Eight Group Shows to See in New York, From Incendiary Art History to a Lesson in Telenovelas

In honor of the soapiest of television traditions, bring your lover, their lover, a secret love child, a long-lost twin engaged in identity fraud—or triplet (por que no?)—to “Telenovela” at the Americas Society. Through roughly 50 artworks dating from the 1970s to the present, the exhibition explores the tantalizing intrigue of telenovelas, whose appeal transcends class, language, and geography across the Americas. Rather than dismiss melodrama as frivolous, the show’s curator, Aimé Iglesias Lukin, considers the genre’s power to unsettle seemingly calcified social and political values. The show also includes a commission by Mexican artist, performer, and educator Pablo Helguera, who’s mined the medium as a site of scholarship through his ongoing project Instituto de la Telenovela, begun in 2002.

Through March 27, 2027, at 680 Park Avenue

In November 1970, Faith Ringgold, Jean Toche, and Jon Hendricks, soon to be known as the Judson Three, gathered more than 150 artists at Judson Memorial Church in New York City for “The People’s Flag Show,” a riotous, weeklong expedition to the limits of creative expression. The exhibition’s flyer called on artists to test the “repressive laws governing so-called flag desecration,” and test them they did. Among the works on view was an iteration of Yvonne Rainer’s signature dance Trio A, performed by dancers wearing American flags tied like bibs around their necks. Police raided the exhibition, and its organizers were convicted of violating New York’s flag desecration law. “We have been convicted, but in fact it is this nation and these courts who are guilty,” they declared in a statement following the ruling, which was later overturned. The exhibition was organized in solidarity with Stephen Radich, a New York art dealer whose conviction for exhibiting works that incorporated the American flag in protest of the Vietnam War brought his case before the US Supreme Court.

Curated by Howie Chen with Jon Huron, “Incendiaries” arrives at New York University’s 80WSE Gallery as a kind of cultural stress test, pressing against the same social limits the Judson Three challenged more than half a century ago—and finding them as rigid as ever. In the intervening decades, a rising tide of nationalism has swept through the arts, narrowing the space for political dissent. Perseverance, however, is the point. Drawing extensively from the Judson Memorial Church Archive, including rare photographs and video documentation, “Incendiaries” traces a continuum of social activism carried forward by contemporary artists.

Through January 16, 2027, at 80 Washington Square East

This show compellingly suggests that American landscape art truly begins not with the Hudson River School’s Romantic vistas or the god-defying expanses that would eventually give way to abstraction, but with young women—including free and enslaved women of color—who rendered this nascent frontier in needle and thread. Caroline Culp, curator of American art at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk and co-organizer of the American Folk Art Museum exhibition, has assembled nearly 100 objects dating from the colonial period through the nation’s founding. These include the kinds of ornamental works trivialized as women’s work: needlework pictures, watercolor studies, painted furniture, among more mediums. The show was organized with the sesquicentennial in mind, but presents a welcome counterpoint to the prevailing triumphalism, which argues art as a vehicle of national might.

Through February 28, 2027, at 2 Lincoln Square.

The Asia Society is marking 70 years in Manhattan with an exhibition of 70 devotional sculptures and ceramics from its renowned Rockefeller collection. The selection offers a spectacular introduction to a trove spanning two millennia of Asian art, from an 11th-century bronze figure of the Hindu goddess Parvati to a mid-17th-century Japanese tea-leaf jar delicately painted with black myna birds and a strikingly embossed silver stem cup from China, dated to the late 7th or early 8th century.

Organized by Asia Society and the American Federation of Arts, the exhibition was first presented in 2020 under the direction of Adriana Proser, then the Asia Society Museum’s senior curator. It has now returned in an expanded iteration, curated by assistant curator Xiaohan Du, to commemorate the museum’s founding in 1956 by John D. Rockefeller III, grandson of the Standard Oil magnate. Rockefeller and his wife, Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller, assembled most of the collection between the 1950s and ’70s and donated it to Asia Society in 1979. Look out for recent additions by two of their children, Sandra Ferry Rockefeller and Hope Aldrich, who carry the family’s collecting legacy into the present.

Through January 3, 2027, at 725 Park Avenue.

As any millennial cosplayer in the West can attest, over the past decade manga has moved from niche interest to pop-culture powerhouse. Making its East Coast debut at the Brooklyn Museum, “The Art of Manga” marks another milestone in that ascent: an institutional survey of the Japanese comics form that attracted more than 176,000 visitors in a previous iteration at the de Young museum in San Francisco. The exhibition features more than 600 original drawings by some of the medium’s biggest names, including Takahashi Rumiko (Inuyasha), Oda Eiichiro (One Piece), and Araki Hirohiko (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure). Tracing manga’s historical roots through its contemporary iterations, the show considers how the form reflects and interrogates social conventions around gender, sexuality, and class disparity.

In typical accounts of the Italian Renaissance, Florence tends to hog the spotlight, with Milan and Venice not far behind. “Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450–1500” makes a case for the Tuscan city—about 30 miles south of Florence—as a center of artistic ingenuity in its own right. Organized by Frick associate curator Giulio Dalvit, the exhibition brings together works by influential sculptors including Donatello, Vecchietta, and Francesco di Giorgio, reconsidering their bronzes against a pivotal chapter in the history of Sienese workshops. Here, technical innovation is cast in the same mold as the political and social forces that forged Renaissance art.

Perhaps a stop in the midcentury is unavoidable, since this is New York City, after all. “Fields of Color X” brings together key works by leading painters of the Color Field movement, including Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Adolph Gottlieb, and Jules Olitski, to illuminate their professional and personal relationships. It’s an admirable undertaking: When the subject is one of the most celebrated movements in art history, what new insights can emerge from the technical and conceptual interplay of these painting? Whatever the answer, an afternoon in the company of these blushing, blooming canvases is its own reward.

Through January 2027, at 745 5th Avenue.

In “All That Before Us,” Jennifer Ling Datchuk and Consuelo Jimenez Underwood challenge a twofold hierarchy: one that relegates ceramics, textiles, and sculptural assemblage to the realm of craft, and the patriarchal order that has devalued both women’s labor and the materials associated with it. Datchuk’s porcelain works reckon with domestic labor and femininity, while two vessels inspired by Song dynasty ceramics are home to the chinoiserie motifs that recur in her visual vocabulary, alongside fertility figurines, extraterrestrials, pregnancy tests, and hair accessories. Jimenez Underwood, meanwhile, reimagines the Mesoamerican rebozo as a functional record of cultural memory, migration, and identity. Together, their works collapse the distance between ancestral traditions and modern politics.

Through November 27, 2026, at 74 East 79th Street.