30 Must-See Art Shows in New York City This Summer
Pierre Huyghe’s brain activity-inspired dreamscapes, Orientalism at The Met, a menagerie of mystical animals, and so much more.
We didn’t need the Knicks to show us that we’re a city of champions, but it sure doesn’t hurt. This has been a major year in New York’s art world — we saw the reopening of the Studio Museum and the expansion of the New Museum, and the stars aligned with marquee exhibitions like the Whitney Biennial and MoMA PS1’s Greater New York landing at the same time. You might even say that The Met’s hard-hitting group show on Orientalism probes the empire state of mind.
And then, of course, there are the wildcards that make this city such a haven for the weird, the experimental, the magical. Can’t really get freakier than Pierre Huyghe’s brain activity-inspired dreamscapes at MoMA. How about an exhibition at Subtitled NYC — a little artist-run Brooklyn project space — that recasts the internet as a water system? Or an ark-full of animals at Powerhouse Arts, and a menagerie of mythical creatures at the Cloisters? We say chase the unicorn this summer — New York’s a wonderland, as an exhibition of New Deal-era murals of Alice and her crew zooming around NYC at the Museum of the City of New York shows us. You need only open your eyes to it.
— Lisa Yin Zhang, associate editor
Pierre Huyghe: UUmwelt
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan
July 1–Nov. 29
Generative artificial intelligence is dependent on human output, but can it interpret our own thoughts before we externalize them? Pierre Huyghe investigates AI’s potential to realize the human imagination in an interactive, multimedia body of work. Born from an artificial neural network’s interpretation of recorded brain activity from a person asked to imagine a series of images, UUmwelt is also activated by visitors whose gazes alter the network’s generative imagery in real time.
Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L
The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, Soho, Manhattan
June 26–Sep. 27, 2026
With over 200 rarely-seen works spanning from William Pope.L’s early career to his final years, a survey of the late performance artist’s prolific drawing practice introduces a new urgency to his absurdist distillations of human hierarchy. Works pulled from key series including Failure Drawings and Skin Sets, and a rarely exhibited installation titled “Relational Painting a.k.a If Black Is Beautiful....” underpin this exhibition, functioning as a cross-section of Pope.L’s provocative aesthetics spanning medium, language, and action.
Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through Feb. 28, 2027
By leveling Orientalist and Islamic art and decorative objects from The Met’s collection, this exhibition examines the exchange between Europe, West Asia, and North Africa from the 19th century. It unpacks the westward trade of Ottoman and Persian wares at a time of rapid industrialization, reflecting the porous boundaries between observation and perception, as well as aesthetic influence and cultural appropriation. Central to the exhibition is an exploration into Osman Hamdi Bey, a French-trained Ottoman painter who uniquely infused the Orientalist style with his first-hand cultural insights.
