Featured Events in New York in April 2025 (May Updated)

In 1969, The Who created a rock opera that changed the course of music history. Some 25 years later,The Who’s TOMMYarrived on Broadway, winning 5 Tony Awards® and pushing the boundaries of what musical theatre can be. This March, the Amazing Journey arrives in a dazzling new production direct from a sold-out, record-breaking, award-winning Chicago premiere. “Broadway has nothing else like this wizardry going on, not this season and nothing I know of for next season. Visually and sonically overwhelming, it’s a prescient masterpiece of a rock opera.”Chris Jones,Chicago Tribune

From the tales of famous travelers like Marco Polo and Alexander the Great to the ancient encyclopedias of Pliny and Isidore, medieval conceptions of the world were often based more on authoritative tradition than direct observation. This exhibition presents one of the most fascinating examples of a medieval guide to the globe, known as the Book of the Marvels of the World. Written in France by an unknown author, this fifteenth-century illustrated text vividly depicts the remarkable inhabitants, customs, and natural phenomena of various regions, both near and far. Reuniting two of the four surviving copies, The Book of Marvels: Imagining the Medieval World brings to life medieval conceptions—and misconceptions—of a global world. Additional objects in the exhibition demonstrate how foreign cultures were imagined in the Middle Ages, and what the assumptions of medieval Europeans tell us about their own implicit biases and beliefs. Highlights include rare illustrated manuscripts of Marco Polo and John Mandeville; a richly ornamented Ottoman Book of Wonders, made for a sultan’s daughter; and a spectacular medieval map of the Holy Land, based on pilgrimage accounts.

This timely exhibition looks back at the year the captivating Eurasian eagle-owl took to Manhattan’s skies, learned to hunt, and peered into apartment windows.

He is one of the greatest entertainers of all time. Now, Michael Jackson’s unique and unparalleled artistry has finally arrived on Broadway in a brand-new musical. Centered around the making of his 1992 Dangerous World Tour, and created by Tony Award®- winning Director / Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, MJ goes beyond the singular moves and signature sound of the star, offering a rare look at the creative mind and collaborative spirit that catapulted Jackson into legendary status. Turn it up, Broadway — MJ is here! • MASKS OPTIONAL - All guests are strongly encouraged to wear a mask in the theatre to protect themselves and others, but it is no longer required.

The exhibition is co-hosted by the Shanghai Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, USA. It brings together more than 200 collections from important domestic and foreign institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Museum in the UK, the Cernuschi Museum in France, the Palace Museum, the Shanghai Museum, and the Liaoning Provincial Museum. This exhibition is a friendly exchange project between the two museums. After the closing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in September 2025, the exhibition will move to the East Hall of the Shanghai Museum.

Brazilian contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes creates mural-like, abstract paintings through an innovative technique she calls “monotransfer.” She begins this process by painting her forms onto clear plastic sheets. Once dry, she layers and adheres the painted films onto the canvas, and then peels off the plastic sheets, revealing the forms in reverse. The resulting vibrant and dynamic compositions balance abstract forms, organic patterns, and geometric structures on densely textured and intricate surfaces.

Thousands of artists—including Norman Rockwell, Mark Rothko, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jacob Lawrence—have studied and taught at the Art Students League, a New York institution founded in 1875 by a group of young artists who believed that an arts education should be accessible to anyone seeking it and who envisioned an artist-run school free from dictates of process or style. To mark the 150th anniversary of the League, The New York Historical showcases works by League affiliates with featured paintings drawn from The Historical’s promised gift of 130 scenes of New York City from art collectors and philanthropists Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld. The installation is part of a larger city-wide, cross-institutional, year-long celebration programmed by the Art Students League. Curated by Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto, vice president & chief curator, in collaboration with Ksenia Nouril, gallery director and curator, and Esther Moerdler, curatorial assistant, at the Art Students League.

