8 New York City Show to Kick Off the New Year
By Natalie Haddad, Hakim Bishara, AX Mina, Seph Rodney, Julie Schneider and Daniel Larkin
January 3, 2025
It’s 2025 and time to start a new year of exploring art — and there’s already plenty to see. While shimmering gold and sequins from artists like Machine Dazzle and Myrlande Constant are ideal to cut through the winter gray, Japanese poetry, calligraphy, and painting at The Met tap into the more meditative side of entering a new year, while the sociopolitical critique of artists Nicholas Galanin, Sohrab Hura, and Gary Simmons provides food for thought. Meanwhile, the modernist patterns of Mary Sully and Harlem Renaissance paintings of Romare Bearden offer rich aesthetic experiences not to be missed. —Natalie Haddad, Reviews Editor
For Nicholas Galanin’s (Lingít and Unangax̂) third solo show at Peter Blum Gallery, Indigenous relationships to land confront the appropriation of Indigenous cultural symbols and objects by colonial powers, and empty gestures from Western institutions. Galanin’s facility for upending expectations and putting viewers on the spot is in full display here — literally in the interactive installation “Pause for Applause” (2024), in which a mirror is bookended by two teleprompters displaying land acknowledgments, with an X on the floor marking where the viewer stands. Other works, such as the photo series “Reenactment (Inversion)” (2024), depicting a pile of burning wood cut from counterfeit totem poles, and “Eye opener (South)” (2024), a decorative porcelain pry bar resting on a pillow in a glass case are subtler but no less scathing. —NH