It's been a big year in New York City — and not just because we (thankfully) got a new mayor. New and updated museums are everywhere you turn: The Studio Museum in Harlem is back and better than ever after a seven-year sabbatical, and the Frick’s spent some of its hefty endowment on an expansion and facelift. A new New Museum will soon follow (we hope). And of course, the gallery landscape has shifted beneath our feet: We bid adieu to some, we say hello to others.
Beyond that, 2025’s been a blockbuster year. It includes shows that will make art history — Amy Sherald at the Whitney, Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim, and Wifredo Lam at MoMA being just a shortlist. We’ve got shows that remake it, from a survey on Indigenous design lineages at the Ford Foundation Gallery to New York’s introduction to 20th-century Malian photographer Seydou Keïta at the Brooklyn Museum. We’ve got surveys of hometown heroes, including the late Queens native Jack Whitten at MoMA, Coco Fusco at El Museo del Barrio, and Reverend Joyce McDonald at the Bronx Museum.
And, of course, as is always the case here, in the city of everything, we’ve got more still. My fellow New Yorkers, I present to you — in no particular order — the best shows of the year. —Lisa Yin Zhang, associate editor
Nanette Carter: Shifting Perspectives
Montclair Art Museum, September 28, 2024–August 5, 2025
Curated by Mary Birmingham
I love a classic "hometown girl does good" story, and it made me happy that Nanette Carter, who grew up near the museum, was fêted by the same institution that helped rear her artistic worldview. From shadows that embrace their own objecthood to bouquets orchestrated out of chaos, Carter’s decades of work convey a sense of optimism. We were given a glimpse of everything from her early experiments in high school to her more recent lingerings over totem-like figures, and left relishing the works’ formal playfulness and how they dance on the wall. —Hrag Vartanian
December 8, 2025