SMASH, inspired by the hit TV show, is finally on Broadway! A hilarious behind-the-scenes rollercoaster ride about the making of a Marilyn Monroe musical called Bombshell, it’s got all the iconic songs, kick-ass choreography, and backstage pandemonium that make Broadway the beloved institution it is today. Our cast is stacked, because who better to play a bunch of wannabe Broadway big shots than actual Broadway big shots? Among them: Robyn Hurder, Brooks Ashmanskas, Krysta Rodriguez, Bella Coppola, Jacqueline Arnold, Caroline Bowman, John Behlmann, Kristine Nielsen and Casey Garvin to name just a few.

Lorenzo Homar was a pioneering printmaker, poster designer, calligrapher, painter, illustrator, caricaturist, and costume and theatrical set designer. Active from the 1950s through the 1990s, few equal his impact and influence as a teacher of poster design and printmaking in Latin America. This exhibition focuses on his poster output over a thirty year period during which time his work reflected the complex history of Puerto Rico, encompassing elements of Taíno, Spanish, and African cultures as well as the rising tensions between tradition and modernity under the Luis Muñoz Marín government. His influence is so extensive that today he is known as the father of the Puerto Rican poster. Alejandro Anreus is Emeritus Professor of Art History and Latin American Studies, William Paterson University. A former curator at the Jersey City Museum and Montclair Art Museum, he is the author of over sixty articles and catalogue essays, and six books on Latin American and Latinx Art.

One of the most prominent features of art from the late eighteenth century onwards, particularly after World War II, is artists’ tendency to evolve traditional artmaking methods outside the studio’s boundaries. This exhibition examines the ways in which contemporary artists enacted new ideas formed by the social and historical contexts of their time and pushed the boundaries of artmaking and materials as a result. By Way Of offers a suite of works from the museum’s permanent collection inspired by the D.Daskalopoulos Collection Gift. Major artists from the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and 1970s, like Jannis Kounellis and Mario Merz share the galleries with artists working today, such as Rashid Johnson, Mona Hatoum, and Senga Nengudi.

The Museum of Modern Art announces Jack Whitten: The Messenger, the first comprehensive retrospective dedicated to the groundbreaking art of Jack Whitten (American, 1939–2018), on view from March 23 through August 2, 2025, in the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions. Presented solely at MoMA, the exhibition will explore the full range of Whitten’s innovative art over his nearly six-decade career, showing more than 175 works from the 1960s to the 2010s, including paintings, sculptures, rarely shown works on paper, and archival materials. Together, these works will reveal how Whitten overturned the tenets of modern art-making to become one of the most important artists of our time. Beginning his career during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Whitten was under great pressure to create directly representational art as a form of activism, yet he dared to invent new forms of abstraction and, in the process, transformed the relationship between art, memory, and society.

Celebrate one of Broadway’s true icons with this legendary theatrical event! Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends is an irresistible celebration of the master himself, with a company headlined by none other than Tony Award® winners Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga. Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends comes to Broadway from London’s West End, where it earned a bevy of 5-star raves and was hailed by The Times as “unmissable musical theatre.”

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie radically reimagines the story of European porcelain through a feminist lens. When porcelain arrived in early modern Europe from China, it led to the rise of chinoiserie, a decorative style that encompassed Europe’s fantasies of the East and fixations on the exotic, along with new ideas about women, sexuality, and race. This exhibition explores how this fragile material shaped both European women’s identities and racial and cultural stereotypes around Asian women. Shattering the illusion of chinoiserie as a neutral, harmless fantasy, Monstrous Beauty adopts a critical glance at the historical style and its afterlives, recasting negative terms through a lens of female empowerment. Bringing together nearly 200 historical and contemporary works spanning from 16th-century Europe to contemporary installations by Asian and Asian American women artists, Monstrous Beauty illuminates chinoiserie through a conceptual framework that brings the past into active dialog with the present. In demand during the 1700s as the embodiment of Europe’s fantasy of the East, porcelain accumulated strong associations with female taste over its complex history. Fragile, delicate, and sharp when broken, it became a resonant metaphor for women, who became the protagonists of new narratives around cultural exchange, consumption, and desire.

