The exhibitions this week present us how we form ourselves in historical past’s picture, and the opposite method round. Lotus L. Kang’s assemblages at 52 Walker draw from diasporic reminiscence, but her draped movie sculptures type an ongoing doc of the exhibition’s idiosyncrasies of sunshine and motion. In the meantime, Rashid Johnson’s survey on the Guggenheim Museum attracts from a dense community of Black mental thought, providing in flip a recent visible vernacular.
Then, two group exhibits — Making House at Cooper Hewitt and Superfine at The Met — tackle the methods peculiar individuals assemble identities, whether or not that be by our home settings or our particular person fashion. As you may see, although three of the 4 exhibits are mere blocks aside on the Higher East Facet’s Museum Mile, they span continents and centuries, and radically completely different programs of thought. However that’s the miracle of New York, and the miracle of artwork. —Lisa Yin Zhang, Affiliate Editor
Lotus L. Kang: Already
52 Walker, 52 Walker Avenue, Tribeca, ManhattanThrough June 7
Lotus L. Kang, “Molt (Toronto-Chicago-Woodridge-New York-)” (2022–25) (photograph Danielle Wu/Hyperallergic)
“[Lotus L.] Kang evaluates what new possibilities and temporalities can emerge from engaging in processes alien or forbidden, such as exposing film to sunlight.” —Danielle Wu
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Making House—Smithsonian Design Triennial
Cooper Hewitt, 2 East 91st Avenue, Higher East Facet, ManhattanThrough August 10
Set up view of “Hālau Kūkulu Hawaiʻi: A Home That Builds Multitudes” (2025) (photograph Julie Schneider/Hyperallergic)
“Featuring a wide-ranging medley of 25 newly commissioned installations with pliable interpretations of both home and design, Making Home takes visitors on a meander through the minds of artists and designers from the US, US territories, and Tribal Nations.” —Julie Schneider
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Superfine: Tailoring Black Type
Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Higher East Facet, ManhattanThrough October 26
“Superfine: Tailoring Black Style is a triumph not only for its expansion of Black fashion history and visual culture, but also for its stirring and substantive approach that centers ordinary individuals and their dress practices.” —Imani Wiliford
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Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, Higher East Facet, ManhattanThrough January 18, 2026
Rashid Johnson’s “Untitled Totem” (2021), forged bronze and crops (left), and “Untitled Anxious Audience” (2019), ceramic tile, black cleaning soap, and wax (photograph Seph Rodney/Hyperallergic)
“[Rashid Johnson’s] discernment is key to this exhibition of 95 works of art that are replete with references to Black identity, its rhetorical construction and historical antecedents, and its visual codes, the dense thicket of signifiers in the forest that is Blackness.” —Seph Rodney
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