The DART Board: 06.18.2025
June 20 & 21, 7:30-10pm: Van Gogh’s Flowers After Dark at NYBG
Experience Van Gogh’s Flowers after dark. The exhibition comes aglow for outings that capture the twinkling allure of the artist’s nighttime scenery. Within and around NYBG’s iconic Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, find yourself surrounded by the botanical beauty that inspired Van Gogh. Wander through a breathtaking lawn of sculptural and real sunflowers, and snap photos of blooming recreations of the artist’s work.
Conditions permitting, the nighttime experience concludes with a 10-minute illuminated Starry Night drone show finale sparkling above—the first of its kind at a cultural institution in New York City. Relax to live music, puppeteers and performers evoking the Parisian bistros Van Gogh frequented while you sip a cocktail and enjoy light bites for purchase. Van Gogh’s painted world comes to life as the sun sets on these special evenings at NYBG.
New York Botanical Garden, 2900 Southern Boulevard, Bronx, NY Directions
Thursday, June 18, 2-5 pm: Adriana Varejão | Don’t Forget We Come from the Tropics
Join Sculptors Alliance for a series of meetups to view sculpture in a variety of settings, from public art in urban spaces to museums and galleries. Bring your sketchbook to study and draw, followed by a casual discussion of the works on view.
This week, head up to The Hispanic Museum & Library for an immersive view of this collection of ceramic works by the Brazilian artist, Adriana Varejão, above, [featured in DART Board]. Hispanic Society Museum and Library, 3741 Audubon Terrace [between. 155-156 Streets], New York, NY Info
Save the date: Wednesday, July 9, 6-8pm: We will meet in City Hall Park for a close look at Thaddeus Mosley’s new works in bronze, above, presented by the Public Art Fund. Bring a friend and your sketchbook for this FREE event, and chill out for a fun experience. Accessible entrances are on the West side on the Broadway and Park Place, on the Southwest side on Broadway and Park Row, and two on the Southeast side on Park Row. Info More about SA Meetups on Instagram
Friday, Jun
e 27: Lisa Yuskavage | Drawings at the Morgan
Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings is the first comprehensive museum presentation of the artist’s drawings. Incorporating drawings from the early nineties to the present and including sketches and finished studies, the exhibition will feature a wide range of her explorations with materials including work in graphite, pen, Conte, pastel, charcoal, distemper, monotype, gouache, watercolor, acrylic and ink on paper.
Yuskavage’s career-long inquiry into how process and material experimentation create entirely new ways to find images is revealed in the selectiolns, from her earliest drawings of imagined figures and still lives, through a period of investigation into what constitutes a model, to her recent studio and landscape scenes synthesizing the real and the imagined into a new kind of fictional reality. READ an in-depth interview with the artist in the T Magazine’s recent Art Issue.
The Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, New York, NY Info
Saturday, June 28, 7:30pm and Sunday, June 29, 3pm: Ghosts of Hell Creek:
Prehistoric Body Theater—an experimental dance theater collective from Indonesia—channel dinosaurs as they explore themes of mass extinction, climate crisis, and evolutionary ancestry through movement. The group creates “deep-time animal dance” by fusing paleontology with traditional dance and experimental Javanese percussion. Prehistoric makes its U.S. debut in association with New York’s Asia Society with Ghosts of Hell Creek: Stone Garuda, a mesmerizing work that eulogizes the raptors who perished in the Chicxulub asteroid impact 66 million years ago, while celebrating the survival of our earliest primate ancestors in a world born anew.
Praised as “an innovative form of global public outreach for paleontology” (Oxford University Press), Prehistoric Body Theater collaborates with Indigenous Indonesian performing artists as well as international scientists—uniting art, science, and a deep commitment to nature conservation. The central characters of these performances are specific vertebrate species from the fossil record. Under collaborative mentorship with leading paleontologists, artistic director A.R. generates choreography by mapping the theoretical locomotion and physiology of the featured prehistoric animals onto diverse ensembles of dancers. These animal characters and their evolutionary narratives are brought to life on stage through evocative use of clay makeup, lighting, sound design, and set installation, creating a fully immersive journey through time, with the air, light, soil, and taste of life as it evolved. Tickets
Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue, New York, NY Info
Extended: Christine Sun Kim at The Whitney
In works full of sharp wit and incisive commentary, Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980, Orange County, California) engages sound and the complexities of communication in its various modes. Using musical notation, infographics, and language—both in her native American Sign Language (ASL) and written English—she has produced drawings, videos, sculptures, and installations that often explore non-auditory, political dimensions of sound. In many works, Kim draws directly on the spatial dynamism of ASL, translating it into graphic form. By emphasizing images, the body, and physical space, she upends the societal assumption that spoken languages are superior to those that are signed.
Kim has taken the trope of identity politics to a high level that informs her work with an incisive with that borders on bitterness. In a recent interview she said that she knows “how sound works, and what the expectations around it are….So why wouldn’t I use that in my work instead of rejecting it outright?....Sound isn’t part of my life, but when I found sound art, it became really interesting to me as a medium.” Videos
After earning an M.F.A. in visual arts at the School of Visual Arts, she completed another in sound and music at Bard College in 2013. What may seem a counterintuitive topic for an artist who is deaf is anything but, co-curator Tom Finkelpearl said. “Some of her work is the visualization of sound. What does it look like? What does it feel like? And the other is the politics of sound — how are people excluded based on sound and language?”
The Whitney Museum of American Art, 92 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY Info
Continuing: Sasha Brown at the High Line
Sasha Gordon, known for her surreal paintings and drawings that explore sexuality, gender, and race, has two works on view at the High Line’s Moynihan Connector Billboard. My Love of Upholstery (2024) and Untitled (2024) both hail from the artist’s most recent body of work, in which she examines challenging taboos and standards of representation. Her images present a wide range of emotional states, frequently considered through the lens of her identity as a queer Asian American woman. Through endless avatars, she portrays the othering of unconventional human bodies and her own experiences of alienation.
Towering over 30th Street and Dyer Avenue, the artist’s fluctuating visage appears at massive scale, marked by a distinct unnaturalness—in My Love of Upholstery, where she depicts herself with a Pinocchio-like wood-grain body, and in Untitled, in which her face and pupils are marked with five-pointed stars. These visions are simultaneously anxious and intimate, teetering somewhere between tender fantasy and nightmare. Her avatars, looming large within their frames, offer both artist and audience an outlet for exploring contradictory emotions and complex personal experiences.
High Line, New York at Dyer Avenue between 30-31st Streets Info