Wonderland: Curious Nature
It’s unbelievable, it’s unfamiliar, it’s NYBG like never before! Head down the rabbit into a botanical experience that grows curiouser and curiouser along the way with the sights, settings, and scents of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. You’ll choose your own adventure as you fall deeper into our otherworldly gardens, mind-bending contemporary artworks, and gallery exhibitions filled with wonderfully weird marvels, and see the Garden through Alice’s playful and curious eyes. Join the New York Botanical Garden for fantastical tea parties, immerse yourself in thousands of colorful Victorian flowers, meet some of Wonderland’s fanciful and familiar characters, and go a little mad with us in this world of wild imagination!
2. Julia Chiang: The Glows and the Blows
The Parrish Art Museum presents the first-ever solo museum exhibition of painter Julia Chiang. Chiang’s painterly process is slow and controlled while spontaneous. Organic shapes coalesce on the picture plane in varying densities of paint and with fervor, scrimmage for territory. She operates in the realm of abstractions, but the body is the basis for her allegories, metaphors, and explorations. Her vocabulary is rife with organic forms and formations, which function as introspections that range from the corporeal to the psychological. The organic-looking imagery borrows from the physical—medical scans, internal body liquids and environments—and the psychological—fields of layered feelings and emotions, tensions between internal turmoil and external pressures, between fragility and strength. Regarding her work, Chiang states, “I’m always interested in our bodies as vessels, what we contain and what we cannot. All that comes out of us, all that is within us . . . Borders both real and imagined. Existing in the in-between.”
NEW
3. Genesis
On view at the Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Gallery is a group show featuring installations from three artists, Samuelle Green, Han-Chul Shin, and Anthony Wigglesworth.
In striving toward a wholly abstract perfection, the three artists featured in the exhibition, Samuelle Green, Han-Chul Shin, and Anthony Wigglesworth, all allow their work to be sculpted by organic processes of creation and destruction, even as it refuses to directly model the natural world. In their contributions, Green, Shin, and Wigglesworth offer images of nature distorted through the lens of the artist.
The work of Pennsylvania-based artist Samuelle Green (b. 1976) functions within the dialectic between the natural and the manmade. Deeply inspired by the natural world, her sculptural catalog features oft-discarded materials, such as scraps of paper appearing to grow like from gallery walls, sometimes even coalescing in cave-like landscapes in which paper appears as crystal or rock.
In his series Infinite Spheres, Korean artist Han-ChulShin (b. 1958) works to approximate the infinite in various amalgamations of colored stainless-steel spheres, arranged in a molecular structure. Inspired by the sphere as a symbol of wholeness, Shin’s spheres not only contain a wholeness within themselves—he calls them “organisms that contain both yin and yang”—but also, through their metallic luster, reach out to commune with their environment.
LAST CHANCE
4. Ocama Aracoel
The show closes on August 11
this gallery remains on view from the long-term exhibition Something Beautiful: Reframing La Colección, which reexamined El Museo del Barrio’s unique and culturally diverse permanent collection. Meaning “a call to the ancestors” in the Taíno language, Ocama Aracoel is the last iteration of the exhibition and foregrounds the importance of Taíno cultural inheritance. As part of this project, El Museo invited a Taíno advisory council to guide the reinstallation of these spiritually resonant forms.
The Taíno peoples have inhabited the Caribbean for many thousands of years. Their forms, symbols, and beliefs continue to provide a living resource for cultural reconnection within the Caribbean diasporic community. This visual language informed El Museo’s early mission and graphic identity. Similarly, these forms have shaped the practices of artists both in Puerto Rico and New York, including members of the influential Taller Boricua and their contemporaries. New commissions by Glendalys Medina and Jorge González Santos further activate these histories. Together, these dialogues reflect the ongoing vitality of Taíno culture and resist the racist notion of its extinction.
5. Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion
The Costume Institute’s exhibition reactivates the sensory capacities of masterworks in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection through first-hand research, conservation analysis, and diverse technologies—from cutting-edge tools of artificial intelligence and computer-generated imagery to traditional formats of x-rays, video animation, light projection, and soundscapes. The exhibition features approximately 220 garments and accessories spanning four centuries, all visually connected through themes of nature, which also serves as a metaphor for the transience of fashion.
