The DART Board: 05.07.2025
May 7, 5:00-7:00pm: Third Annual Upper East Side Art Walk
Seventeen Upper East Side Galleries will join organizer Jill Newhouse Gallery for the third annual UES Art Walk. Anchored by the Metropolitan Museum, the Upper East Side is home to many beautiful galleries tucked away in historic townhouses. Showing a broad selection of fine art in all media, including European, American, and Australian art by living artists as well as Old and Modern Masters, and coinciding with Frieze and TEFAF art fairs, the UES Art Walk adds an exciting event to the New York Spring calendar. See DART for the Frieze Week rundown. Above: Edward Hopper, Cityscape, 1959; courtesy of Jill Newhuse Gallery
At the northern end of the art walk, Hans P. Kraus will show 19th century French photographs made for painters. On 81st Street on the first floor Mireille Mosler will show a selection of works titled Random Girls + Flowers, and on the 2nd floor Jill Newhouse Gallery will exhibit a collection of Edward Hopper drawings from New York and Cape Cod, alongside watercolor views of Paris done in 1904 by Spanish artist Enrique Atalaya. D’Lan Contemporary will mount a show of Australian art, also on view at their 73rd Street location.
Around the corner, modern and contemporary artists will be found at Victoria Munroe Fine Art’s show of multimedia art by Varujan Boghosian and Nan Swid. Sprüth Magers will have a show of Rosemarie Trockel, and Barbara Mathes Gallery will mount a group show of 20th century artists
Click here for the interactive map.
Thursday, May 8, 6-8pm: Michael Armitage | Crucible at David Zwirner
This exhibition of new work by Kenyan-British artist Michael Armitage inaugurates the gallery’s new Chelsea building on West 19th Street. This is Armitage’s first solo show with David Zwirner since the announcement of his representation in 2022 and his first solo presentation in New York since Projects 110: Michael Armitage, organized by The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and presented at The Museum of Modern Art in 2019. The exhibition includes new paintings and bronze reliefs by the artist.
In Crucible, Armitage reflects on the theme of migration. Painted on Lubugo bark cloth—a traditional Ugandan textile used in funerary rituals, which the artist has used as a support for more than a decade—these works are marked by a visceral directness that implicates the viewer in the migrant’s journey and the representation of migrants in wider society. The works in the exhibition incorporate elements of real-life imagery to present narratives that are imbued with a profound sense of humanity and pathos.
533 West 19th Street, New York, NY Info
Thursday, May 8, 6:00-8:00pm: Takashi Murakam | Japonisme at Gagosian
Extending Takashi Murakami’s interest in the copy—a theme he has been exploring for the past few years—the exhibition juxtaposes the artist’s reworkings of prints by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) with those of paintings by artists identified with the nineteenth-century tendency known as Japonisme, including James Abbott McNeill Whistler. For artwork info please go here
On view are 121 canvases that Murakami produced in response to Hiroshige’s series of ukiyo-e prints 100 Famous Views of Edo (1856–58), which captures life in a city on the precipice of change. Murakami’s interpretations, to which he has added elements of other ukiyo-e works alongside his own characters, were first shown alongside the historical prints at the Brooklyn Museum in 2024 and prompt consideration of Hiroshige’s influential worldview.
Among the works that Murakami interprets—alongside those of Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai, Hishikawa Morofusa, and Kitagawa Utamaro—is James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge (c. 1872–75). This image echoes the nocturnal subject and boldly cropped composition of Hiroshige’s Bamboo Yards, Kyobashi Bridge (1857); the flat color found in woodblock prints may also have prompted its restricted palette and simplified forms. Reportedly, Whistler discovered Japanese prints in a Chinese tearoom in London, an encounter whose cross-cultural essence encapsulates the initial emergence of Japonisme and its fascination to Murakami.
Gagosian, 522 West 21st Street, New York, NY Info
Friday, May 9, 9:30-10:30am, Panel: The artist and Her Sitters with Katy Hessel
This panel discussion moderated by art historian Katy Hessel will feature artists and sitters in the exhibition The Human Situation. Panelists will include the artists Jenna Gribbon, Mimi Gross, and Wangari Mathenge, as well as Marcia Marcus's daughter Kate Prendergast.