In her first solo museum exhibition, Whitney Claflin (American, b.1983) features a focused selection of works tracing her distinctive approach to painting and ongoing engagement with notions of infatuation, misrecognition, and waywardness. The exhibition includes over twenty new and recent paintings, which careen between subjects and styles ranging from lyrical abstractions and breezy sketches to snippets of text, renditions of logos, and scraps of mass-produced textiles. Following the associative logic of a mixtape or poem, they express transient states of intensity. References and subcultural symbols—such as nods to 1970s flower-power paraphernalia, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, beloved New York bars, and the late-90s DIY scene of her teens in Providence, Rhode Island—suffuse her work with varying degrees of legibility. In addition to paintings, the exhibition also includes drawing, photography, video, and sculptural interventions, highlighting Claflin’s multifaceted approach.

Ramin Karimloo, Jinkx Monsoon, and David Hyde Pierce lead the crew in Pirates! The Penzance Musical, this must-see Roundabout reimagining of The Pirates of Penzance. Scott Ellis (Doubt; Kiss Me, Kate) directs and Warren Carlyle (Harmony; Kiss Me, Kate) choreographs with a hilarious new adaptation by Rupert Holmes (The Mystery of Edwin Drood), musical direction by Joseph Joubert (Caroline, or Change), and orchestrations by Joubert and Daryl Waters (Memphis). Gilbert & Sullivan’s pirate ship docks in New Orleans in this jazzy-bluesy vision of the crowd-pleasing classic, in an outrageously clever romp sizzling with Caribbean rhythms and French Quarter flair. With the tongue-twisting Major-General, the rabble-rousing Pirate King, newly-imagined young lovers, daring daughters, footloose pirates and fleet-footed police, there's a shipload of musical comedy delights on board to dazzle first-timers and G&S aficionados alike.

Upsilon Gallery presents an illuminating dual exhibition of works by Alice Baber (b.1928 – d.1982) and Paul Jenkins (b.1923 – d.2012), two towering figures in Postwar Abstraction whose intertwined lives and creative practices helped shape the trajectory of Abstract Expressionism.

The exhibition is drawn from the Museum’s collection, as well as through key loans from organizations including: Institute of Jazz Studies, Louis Armstrong House Museum & Archives, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, Celia Cruz Foundation, Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Centro), Royal House of LaBeija, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Remix⟷Culture, CUNY Center for Dominican Studies, Apollo Theater, Karla Flórez School of Dance, Think!Chinatown, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, Brooklyn Contra, and private lenders such as Rubén Blades, DJ Rekha, Judy Santos, Hellotones, and many more.

For the 2025 Roof Garden Commission, Jennie C. Jones (born 1968, Cincinnati, Ohio) will produce Ensemble. Only her second outdoor sculptural installation, the project will explore the sonic potential of stringed instruments as well as their formal possibilities. In the artist's unique response to modernism, these acoustic sculptures propose the line of the string as a proxy for art history, unbroken and continuous. In her paintings, sculptures, works on paper, installations, and audio compositions, Jones uses sound to respond to the legacy of minimalism and to modernism itself. Drawing on her immersion in Black improvisation and avant-garde music, she deploys sound and listening as important conceptual elements of her practice, from the acoustic fiberglass panels she affixes to canvas, which absorb sound and affect the acoustic properties of the environment, to the lines and bars she creates through her compositions that refer to elements of musical notation. Her work across media offers new possibilities for minimalist abstraction, challenging how—and by whom—it is produced.

This spring, the Guggenheim Museum’s iconic rotunda will fill Rashid Johnson’s Anxious Men, spray-painted text works, large-scale sculptures, films, and more in a highly anticipated mid-career exhibition. Rashid Johnson: Poems for a Deep Thinker will bring together nearly 90 works that showcase the Chicago-born, New York-based artist’s wide-ranging practice, exploring themes ranging from history and literature to black pop culture and music.

