Gallery Shows

Explore interesting free indoor art at shows in chic galleries in cool neighborhoods (just don't touch). The art on display is always changing; here are some current family-friendly favorites.

Also see our guide to public art and kid-friendly museums, plus ideas for making art at home.

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DOWNTOWN

Aki Kuroda: MIDNIGHT SPAGHETTI

Richard Taittinger Gallery
154 Ludlow Street Soho/Tribeca/LES

Look for bunnies, faces, planets, floral arrangements, and caryatids that morph into portals or openings to other realms in world-renowned Japanese artist Aki Kuroda whimiscal paintings and 1 NFT. Compare works in vivid blues and yellows to those in deep blacks and subdued whites.

Tuesday–Sunday 11 am-7 pm

Chie Shimizu: ROJI

NowHere Gallery + Cafe
40 Wooster Street

Meet all sorts of interesting characters in Japanese-born, New York-based artist Chié Shimizu’s sculptures. Look for women standing in their hair, men with piles of rocks on their head, demons hiding in elaborate headdresses and more statues with stories in a serene exhibit evoking a roji, a garden surrounds and leads to the room in which the Japanese tea ceremony occurs.

Wednesday – Sunday 11 am – 6 pm

Elene Chantladze

FIERMAN
127 Henry Street

See animals, children and crowds gathering to celebrate weddings or other rituals that reflect the life and customs that surround Georgian artist Elene Chantladze in works rendered using both traditional media—gouache and pens—and the unconventional—elderberry juice, charcoal, kerosene—on old chocolate boxes or plastic lids. Find evocative faces from the sea, birds from the sky, flowers from the forest – plus moments of social critique dotting her painterly landscape. Distraught brides, monstrous bridegrooms, and bereaved mothers are found across her work and refer to the patriarchal demands on women, especially through marriage and caregiving.

Look for references to literature, including the nascent feminism of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, or current events, including the Covid pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the ongoing Russian occupation of regions in Georgia.

Wednesday-Sunday, 12 – 6 pm

Future Retrieval | Crystal-Walled Seas

Denny Dimin Gallery
39 Lispenard Street

Enter an underwater garden with reefs, fungi and other oceanic, organic forms, reimagined in ceramics, weaving, cut paper and paintings. Guy Michael Davis and Katie Parker collaborate together under the name Future Retrieval, mining archives and museums to digitally collect and make objects that re-examine the history of decorative arts. Much of this exhibit is based on early illustrated instructionals on sustaining aquatic life in a domestic setting. Lots to to look for in this art aquarium.

Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm

Colin Thomson | Through Line

High Noon
124 Forsyth Street

Lines caress, pierce, and bump up against one another in Colin Thomson’s paintings, resembling a type of excavation, like digging into the earth, something he did in his twenties as a heavy equipment operator. Look for layers of colorful shapes and allusions to body parts like eyes and feet. Sometimes the artist creates under hypnosis, entering the painting and kinesthetically experienced an enormous dimensional field of lines moving through space — imagine what that would feel like.

Wednesday-Sunday 12 – 7 pm

Kenny Scharf WOODZ ‘N THINGZ

TOTAH
183 Stanton Street

Explore legendary downtown painter Kenny Scharf’s “intuitive derangements of the regime of senses” in an exhibit of colorful, surreal paintings. Anthropomorphic elements of nature like red trees with big eyes interact with mesmerizing patterns and vibrant colors.

Tuesday – Saturday 11 am – 6 pm

Evan Mazellan, Eye Care

Massey Klein Gallery
136 Eldridge Street

Look for oversized body parts and surfers in works by Brooklyn-based Evan Mazellan, who says ‘I paint water like ripped strips of collaged paper and I paint figures like clothes crammed into a suitcase. I start each work by drawing the toes and work my way up. I try to fit things in – whatever works. By the time I reach the top, my figures are hunched and skewed as if viewed from the bottom of a massive swell.”

Thursday – Sunday, 12 – 5pm

Clive Smith 2022

Marc Strauss
299 Grand Street

See Clive Smith’s paintings of new species of birds: owls, ducks, spoonbills, pelicans, kingfishers, and pigeons, plus occasionally an insect or a mammal makes an appearance as well. Look for new feathers and fur patterns, based on canonical masters like Pablo Picasso, Bridget Riley, Hilma of Klimt, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Kenneth Noland, Josef Albers, and Mark Rothko.

