As a frigid winter gives way to March’s unpredictable—and often, relentless—showers, New York City’s museums are offering folks indoor reprieves in the form of a slew of stellar art programs. From the Whitney Biennial 2024, which starting March 20 will occupy several floors of the storied institution, to smaller exhibits dealing in augmented-reality sculptures and artificiality, there’s something for every kind of art lover. Read on for our pick of the best, most interesting art exhibits in New York City for the month of March.
Museum of the Moving Image
It's odd to consider that the internet has been around for long enough that one of its pioneer artists is now of age for a career retrospective. Auriea Harvey: My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard is a wonderfully nebulous, searching survey of the net-artist and sculptor's strange and prescient work. Installed here are interactive, “net-based” interactive pieces alongside video games and augmented-reality sculptures that challenge the viewer to ponder digital media's ability to bring people together while keeping them physically apart. Very far out, and on view through July.
Whitney Museum of American Art
Another even year, another biennial at the Whitney. Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing opens March 20 and promises to comment on the issues shaping today’s landscape—this writer’s guess, from the title, is that we will be dealing as in 2022 with questions about artificiality stemming from technology. Until then, or while there, check out Harold Cohen: Aaron and learn about the earliest artificial intelligence program for artmaking—on view until May 19.
The Morgan Library & Museum
Wonder and whimsy are alive and well in New York thanks to The Morgan's Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature, where the museum's collection of her picture letters pairs nicely with artworks, books, and manuscripts gathered from leading institutions in the United Kingdom. Potter grew up ensconced in English nature, and from a young age sketched the flora and fauna that surrounded her and created fairy tales to match—the exhibitions take you from this inception point through her study of natural sciences and end in a recreation of her Lake District country home complete with a pair of her clogs.
The Tenement Museum
The Tenement Museum has, until now, focused its exhibitions strictly on the former residents of the two Lower East Side structures it occupies. With A Union of Hope: 1869 , that changes. Recreated here is the home of Joseph and Rachel Moore, a Black couple that lived in SoHo in the 1860s and '70s. The cramped two rooms sit on the museum’s top floor, giving a glimpse into the lives of a migrant group heretofore unseen on its premises.
Museum of Modern Art
MoMA has the coolest guest curator in New York City in the form of Grace Wales Bonner (when I bought a $200 purple pair of athletic shorts from her in college, my friends thought I was crazy but I still wear them almost daily—I’m biased.) As part of the Artist’s Choice series, Spirit Movers sees the designer gather 40 pieces by African diaspora artists from the museum’s collection that speak to her interest in sound and movement. The Floor 4 Studio also features a site-specific installation, Shana Moulton: Meta/Physical that is well worth a visit.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
As usual, the Met has an embarrassment of riches on display. The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, an exploration of art and its explosion in new Black cities between the ‘20s and ‘40s, is one. 160 works of photography, painting, sculpture, and film strong, this is the first survey of such subject matter in a New York City museum since 1987. There’s also Indian Skies: The Howard Hodgkin Collection of Indian Court Painting, with a very pretty selection of works ranging from the 16th to 19th centuries.
Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is rife with exciting exhibitions, the starriest among them being Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys. Beatz and Keys, the avid collectors that they are, have loaned the museum pieces by everyone from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Kehinde Wiley. It’s an impactful show, one where you really do feel towered over by the art, and that proves the unimpeachable taste of Beats and Keys. Opening on International Women’s Day are In the Now: Gender and Nation in Europe, Selections from the Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl Photography Collection featuring photography by fifty European women artists, and Nona Faustine: White Shoes, with several self-portraits of the titular artist standing in some of the city's most recognizable locales (Prospect Park, Wall Street) that are “built upon legacies of enslavement.”
Anyone who has taken any level of a publishing or literary production course will be excited to see Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines while they still can. What is a “zine”? If you cannot wait to find out, know that this will offer glimpses into America's wildly diverse perspectives and alternative scenes—imagine if every person you knew was the Editor-in-Chief of their own magazine. What would they put in it? How many ideologies would be represented? Check it out.
The Jewish Museum
The first exhibition (and monograph!) of Argentine conceptual and performance artist Marta Minujín's work stateside is on view in Marta Minujín: Arte! Arte! Arte! at the Jewish Museum through the end of the month. Minujín, who was born to a Russian-Jewish family in Buenos Aires in 1943, is known for a vibrant career spent not just in her home country but also New York City, Paris, and more—the work will reflect such breadth with works of soft sculpture, vintage film footage, large-scale painting, and more. Expect bountiful color, personality, and humor.