The exhibition, conceived by Saara Pritchard, will mark the first focused presentation of Marcia Marcus (1928–2025), Alice Neel (1900–1984), and Sylvia Sleigh (1916–2010), who each worked in New York City and shared in its artistic circles in the dynamic decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. During this period, they portrayed mutual sitters, exhibited together, and participated in public discussions. Their representations of loved ones, friends, and acquaintances are distinctive in form and style, yet share in their evocation of the human spirit, capturing Sleigh’s reflection “The human situation adds a certain poignancy to portraits...” To RSVP, email RSVP@levygorvydayan.com
Lévy Gorvy Dayan, 19 East 64th Street, New York, NY Info
Saturday, May 10, 12:30-5:0-0 pm: Ms. Muscle Tours Public Statues of Women in Manhattan
If you have been unaware that there are a total of only nine monuments to legendary women in NYC, this is your chance to join the human race! Ms. Muscle, aka sculptor/printmaker/performance artist Barbara Lubliner, will lead a tour of six of these works. At each monument, there will be a ceremonial offering of flowers. Through call and response, participants will invoke the voices and values of the historic women, weaving their legacies into our present moment. Ms. Muscle requests that you, “Dress to feel your breast!”
The tour opens conversation about public art, patriarchy, gender equality and paradoxical expectations in today's world. Ms. Muscle is a cheerleader for women, feminist pioneers, and the power of nurturing. She is a spectacle that draws attention and sparks conversation wherever she goes. Her interactive walkaround performances are done with humor and embrace society's paradoxical expectations and values for women.
Meet at the Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial, at the intersection of St. Nicholas Avenue and Frederick Douglass Blvd (West 122 Street), at 12:30 pm. Or join later at one of the other monuments along the route. The tour ends at the Golda Meir Statue at 39th Street and Broadway. Rain date May 18th
Here is the list of monuments with approximate times of arrival.
12:30 Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial
1:45 Joan of Arc Monument
2:30 Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial
3:15 Women's Rights Pioneers Monument
4:55 Golda Meir Statue
For real time updates on the day of the walk check with:
https://www.instagram.com/themsmuscle/
Tuesday, May 13, 6;30-8:00pm: Book Launch, Peter Kuper’s Insectopolis at Lofty Pigeon
Join Eisner Award–winning author and illustrator Peter Kuper for the launch of Insectopolis, an incredible visual account of the 400-million-year history of insects and the remarkable entomologists who have studied them. Peter will present from Insectopolis, followed by a conversation with ecologist Mark Moffett, book signing, and reception.
Insectopolis, a visually immersive work of graphic nonfiction, dives into a world where ants, cicadas, bees and butterflies visit a library exhibition that displays their stories and humanity’s connection to them throughout the ages. Kuper’s thrilling visual feast layers history and science, color and design, to tell the remarkable tales of dung beetles navigating by the stars, hawk-size prehistoric dragonflies hunting prey and mosquitoes changing the course of human history.
Kuper, a charter subscriber to DART, illuminates pioneering naturalists, from well-known figures like E. O. Wilson and Rachel Carson to unheralded luminaries like Charles Henry Turner, the Black American scholar who documented arthropod intelligence and Maria Sibylla Merian, the seventeenth-century German regarded as the mother of entomology. Preorder your copy of Insectopolis here!
Lofty Pigeon Books, 743 Church Ave, Brooklyn, NY Info
Continuing: National Arts Club Members Show
Just in from Barbara Nessim, charter subscriber and contributor to AI:
One of the most anticipated and popular shows on the exhibitions calendar, the Annual Exhibiting Artist Members Exhibition returns in full force with an installation of new works by the NAC’s most talented. In 1934, with the suspension of the Artist Life Member program, the Club was eager to expand its membership and began reaching out to a wider community of working artists. It was this wave of new members that created EAM and the Annual Exhibitions as we know it today. Above: Barbara Nessim, Role Models, 2020; oil on canvas
National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, New York, NY Info