Those last days of summer can be an opportunity to explore artists we might otherwise overlook in the summer group shows, and to revisit a few of our favorite exhibitions — and maybe go a little out of the way for art. To start August we suggest a few exceptional group shows, including a dog-themed one (a staff favorite), as well as solo shows featuring powerhouse women Jenny Holzer, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Huong Dodinh. If you can make the trek to Long Island, don’t miss the searing political art of George Grosz. We’re also excited about Wake Windows, an interactive online show that you can enjoy no matter where you are. —Natalie Haddad
Cantando Bajito: Incantations
A diverse medley of vegetable gourds drape from a conical raffia-covered structure in a towering sculpture at the exhibition’s entrance, reminiscent of a fantastic tree lush with ripe fruit. Mônica Ventura’s “O Sorriso de Acotirene (Acotirene’s Smile)” (2018), titled after the founding matriarch of the Palmares quilombo, a community of Black people who fled slavery in colonial Brazil, joins works by seven other artists exploring forms of resistance against the pervasive attacks on women’s bodies around the world. This moving, urgent show draws its name from the Spanish for “singing softly,” a fitting image for the tight-knit networks of care, ancestral traditions, and subversive strategies whose lives women and feminized people continue to depend on. —Valentina Di Liscia
Ford Foundation Gallery (fordfoundation.org)
320 East 43rd Street, East Midtown, Manhattan
Through August 10
Wake Windows: The Witching Hour
Way back in 2020, online art shows were all the rage. It was a renaissance for art lovers who couldn’t, or didn’t want to, leave the house. While online shows have dwindled, the format is rife with potential to change the way we experience art, especially as AI becomes more common. Curator (and Hyperallergic contributor) Rea McNamara taps into that potential with an interactive digital show that takes a choose-your-own-adventure format. Based on the idea of “wake windows,” the periods between an infant’s naps, the show casts the viewer as a friend going through art files to help out a curator/new mother while the baby is awake. From there we encounter an AI chatbot named Edgar who longs for emotional engagement before entering the virtual space of the art; the show includes digital works, many interactive, by artists who are also parents, caregivers, or educators, such as Lauren Lee McCarthy, Skawennati, and Rodell Warner. You can spend as much or as little time as you’d like with the chatbot and art, but chances are you’ll get sucked into this digital world, with its array of choices, conversations, and perspectives. —NH
MacKenzie Art Gallery (mackenzie.art)
Online
Through August 11
Huong Dodinh: Transcendence
It’s hard to know what to make of Huong Dodinh’s art. The Vietnam-born, Paris-based artist creates muted paintings that evoke the natural world without explicitly rendering it. But these calm, reserved artworks are not as self-evident as they may initially appear, each one seemingly hinting at something just beyond perception. A group of beige-toned works from the late 1980s and early ’90s depict forms that suggest rocks or mountains, yet their sinuous lines and organic shapes seem to breathe with life. Later monochrome works in gradations of white whisper their presence, quietly inviting us into their expansive light. The exhibition’s overall effect is that of an enigma that need not be solved, but instead offers a space to ponder as long as we wish. —NH
Pace Gallery (pacegallery.com)
540 West 25th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through August 16
Dog Days of Summer
Anyone who loves dogs should not w-a-l-k, but run to this group show devoted to our canine companions. In fact, bring your dog with you because the gallery has treats, a water bowl, and some refreshing air conditioning. With more than 60 works in the exhibition, Dog Days of Summer’s offerings range from David Surman’s enormous odes to giant fluffy pups and Justin Liam O’Brien’s painting of a hungry Borzoi to prints and original works from the likes of Jonas Wood, Kiki Smith, Paula Rego, and Robert Mapplethorpe. The exhibition’s adoration for dogs is all-encompassing and will leave even the most jaded visitor with a warm and fuzzy feeling — just the one you have when a puppy falls asleep on your lap. —Rhea Nayyar
Timothy Taylor Gallery (timothytaylor.com)
74 Leonard Street, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through August 23
Summer Exhibition
Another summer group show, you say — and mostly paintings, of all things! My art world-weary friend, I ask you to set aside your preconceptions for a moment and step into this gem of an exhibition, installed salon-style but with a flair. Stacked and arranged in unexpected configurations are artworks made over the course of 100 years, from Clara Klinghoffer’s pastel-colored “Portrait of a nude woman” (1921) to Pol Morton’s joyous recent collage of glitter, sequined butterflies, cat hair, and other bits and pieces. It’s the kind of show you’ll want to meander through without an agenda, letting yourself be seduced and surprised without pressure. Isn’t that what summer’s all about? —VD
Shin Gallery (shin-gallery.com)
322 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through August 31
George Grosz: The Stick Men
Organized by the Das Kleine Grosz Museum in Berlin and expanded with additional works from the Heckscher Museum collection, is a lovely small exhibition that explores an oft overlooked period in the German Expressionist’s life, when he lived on Long Island during and after the Second World War. The Stick Men drawings are at the core of this show, which brings up Grosz’s complicated history with modernism — he disliked Jackson Pollock’s apolitical work — and his responses: he used these images of hollow men to portray the contradictions of life in the West.
The exhibition is also a great chance for you to see the museum’s own collection of half a dozen artworks by Grosz, including the spectacular “Eclipse of the Sun” (1926) and his lesser known collage works.
Given our current political moment, it’s really worth taking a look at these works by one of the greatest political artists of the 20th century and reflecting on our current political moment — and how many don’t want to confront the realities before our eyes. —Hrag Vartanian
The Heckscher Museum of Art (heckscher.org)
2 Prime Avenue, Huntington, New York
Through September 1
LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity
In Monuments of Solidarity, LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs reveal an eye that is at once tender and probing. The images stare unflinchingly at the collusion between post-industrial capitalism, environmental racism, and class disenfranchisement, while illuminating the strategies of refusal and resistance that working-class communities (most of them Black and Brown) have developed in response. Frazier is no outsider looking into these communities; rather, she starts with what she knows most intimately and works outward from there: The exhibition begins with images of her immediate family and community in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a former steel-mining capital, and expands to other communities across the United States that have contended with similar political struggles. Images from later projects like Flint Is Family Act III (2016) and The Last Cruze (2019) are mounted on architectonic structures, evoking monuments and their claims to power. —Zoë Hopkins
Museum of Modern Art (moma.org)
11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan
Through September 7
Jenny Holzer: Light Line
I didn’t expect to be so moved by a Jenny Holzer survey. But I was, deeply. This show is an antiwar poem, wherein the killed, maimed, and irrevocably traumatized children of wars take center stage. It’s never too explicit, at times even strangely apolitical, but if you look beyond the spectacle of flashing LED screens on the museum’s spiral rotunda and submit yourself to the imagery described in Holzer’s texts, a sudden chill might climb up your spine, followed by long, morose silence. —Hakim Bishara (Read the full review here)
Guggenheim Museum (guggenheim.org)
1071 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through September 29
