July 24, 6pm: Fresh Cut at Bookstein Projects

Summer exhibitions often feel like bouquets gathered from many gardens, and Fresh Cut at Bookstein Projects embraces that spirit with particular charm. Bringing together more than fifty artists from different generations, the exhibition celebrates the enduring pleasures of flowers, still lifes, and scenes drawn from everyday experience. Historic masters and contemporary voices mingle easily, revealing how familiar subjects can continually be renewed through color, composition, and imagination. Like a freshly arranged centerpiece, Fresh Cut offers visitors a vibrant reminder that beauty and artistic invention are always in season. Art work [from top down] by Susan Walp, Jimmy Wright and Ruth Miller. Click to view more 

Bookstein Projects, 39 East 78^th Street, New York, NY Info

July 31: Firelei Báez | feet squelching on wet grass at Hasuser & Wirth

This immersive debut exhibition spans two floors of the gallery’s 22nd Street space, weaving together the anthropology, historical research, and spiritual sensitivity of  Dominican Republic born Firelei Báez. Through a combination of vibrant works on paper and massive mythological bronze sculptures, Báez explores themes of colonialism, Afro-Caribbean history, identity, and the African diaspora.

On the ground floor, towering bronze ciguapas—the elusive, backward-footed female tricksters of Caribbean folklore—draped in sculpted foliage and real feathers, physically bridge the gap between historical trauma and mythological freedom. But it’s the monumental, eight-panel painting View of Nature [above] that completely disrupts the gallery space. Spanning a massive 50-foot wall in the main space, Báez has layered an explosion of atmospheric flora in liquid, jewel-toned acrylics over the 1852 John Emslie pictorial climate map. The precision of colonial taxonomy nearly vanishes beneath her lawless brushwork, transforming the graphic information into unfixed places outside of time. It's as if Báez has honored recorded facts that have somehow survived historical interpretations. 

Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22^nd Street, New York, NY Info

July 31': Trevor Winkfield | The Mermaid’s Revenge at Tibor de Nagy

If your summer art-crawl template needs a jolt of pure, mainlined imagination, head over to Tibor de Nagy for  Trevor Winkfield: The Mermaid’s Revenge - Paintings 1991 – 2001. Winkfield, a beloved fixture of the New York School poetry and art scene since migrating from England in the late '60s, spent the 1990s expanding his physical studio footprint, a move that allowed his usually modest canvas sizes to scale up to match his outsized wit.

The resulting works are feasts of flat, hyper-saturated acrylics—meticulous visual rebuses where Egyptian hieroglyphics, heraldic crests, and cartoon logic collide. In the massive, six-foot-wide standout Voyage I (1995), he meticulously crafts a landscape that feels simultaneously sinister, playfully nonsensical, and entirely liberating. For anyone who appreciates the intersection of graphic precision, literary puns, and unchecked creative freedom, this show offers close view of an artist who masterfully rejects certainty in favor of the joyous, yet elusive, riddle.

Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 11 Rivington Street, New York, NY Info

August 7: Plants, Animals and Sky at CANADA

If your summer itinerary involves navigating the sizzling, sun-baked canyons of Tribeca, make a detour to Tribeca’s CANADA NYC, where   Plants, Animals and Sky is on view. Running through August 7, the exhibition centers around the natural world, refracting themes of ecology, landscape, and the environment through the unique lenses of the gallery's contemporary painters and sculptors. A diverse cohort of modern and historic artists, reaching back to tonalist painter George Innes, also includes Lois Dodd, Marsden Hartley, Gerald Ferguson, Francesco Igory Deiana, Elizabeth Kley, Sam Falls, and Tyson Reeder Click for  a preview. Above: Diana Mallett, Seagull

CANADA NYC, 60 Lispenard Street, New York, NY Info 

August 1: Kyung-Me | Sunflowers at Bureau

There is something thrilling about watching an artist completely shatter their own carefully constructed identity, and Kyung-Me’s I, Sunflower at Bureau does just that with a deliberate sense of lawlessness. Her previous graphic narratives and representational drawings were studies in architectural rigor and obsessive, monochromatic precision.

Now she demonstrates what must have been a deep dive into a period of studied unlearning. Dropping the graphite for the volatile nature of watercolor and ink on mulberry paper, she lets the medium bleed, pool, and saturate into a vivid exploration of the life cycle of sunflowers.  

As someone who spends hours exploring the unpredictable interactions of watercolor myself, I am captivated by how she surrenders absolute control to find something far more liberated. Tracing the lifespan of these floral giants from full bloom to decay, Kyung-Me channels a raw, emotional landscape that feels free from earthly concerns.

Bureau, 112 Duane Street, New York, NY Info