Tuesday-Saturday 11 am – 6 pm

Josh Sperling: Daydream

Galerie Perrotin
130 Orchard Street

Find inspiration in Josh Sperling’s colorful painted lines that curl and wend and spiral, shimmying up walls across three floors of a spacious gallery show.

Not far from legendary Economy Candy.

CHELSEA/MEATPACKING

DVF x Ashley Longshore Gallery

Diane von Furstenberg Store
874 Washington Street

See Ashley Longshore’s paintings of inspirational women including Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Jackie Kennedy, Marlene Dietrich, Cleopatra, Oprah, Gloria Steinem, Nina Simone, Amelia Earhart, Rosa Parks and Jane Goodall in a photogenic gallery at the Diane von Furstenberg store. Good stop for International Women’s Month.

High Line Nine

High Line Nine
507 West 27th Street

Explore a collection of sky-lit galleries with a rotating cross-section of culture. Watch resident artists create (behind glass) and see finished work in a variety of mediums.

Imagine the stories of the diverse women portrayed in REWA and Megan Gabrielle Harris’s “Ladies of Leisure” and Nicolas V. Sanchez’s “belongings,” two of many intriguing exhibits.

Doug Aitken, Wilderness

303 Gallery
555 West 21st Street

Go inside Doug Aitken’s multi-screen video installation. A series of song cycles, sung in AI-generated digital voices, narrate and capture the modern landscape as it moves from day into night. The artwork flows from person to person, following a subconscious thread where sound and language create the connective tissue. The piece was filmed over two and a half years on the same stretch of urban beach, within a one-mile radius of the artist’s home.

Also see twilight (triptych), a group of three payphones recast as translucent forms and filled with light. This generative light sculpture glows and pulses with color.

Tuesday-Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm

UPTOWN

Dana Hoey and Caitlin Cherry: Hello Trouble

Petzel Gallery UES
35 E 67th Street

See a joint exhibition addressing the subject of the great American West with wildly different, yet related takes on the problem of how to best represent femininity. Caitlin Cherry paintings’ evoke glitched and chaotic LCD laptop’s desktop screen, with overlapping tabs and browser tabs of research, memes, Tiktoks and porn open simultaneously with Youtube music videos. Dana Hoey’s photographs uses herself, her karate coach and her longtime collaborator Mary C. Greening to embody icons of American masculinity typically pictured using white men: the cowboy, the flag-waver, the gun-toter and the bodybuilder.

Tuesday–Saturday 10 am-6 pm

Takashi Murakami: An Arrow through History

Gagosian UES
980 Madison Avenue at East 76th Street

See new works by Takashi Murakam in three simultaneous presentations spanning two of Gagosian’s New York galleries, at 976 and 980 Madison Avenue, and bridging the physical and digital realms. Look for distinctive personalities in walls of pixelated flowers with faces. See digitally modeled NFT avatars in meticulously detailed, hand-painted portraits and full-scale figurative sculptures

A virtual reality digital rendering of the 976 and 980 Madison Avenue gallerie is accessible online via gagosian.com or through a VR headset and allows access to the entire exhibition from anywhere in the world. Visitors on-site can activate numerous custom Snapchat Lenses to view augmented-reality animations in each gallery and on the building’s exterior.

Expect long lines; ones for art, and one to purchase NFTs/clothes. Queue for entry to 980 Madison is on the corner of 77th street, queue for entry to 976 Madison is on the corer of 76th street.

Tuesday-Saturday 10 am–6 pm

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Wednesday, January 1

Wow in the World

January 1, 2020 - December 31, 2023

Online
+ Google Map

Join hosts Guy Raz and the hilarious Mindy Thomas on a journey into the wonders of the world. Go inside brains, out into space and deep into the coolest new stories in science and technology - with lots of wacky fun along the way. One of our family's faves.

FREE

DOWNTOWN

CHELSEA/MEATPACKING

UPTOWN

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Wednesday, January 1

Thursday, January 2

Wednesday, April 1

Tuesday, November 3

Friday, January 1