Summer is arguably the best time of year to enjoy New York City’s architecture, parks, and buzzing arts and culture scene, warranting an extensive exhibition guide like the one before you. Below is a list of indoor shows, outdoor installations, and art events to help you plan your summer in the city, including suggestions for day trips to Upstate New York and Long Island. Here’s to a peaceful, restorative, and art-filled sunny season. — Hakim Bishara, Senior Editor

Lizania Cruz: Influential Sites

Entering Lizania Cruz’s exhibition feels a bit like trespassing on a crime scene investigation. A massive stack of cardboard boxes — each labeled with the Spanish word for “evidence” and the various geographic loci of Cruz’s project — leads us into a sterile gallery filled with film and photographic documentation, archival findings, and even a collage of images and clippings that resembles a classic evidence board. Many of these works chronicle the Dominican state’s pattern of suppressing Black and Brown activists who challenge authoritarian rule and United States imperialism. Outside, a yellow A-frame sign invites passersby to apply to be a “civilian reviewer” of Cruz’s research by finishing the statement on a banner hanging above the entrance; you’ll understand when you see it for yourself. — Valentina Di Liscia

Proxyco (proxycogallery.com)
121 Orchard Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through July 8

Summer Exhibition 2023

A cherished tradition since 2007, the New York Academy of Art’s juried summer exhibition features works by students, alumni, and faculty of the Manhattan school. The works in this year’s edition, selected from nearly 500 submissions, portray the practice of artmaking as a much more daring and delightfully experimental enterprise than what’s on view in most of the surrounding Tribeca galleries. One standout is 2015 graduate Tamalin Baumgarten’s tiny oil-on-panel painting “Almost There” (2022), a view from a ship cabin window that disrupts the cloying aesthetic of the Instagram influencer travel photo with its hushed tones and uncanny mood. — VDL

Wilkinson Gallery at the New York Academy of Art (nyaa.edu)
111 Franklin Street, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through July 9

Mary Grigoriadis

Mary Grigoriadis’s alluring works explore bodily spatial conditions and unseen expanding boundaries in their contrasting colors, symmetrical patterns, measured brushstrokes, and iconographic shapes. This exhibition, which spans the late 1960s through the mid-’90s, presents oil and acrylic paintings featuring colorful, geometric patterns juxtaposed against the stark white borders of raw linen. — Maya Pontone

James Cohan Gallery (jamescohan.com)
52 Walker Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
June 22–July 28

Sunshowers

Curated by artist and writer Mira Dayal, this group exhibition features works by 18 AIR National Artist Members, who plumb experiences such as trauma, care, and healing with varying media. — EV

AIR Gallery (airgallery.org)
155 Plymouth Street, Dumbo, Brooklyn
June 30–July 30

Alexis Ralaivao: On s’enrichit de ce que l’on donne, on s’appauvrit de ce que l’on prend

Alexis Ralaivao creates smooth oil paintings that explore only one or two elements at a time — the glimmer of an earring, the pattern of a tan on bare skin, the way silverware rests on a restaurant plate. Ralaivao mostly works with only three models: his girlfriend, his brother, and a close friend. His works exude a tangible sense of intimacy, veering away from staged studies of subjective snapshots. This show features 11 paintings and it’s the Berlin-based artist’s biggest New York exhibition to date. — Elaine Velie

Kasmin Gallery (kasmingallery.com)
509 West 27th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through August 11

Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time

Georgia O’Keeffe is best known for flower paintings, typically rendered in oil on canvas. This show examines the comparatively lesser-known works on paper she created alongside her most recognizable paintings, providing a glimpse into her process. — EV

The Museum of Modern Art (moma.org)
11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan
Through August 12

Oceanic, Portal

Oceanic, Portal is an experience-based façade installation featuring three ghostly dancers teleporting between the Natural Bridges Beach in Santa Cruz, California, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City. The 3D video was captured using LiDAR scanners and altered with augmented reality elements. Artists micha cárdenas, Gerald Casel, Ian Costello, Cynthia Ling Lee, Susana Ruiz, and Huy Truong draw connections between the exacerbated need for liberation and justice for marginalized groups throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and the ecological conditions impacting marine life on the West Coast. — Rhea Nayyar

Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (leslielohman.org)
26 Wooster Street, Soho, Manhattan
Through August 13

Van Gogh’s Cypresses

We know and love his sunflowers, but this show pays homage to a less frequently appreciated aspect of Vincent van Gogh’s visual language — his cypress trees. More than 40 works explore the varied ways in which the artist depicted the evergreen plant over two years in Southern France, including some made during his stay at an asylum in Saint-Rémy. “Starry Night” (1889) temporarily left its home at the Museum of Modern Art to make an appearance in the show. — EV

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (metmuseum.org)
1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through August 27

A Greater Beauty: The Drawings of Kahlil Gibran

Honoring the 100th anniversary of the publication of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, the Drawing Center has put together a massive exhibition celebrating the legacy of the Lebanese-American poet and artist. The show includes over 100 works of art, exhibited alongside Gibran’s manuscript pages, notes, clippings from print media, and other such tidbits in the interest of illustrating the artist’s full practice, materially and philosophically. — RN

The Drawing Center (drawingcenter.org)
35 Wooster Street, Soho, Manhattan
Through September 3

Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy

Photographs by 16 artists explore love and intimacy in this show, conceptualized as a mixtape to a lover. The works date from 1952 to 2022 and range from quiet semi-nude portraits to snapshots of grinning party-goers. All of the works, however, reflect on the assigned and chosen families of the photographs’ subjects or the artists behind the camera. — EV

International Center of Photography (icp.org)
79 Essex Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through September 11

Ebony G. Patterson

For the duration of the summer, the New York Botanical Gardens is presenting Ebony G. Patterson’s multidisciplinary installations across its grounds and gallery spaces. Embedding themselves in the botanical environments, Patterson’s works dig into notions of life and death, and the interactions of race, gender, and colonialism — all done with sheer beauty. — RN

New York Botanical Garden (nybg.org)
2900 Southern Boulevard, Bronx Park, Bronx
Through September 17

Dora García: Amor Rojo

Amor Rojo, titled after the prominent Bolshevik party member, Soviet ambassador, and Marxist feminist Alexandra Kollontai’s novel Red Love (1927), is Dora García’s third and final film installment analyzing the uptick in feminist rebellions in Mexico through Kollontai’s ideological lens. With the help of three researchers accessing Kollontai’s archives in Mexico City, García connects Kollontai’s feminist theories on free love and elimination of the nuclear family to the increase in Mexican trans-feminist uprisings. She applies this research to explore the patriarchal structures that fuel alarming rates of gender-based violence across the country. — RN

Amant (amant.org)
315 Maujer Street, East Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Through September 17

Nora Thompson Dean: Lenape Teacher and Herbalist

This historical exhibition honors the life’s work and teachings of Lenape herbalist and preservationist Nora Thompson Dean of Oklahoma, also known as Weenjipahkihelexkwe,. Having dedicated her life to Lenape customs across social and educational avenues, Thompson Dean was considered a bastion of cultural knowledge sought out by other Indigenous preservationists, scholars, educators, and artists for her insights. The show includes letters, photographs, and printed material associated with Thompson Dean’s life and practice as well as a plant-based installation featuring culturally significant crops in the Morgan Garden. — RN

The Morgan Library & Museum (themorgan.org)
225 Madison Avenue, Murray Hill, Manhattan
Through September 17

Africa Fashion

Runway and ready-to-wear clothing, sketches, jewelry, literature, music, and catwalk footage are exhibited together in this show of over 180 works by more than 40 artists and designers from 20 countries in Africa. The exhibition begins with the 1950s, demonstrating how the continent’s thriving fashion field was set ablaze when many African countries gained back their sovereignty after long periods of European colonialism. — EV

Brooklyn Museum (brooklynmuseum.org)
200 Eastern Parkway, Prospect Park, Brooklyn
June 23–October 22

Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch

This exhibition spans 50 years of Shelley Niro’s explorations of her Six Nations Kanyen’kehá:ka (Mohawk) identity. Her self-portraits, and photographs of other women from her community, are mixed with more fantastical creations, questioning the roles Native peoples are expected to perform in American society. — EV

The National Museum of the American Indian (americanindian.si.edu)
1 Bowling Green, Financial District, Manhattan
Through January 1, 2024

Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera

At the Frick Madison, the material and conceptual anchor of Swiss artist Nicolas Party’s site-specific installation is Venetian Rococo artist Rosalba Carriera’s “Portrait of a Man in Pilgrim’s Costume” (c. 1730). Carriera’s pastel portrait is flanked by two original portraits by Party and surrounded by a pastel mural of decadent fabric drapery, which samples from the likes of Jean-Étienne Liotard and Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, comprising an installation that pays homage to Carriera and other 18th-century pastelists who helped popularize the medium. — RN

The Frick Collection (frick.org)
Frick Madison, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through March 3, 2024

Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery

The 60 members who make up the Pueblo Pottery Collective curated this exhibition highlighting the creativity, craft, and community-based traditions of the Indigenous Southwest through ceramic works from the Río Grande Pueblos, the Ysleta del Sur community, and the Hopi Tribe. Spanning from the 11th century to the present day, Grounded in Clay showcases over 100 vessels that map the imbued histories and traditions of their respective creators. — RN

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (metmuseum.org)
1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
July 14–June 4, 2024

Rowan Renee: The Perimeter Path

Compiling research into public burial lots with artworks made of marble and glass, Rowan Renee investigates how socioeconomic inequities affect memorialization through an immersive installation in Green-Wood Cemetery’s historic chapel. As Green-Wood’s 2022 artist-in-residence, Renee’s summer exhibition draws the viewer’s gaze away from striking Victorian-era monuments and lush flora and toward the overlooked imprints of generational racial and class discrimination on memorials along the cemetery’s perimeter. — MP

Green-Wood Cemetery (green-wood.com)
500 25th Street, South Slope, Brooklyn
Through September 4

Aliza Nisenbaum: Queens, Lindo y Querido

The title of Nisenbaum’s exhibition of massive and explosively colorful figurative paintings was adapted from Vicente Fernández’s 2006 rendition of the song “Mexico, Lindo y Querido” (“Mexico, Beautiful and Beloved”). It includes portraits of South and Central American residents in Queens’s Corona neighborhood alongside student work from her bilingual painting workshop at the museum. — RN

Queens Museum (queensmuseum.org)
Grand Central Parkway and Van Wyck Expressway, Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, Queens
Through September 10

Upstate & Long Island

Upstate Art Weekend

With a map of event sites that speckle the banks of the Hudson River and venture further into Delaware County, this four-day event in July could make for a wonderfully pastoral weekend road trip to Upstate New York. Launched only in 2020, Upstate Art Weekend has seen exponential growth with over 130 art organizations, galleries, museums, and creative spaces participating in this year’s iteration. Alongside returning participants like the Wassaic Project, Alexander Gray Associates, and Geary are a variety of art-oriented spaces such as the Trolley Barn Gallery in Poughkeepsie, Blue Marble Arts in Stone Ridge, Collar Works in Troy, and many more. — RN

Upstate Art Weekend (upstateartweekend.org)
Various Locations
July 21–24

Renee Cox: A Proof Of Being

Renee Cox has played many roles throughout her long and varied artistic career, including as a model, fashion photographer, curator, and painter. In this show, three decades of the feminist artist’s imaginative portraits of women are displayed alongside a new immersive video installation. — EV

Guild Hall (guildhall.org)
158 Main Street, East Hampton, New York
July 2–September 4

Courtney M. Leonard: Logbook 2004–2023

Shinnecock artist Courtney M. Leonard has long used her art as a way to pay homage to the natural world and probe the potential of sustainable living. Many of her works are hyper-local to Long Island and pay special attention to water, featuring subjects such as whales and native shells. This exhibition, however, is even more site-specific: The Heckscher Museum commissioned Leonard to create a large-scale map of Long Island. Leonard hung thousands of small porcelain thumbprints that look like shells and used a deep purple color to render the peninsula’s image. — EV

Heckscher Museum of Art (heckscher.org)
2 Prime Avenue, Huntington, New York
Through November 12

Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969

This large-scale exhibition features over 100 artworks and archival materials from Native American, First Nations, Inuit, and Alaska Native artists. Indian Theater chronologically explores how the development of contemporary art functions as a tool for collective Indigenous resistance and self-determination, beginning with the performance and theater that emerged from the 1969–71 Occupation of Alcatraz by the Indians of All Tribes group. — MP

