10 New York Museum Shows Worth Slowing Down for Over the Holidays

Late December marks one of the rare periods in which the commercial art world actually slows down. Most galleries close for at least a week starting around December 20, creating a brief lull in a calendar otherwise engineered for constant motion. But museums, with the exception of a few days, remain open, making this a good time to do something the hustle and bustle of the rest of the year seldom allows. Namely, not just catching an exhibition or two, but spending real time with them.

In a city like New York, where cultural events pile up at a pace that can leave even the most committed art professional scrambling to keep up, these all-too-brief holiday weeks offer a chance to finally see some of the shows at the city’s globally envied museums that can get lost in the churn of gallery openings, art fairs and (for us) deadlines. What follows is our holiday gift to you: a roundup of the New York City museum shows we think you should make time for in the next few weeks.

“Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream”

• MoMA, through Apr. 11, 2026

The first major U.S. survey dedicated to the visionary Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam is one of the season’s true highlights. His surreal paintings offer not only a deep journey into an emotional and oneiric subconscious but also an entry into a broader realm of archetypes and ancestral symbolism shared across cultures and time, reemerging in altered states where the boundary between the time-bound and the mythical, eternal dimension grows thin. Mythic, atmospheric, slightly uncanny yet deeply revealing, Lam’s paintings arise from an imaginary universe shaped by his own lived experience: of African and Chinese descent, born in Cuba, long exiled in Europe, and returning to the Caribbean after 18 years to radically reimagine and reactivate the region’s Afro-Caribbean heritage from a syncretic and revolutionary perspective. Lam considered his art an “act of decolonization,” and hybrid both formally and conceptually, his dense jungle scenes become sites of experimentation with universal symbologies capable of disrupting the colonial structures he encountered in art and in life, as African, Caribbean and European visual languages coexist without hierarchy. “I knew I was running the risk of not being understood either by the man in the street or by the others,” Lam said, “but a true picture has the power to set the imagination to work, even if it takes time.”

“Anish Kapoor: Early Works”

• Jewish Museum, through Feb. 1, 2026

This is one of the last chances to catch a rare showcase of Anish Kapoor’s early works in the city, currently on view at the Jewish Museum. In these early experiments with pure color and pigment, the foundations of Kapoor’s lifelong investigation into the physical, spiritual and poetic properties of color are already visible—an inquiry that challenges the boundaries between sculpture, sensation, idea and form. At the core of this research lies a philosophical and psychological question about the nature of human experience itself, unfolding through a continuous exchange between sensation and imagination, reality and illusion. On view are the artist’s pigment sculptures presented in richly hued, evocative groupings alongside select examples of his more recent works made with Vantablack. This nanotechnological substance absorbs nearly all light, and the exhibition underscores Kapoor’s masterful play with perception, drawing on the psychic effects of color—and its absence—as well as the enduring allure of objects that seem to defy their own material nature.

“Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective”

• MoMA, through Feb. 7, 2026

MoMA is hosting Ruth Asawa’s first major museum survey to reach New York following its debut at SFMOMA. Spanning six decades, the exhibition offers a comprehensive view of Asawa’s sustained exploration of the formal and emotional resonances between natural and human-made structures across media including wire sculptures, bronze casts, paper folds, paintings and works on paper. “Life draws,” she wrote, framing artmaking as a mode of full presence, and continuity and repetition shape this practice as she returns again and again to the same flowers and plants, echoing universal natural structures while treating repetition as a meditative search for order within entropy. An organic logic underpins Asawa’s approach to both sculpture and drawing as sculpture, driven by an effort to capture the life within objects while revealing the underlying harmony that connects all things. Her signature “continuous form within a form” evolves here through doubled and interlocking interiors, split and woven wire strands and layered structures activated by negative space, opening networks of connection rather than enclosure. At the same time, these repeated gestures of weaving and mending carry a quiet ritual and spiritual charge, suggesting care, repair and healing in the context of diasporic trauma, and together the works form a partial inventory of the sculptural vocabulary Asawa developed over time, using industrial wire to reimagine organic form and situate her practice within an ongoing dialogue with nature, ritual and the history of sculpture.

