment at Gagosian

Vestment, a new series of tar paintings or “torch works” by Gates, continues the artist’s ongoing engagement with formalism and mark making at the scale of the roof. In this suite of paintings and a sculpture, The tar paintings serve as a distillate of some of the key intellectual musings with which Gates has grappled over the past year and throughout his practice. Invoking his recent meditations on the legacies of Russian Suprematism and Constructivism, along with the technical restraint and conceptual rigor of artists such as Josef Albers and Agnes Martin, Gates considers the cross as a politically galvanizing device and motif of religious social form. 

 Through the torch, Gates challenges us to reconsider the stylistic grading of humble materials and labor-based practices. Paying homage to his father’s craft as a roofer, Gates honors the lineage of knowledge and transference of this skill while demonstrating the malleability, vulnerability, and precarity of the form. 

Gagosian, 976 Madison Avenue, New York, NY Info

December 25, 5-10 pm: Tango en El Barrio at El Barrio’s Artspace PS109

Tangueros Mariano Logiudice and Guillermina Quiroga offer a dance lesson followed by a party called a milonga, where dancers of all levels meet to have fun. The class goes from 5-6pm followed by the milonga, with a duo performance at 8pm. Hosted by Dragan & Elliot, with DJ Anthony Blackwel. Tickets $20/$25 at the door. Above: pop-up milonga in Buenos Aires

El Barrio’s Artspace PS109, 215 East 99^th Street, New York, NY 

January 5, 6-8 pm: Ed Ruscha | Parking Lots at Yancey Richardson 
This portfolio of 30 images from 1967 can be seen to anchor the artist’s xxx over a career spanning six decades. Made from a helicopter in Southern California early on a Sunday morning, the aerial photographs of mostly empty parking lots show the rapidly growing urban sprawl of Los Angeles including Dodgers Stadium, Universal Studios, Good Year Tires, and Sears, Roebuck & Co.

Parking Lots reflects Ruscha’s interest in serial imagery, topography and mapping, and car culture, presenting the urban landscape as a geometric design with the artist’s inimitable deadpan style. The photographs were originally released  in the form of a self-published and mass produced 1967 artist’s book entitled Thirtyfour Parking Lots.

In 1999, Ruscha revisited his early work, and produced limited edition portfolios. The photographs in the portfolio were printed from the same negatives as the 1967 book but are cropped differently, sometimes displaying more of the original images. Ruscha said, “Over the years I began to appreciate print quality and see my photographs as not necessarily reproductions for a book, but as having their own life as silver gelatin prints.”

Yancey Richardson Gallery, 525 West 22^nd Street, New York, NY Info