Thursday, October 29, until 8pm: Thucydides Fever Dream at Hill Art

This exhibition curated by Xin Wang arrives at a moment when the cultural landscape between the U.S. and China feels both deeply interconnected and increasingly fraught. Stepping into this sun-lit Chelsea space, viewers are challenged to look past the superficial headlines of geopolitical rivalry and instead engage with a complex, multi-layered dialogue of mutual influence. Wang masterfully orchestrates a conversation between contemporary Chinese masters and American post-war icons, revealing how artistic identities are forged not in isolation, but through porous and often unpredictable cross-cultural currents. 

The emotional anchor of the exhibition might well be Liu Xiaodong’s monumental 1993 canvas, The Heavy Rain (In New York) [above, far left]. The painting captures a young, pre-global-celebrity Ai Weiwei flat on his back, his face covered in wet plaster as he undergoes a life-casting session by East Village sculptor John Ahearn. It is a stunning time capsule of a bygone NYC art world, a poignant reminder of the grit, vulnerability, and intimate personal exchanges that shaped an entire generation of diaspora artists long before the art market took notice.

Surrounding this centerpiece are works by Liu Wei, Yu Hong, and Hao Liang shareing space with the rigorous abstractions of Agnes Martin, Christopher Wool, and Andy Warhol. Wang’s selections highlight the friction and nuance of these encounters—how a shared interest in landscape, memory, or industrial decay can manifest in entirely different visual vocabularies. This is a show that deserves the patience of slow looking and quiet reflection. Note: to learn more about how American cultural diplomacy has influenced post-Cultural Revolution China’s art, read Robert Rauschenberg: An Oral History Project.

Hill Art Foundation, 239 Tenth Avenue, FL3, New York, NY Info

October 29, 6:00-8pm: Jason Stopa | Open Window at Morgan Lehman

For this new solo show, Jason Stopa flips the script on his usual high-octane color chords, trading the electric vibrato for a quieter meditation on the architecture of looking. In Open Window Stopa presents ten new large-scale paintings that treat the canvas as more of a translucent threshold to form than as a flat barrier. 

He loosens his familiar monolithic subjects with gestural washes of paint, letting ancient and modernist structures overlap until foreground and background become something of a fluid, optical performance. Layering his surfaces into a luscious sheen reminiscent of ancient ceramic glazes, he riffs on the Fauves’ and Nabis’ preoccupations with overall light—but through his tactile brushwork infuses his geometric forms with a sense of physicality and personhood.

Morgan Lehman Gallery ,526 West 26th Street, Suite 419, New York, NY Info

Thursday, October 29, 7-9pm: Halloween Costume Contest at the New Museum

Show off your Halloween spirit at the New Museum! Costumes will be judged in the Museum Lobby and the most devious (or playful) look will win a prize. The contest is open to all Museum visitors, so dress up and explore until 8 pm, when the winner will be announced. Note: Masks that fully conceal the face and weapons of any kind, including fake or prop weapons, are not permitted. Pay what you wish. Info

New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, NY Info

Friday, October 30: Phil Buehler | Wall of Crazy in Bushwick 

A new monument to our fractured digital landscape is taking over a Bushwick block just in time for the midterm elections. Installed outside the Pine Box Rock Shop, this colossal mural acts as a color-coded psychic map of our political moment, as the artist has condensed 1,516 of Donald Trump’s most polarizing social media dispatches into a chronological visual narrative.

Culled from an archive of more than 70,000 posts across Twitter, X, and Truth Social, Buehler’s timeline charts an eleven-year trajectory from the infamous escalator campaign launch on June 16, 2015, right up to October 25, 2026. 

Rather than a simple catalog, the work is a sophisticated data visualization of repetitive rhetoric; posts are meticulously organized by thematic frequencies—ranging from personal grievances and late-night conspiracy theories to direct contradictions and sweeping declarations of genius.

This marks Buehler’s fifth public art collaboration with the independent community radio station, following the formidable lineage of Wall of Lies (2020), Wall of Liars and Deniers (2022), and last year's provocative Wall of Shame. 

Pine Box Rock Shop at 12 Grattan Street, Brooklyn, NY L train to Morgan Avenue Info