“High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100”

• The Whitney, through Mar. 8, 2026

This season, the Whitney brings back into view a true gem: the complete Calder’s Circus, presented on the occasion of its centennial anniversary. The exhibition is worth seeing not only for its disarming playfulness, but also for its importance in revealing the foundations of Calder’s practice and allowing a rediscovery of its essence beyond the myth. Shortly after moving to Paris in 1926, Calder began creating this entire circus of characters, small enough to fit into a suitcase and activated through handmade stage props, music, lighting and live performances that could last for hours. Made during the interwar years, the work is marked by an extreme economy of means and a radical simplicity that, beneath the apparent naivety and playfulness of its fantastical figures, already registers the fragility of humanity confronted with the trauma and violence of war. Staged within a theatrical exhibition design that revives the circus’s sense of wonder, the show also serves as a reminder of the need to reconnect with the raw, spontaneous and unfiltered power of childhood imagination, especially in times of chaos and destruction. Calder understood this a century ago, and encountering Calder’s Circus again at the Whitney feels both revelatory and quietly regenerative.

“Joan Semmel: In the Flesh”

• Jewish Museum, through May 31, 2026

This exhibition draws viewers into Joan Semmel’s emotional and psychological investigation of skin and flesh as the substance and filter through which we experience both inner and outer worlds. The show brings together her iconic close-up paintings and self-portraits alongside 50 works from the museum’s collection to examine shared themes of the body, intimacy and autonomy. Born in 1932 into a secular Jewish family in the Bronx, Semmel came of age amid Abstract Expressionism before turning decisively toward figuration in the late 1960s and 1970s, using her own body to confront and upend the male gaze that has long shaped art history. For Semmel, flesh becomes the most fundamental point of view from which to reckon with femininity in its many forms, its condition of being-in-time and its shifting relational nature. Addressing aging, sexuality and physical presence with unflinching directness, her paintings are often rendered from her literal vantage point, looking down at her own body and placing the viewer inside rather than outside female experience, literally “in the flesh” of it. Closely aligned with the feminist art movements of the 1970s, Semmel’s work foregrounds visibility, agency and embodied subjectivity, securing her position as a key figure in redefining representation, desire and power in contemporary painting.

“Ayoung Kim: Delivery Dancer Codex”

• MoMA PS1, through Mar. 16, 2026

Digital simulation is, for Ayoung Kim, a fluid realm through which to examine human experiences within the relentless urban and digital flux of everyday life. Using science fiction, gaming logic and digital world-building, she creates immersive narratives that blur the boundary between the virtual and the real, often inviting viewers to inhabit the perspectives of marginalized or precarious bodies navigating algorithmic systems. For Kim, digital space is not an escape but a site of critical inquiry where contemporary conditions of labor, borders and power—shaped by political and economic forces—are confronted and tested through simulation and the role-play logic of gaming. Her Delivery Dancer trilogy, a widely acclaimed group of video installations now presented together for the first time at MoMA PS1, stands as one of the most compelling outcomes of her multiyear practice of constructing multiverses to stage and probe human behavior. Described by the artist as “pandemic fiction,” the work follows female delivery drivers En Storm and Ernst Mo, names that form an anagram of “monster,” through live-action footage shot in real locations, foregrounding the new labor dynamics produced by the gig economy as it surged in both Korea and the U.S.

“Monet and Venice”

• Brooklyn Art Museum, through Feb. 1, 2026

In what is the largest Monet exhibition in New York in 25 years, the Brooklyn Museum presents an extraordinary sequence of 19 works depicting Venice, foregrounding a radiant yet often overlooked chapter of the artist’s late career, first shown in 1912. Altogether, the exhibition brings together more than 100 artworks, books and pieces of ephemera, including key masterpieces such as the Brooklyn Museum’s own Palazzo Ducale and The Grand Canal, Venice from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, alongside works spanning Monet’s broader career. Across these paintings, light and water emerge as the true protagonists as Monet seeks to capture perception itself at the level of immediate sensation, with air, light and matter dissolving into vibrations of color that become image and experience.

“Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World”

• The Guggenheim, through April 26, 2026

Gabriele Münter stood at the very forefront of early modernism as a co-founder of Der Blaue Reiter alongside Wassily Kandinsky. Münter’s use of color is both radically innovative and emotionally intense, driven by a desire to capture the energetic essence of her subjects, with vital forces conveyed through chromatic expression rather than descriptive detail. Her work is defined by a bold palette, simplified forms and a direct, emotionally charged approach to landscape, portraiture and still life. Rather than imitating reality, she sought to “convey an essence,” as she put it, insisting that she did not need nature in front of her to paint because she already carried her landscapes within herself. More than 50 paintings are presented across the Guggenheim’s three Tower galleries, alongside 19 photographs taken during her extended stay in the United States between 1898-1900, a formative period that shaped her vivid palette as profoundly as her later travels across Europe and Tunisia. Long overshadowed by her male contemporaries, Münter is now recognized as a decisive force in forging a distinctly modern visual language that bridged German Expressionism and later abstraction.

“Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island”

• El Museo del Barrio, through Mar. 1, 2026

Coco Fusco is known for her unfiltered and piercing examination of colonialism, the legacies of imperialism and migration, as well as the power dynamics of representation, culture and institutional critique. A 2023 Free Speech Defender Award recipient from the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist, writer and curator often works at the crossroads of visual art, activism and anthropology, using her platform to expose the societal dynamics that establish categories, hierarchies and disparities within communities. Borrowing its title from the artist’s recent monograph publication, the exhibition at El Barrio foregrounds more than three decades of Fusco’s artistic production, spanning her now-canonical performance Two Undiscovered Amerindians Discover the West, presented with Guillermo Gomez-Peña to her ongoing investigation of post-revolutionary Cuban history and her most recent photographic explorations of U.S. politics, probing her unflinching ability to address some of today’s most pressing issues.

“Robert Rauchenberg’s New York” (with Gingerbread NYC)

• Museum of the City of New York, through April 19.

2025 marked a moment for Robert Rauschenberg, with major exhibitions across geographies fueling revived market and institutional interest around the centennial of his birth. The Museum of the City of New York brings his relationship with the city into focus through an exhibition presented in partnership with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, tracing the artist’s deep engagement with the city through his innovative use of photography and found materials. At the heart of the show is “In + Out City Limits,” a three-year photographic survey conducted across the United States between 1979 and 1981, with Rauschenberg’s New York images foregrounding his enduring fascination with the signs and symbols of human culture. The exhibition also includes rare early photographs, mixed-media works and assemblages that reflect his commitment to what he called “the real world,” a sensibility that New York amplifies at its most intense, and across these works his signature ability comes into sharp focus: capturing the energy, contradictions and visual noise of urban life and transforming them into the ready-made materials of his art. A visit to MCNY during this period also comes with a lighter bonus in the form of the fourth edition of “Gingerbread NYC,” which invites professional and amateur bakers from across the five boroughs to create edible tributes to the city’s iconic places, buildings and spirit, all rendered in gingerbread, on view through January 19.

Derrick Adams’s
‘Tree Huggers’

• DUMBO House, through December 2025

This is one of the very few art-driven Christmas installations in New York this year, and it is not one to miss. Derrick Adams has transformed the rooftop of DUMBO House with a group of Christmas trees, cheekily personified and animated through his signature use of bold color and graphic patterns. Set against the sweeping backdrop of Manhattan’s skyline and the Brooklyn Bridge, each tree greets visitors with softly open arms, inviting a moment of warmth, humor and gentle wonder. The installation reads as a quiet meditation on togetherness and care, and a reminder of art’s ability to create new connections in a fractured present. The project unfolds alongside the broader seasonal atmosphere at DUMBO House, where you’ll find winter market-style food, festive drinks served in terrace chalets and a calendar of December programming that includes vinyl listening nights, carolers, visits from Santa and holiday-themed workshops, extending the installation’s spirit into the venue’s convivial communal setting.