Hessel Museum of Art (ccs.bard.edu)
33 Garden Road, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York
June 24–November 26

Michael Snow: A Life Survey

Canadian artist Michael Snow, who died earlier this year, carved out a long career of creating mind-bending films, paintings, sound installations, performances, and photographs. He often employed hyperbole and humor to critique capitalism and point out the absurdity of daily life under its overbearing presence. This survey exhibition showcases the work Snow made throughout the decades, highlighting the experimentation he employed not only in his messaging, but also in his manipulation of mediums. — EV

The School (jackshainman.com)
25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, New York
Through December 30

Rita McBride

Rita McBride’s long-time interest in public infrastructure and its impact on perspective is explored in this presentation at Dia Beacon, which centers her monumental interactive sculpture “Arena” (1997) alongside several freestanding and wall-mounted artworks. The exhibition also features a series of virtual and physical performance engagements by the experimental interdisciplinary group Discoteca Flaming Star, with choreography by Alexandra Waierstall. — MP

Dia Beacon (diaart.org)
3 Beekman Street, Beacon, New York
July 1–January 2025

Pippa Garner: $ELL YOUR $ELF

Pippa Garner famously drove “backwards” over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in 1974 in a specially outfitted car she made as a conceptual artwork. Nearly 50 years later, this show debuts Garner’s newest automobile creation, “Haulin’ Ass!” (2023). It comprises a 2003 red Ford Ranger, removed from its underlying frame and turned backwards. Like her earlier piece, Garner’s new work is also completely functional. — EV

Art Omi (artomi.org)
1405 County Route 22, Ghent, New York
June 24–October 29

Outdoor Shows and Installations

Mary Mattingly: Ebb of a Spring Tide

Artist Mary Mattingly’s site-specific installation at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens includes a 65-foot-high clock that mirrors the Manhattan skyline, includes edible plants, and maintains its tempo with water pumped from the river. The exhibition includes a self-sufficient home, too, ultimately asking viewers to reflect on the environmental impact of humans and consider the fragility of nature’s balance. — EV

Socrates Sculpture Park (socratessculpturepark.org)
32-01 Vernon Boulevard, Long Island City, Queens
Through September 10

On the Grounds: Anina Major and Sagarika Sundaram

The third in an outdoor series of installations, On the Grounds displays a site-responsive installation made of wood, clay, and fiber in the landscape encompassing Al Held’s Boiceville studio. The exhibition includes dock-like structures and ceramic vessels by Bahamian visual artist Anina Major that continue her exploration of diasporic ties to home. Major also engages with Held’s former swimming pool that has been reclaimed by the elements. New York-based artist Sagarika Sundaram’s abstract wool sculptures containing natural spiral allusions are also spread throughout the grounds, nestled in specific areas chosen by Sundaram. — MP

Al Held Foundation (alheldfoundation.org)
26 Beechford Drive, Boiceville, New York
Through October 14

Beatriz Cortez: The Volcano That Left

Beatriz Cortez’s gargantuan steel-welded sculptures are majestic, awe-inspiring things. This body of work stems from her interest in the eruption of the Ilopango caldera that took place over 1,500 years ago in what is now El Salvador, where she grew up. The artist finds poetic parallels between volcanic behavior, migratory patterns, and ancestral histories. In a metaphorically resonant journey, her nomadic sculpture “Ilopango, the Volcano that Left” (2023) will travel by boat up the Hudson River to the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy after its run at Storm King. — VD

Storm King (stormking.org)
1 Museum Road, New Windsor, New York
Through November 13

Nicholas Galanin: In every language there is Land / En cada lengua hay una Tierra

A steel reimaging of Robert Indiana’s “Love” (1970), Nicholas Galanin’s “In every language there is Land / En cada lengua hay una Tierra” (2023) compiles generations of Indigenous land displacement, colonial violence, and capitalist propaganda into a 30-foot sculpture Brooklyn Bridge Park. The artwork is made out of the same materials as the US-Mexico border wall, and spells out “Land” in four layers of colossal text that visitors can pass through — a sharp critique of the impassable reality of barriers. — MP

Public Art Fund (publicartfund.org)
Brooklyn Bridge Park, Dumbo, Brooklyn
Through March 10, 2024