Mike King is America’s most prolific gig poster artist. What began as a means of promoting his own bands’ shows in the late 1970s gradually morphed into a full-time specialty in the art of the eye-catching concert poster. Today, there are few major venues or bands that have not worked with him—his imagery has saturated into the tapestry of American music culture, appearing on album covers, t-shirts, and, most importantly, posters. The posters in this exhibition are a mere slice of a much larger visual pie—a taste of some of Mike’s rarest posters from a thirty-year spread within his ongoing career. They highlight shifts in both the available technology for making posters, from fully analog to digital, as well as how the function of gig posters has evolved from advertisements to collectible merchandise. Rather than being presented strictly chronologically, each section focuses on Mike’s process for creating the paste-up or digital file necessary to produce each type of poster.

Sargent is one of the greatest painters of the early 20th century, on par with Whistler. This exhibition, co-hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musee d'Orsay, brings together more than 90 works by Sargent, focusing on his time in France. In 1874, the 18-year-old Sargent arrived in Paris as a student. In the mid-1880s, his portrait "Madame X" was a great success at the Paris Salon. This was the peak of Sargent's creation in Paris and also the highlight of the exhibition.

A large art project called Day's End now stands in the Hudson River near Pier 52. Created by David Hammond, it's made of slender steel pipes and pays tribute to artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who transformed an abandoned shed on the same pier in 1975. The sculpture changes with the light, connecting to the history of the waterfront as a shipping hub and a gathering place for the gay community. It took seven years to complete the installation, and it's now open to the public for free. The Whitney Museum collaborated with the Hudson River Park Trust on this project, and they will work together on a maintenance plan. To celebrate its completion, the Whitney offers free admission on May 16, and there will be family workshops throughout the day. You can find Day's End at Hudson River Park, across from the Whitney Museum, on the southern edge of the new Gansevoort Peninsula, where it will remain permanently.

Experience this good musical. The denizens of the Kit Kat Club have created a sanctuary inside Broadway’s August Wilson Theatre, where artists and performers, misfits and outsiders rule the night. Step inside their world. This is Berlin. Relax. Loosen up. Be yourself.

Edra Soto (b. 1971, Puerto Rico) explores the relationship between our private, interior lives and shared public history and culture. Graft is the latest in an ongoing series of installations based on rejas, wrought iron screens frequently seen outside homes in Puerto Rico. Rejas often feature repeating geometric motifs that can be traced to West Africa’s Yoruba symbol systems, in contrast to the Spanish architecture celebrated in official Puerto Rican tourism. Graft investigates how Puerto Rican cultural memory often masks the Black heritage of the island as folklore.

For the 2024 Genesis Facade Commission, South Korean artist Lee Bul (born 1964, Yeongju, based in Seoul) has created four new sculptures that combine figurative and abstract elements. The Genesis Facade Commission: Lee Bul,Long Tail Halois the artist’s first major project in the United States in more than twenty years and the fifth in the series of contemporary commissions for The Met Fifth Avenue’s facade niches. With a career that spans four decades, Lee is widely recognized as the preeminent artist from South Korea. She is known for her sophisticated use of both highly industrial and labor-intensive materials, incorporating artisanal practices as well as technological advancements into her work. Her sculptures, often evoking bodily forms that are at once classical and futuristic, address the aspirations and disillusions that come with progress. The Genesis Facade Commission is part of The Met’s series of contemporary commissions in which the Museum invites artists to create new works of art, establishing a dialogue between the artist’s practice, The Met collection, the physical Museum, and The Met’s audiences.

This groundbreaking exhibition explores the everyday clothing of ordinary women, from worn-out housecoats to psychedelic micro miniskirts and modern suits to the uniforms of fast-food workers. On view in the Joyce B. Cowin Women’s History Gallery and featuring objects from Smith College’s Historical Costume Collection on display for the first time in a museum, the exhibition traces how women’s roles have changed and evolved across race and class over the decades. Each garment holds a rich story about the women who wore it and made it, the materials used, and the context of place and time. Whether homemade or ready-made, many of the garments on display are modest and inexpensive, rarely preserved or displayed in a museum setting. Some are one-of-a-kind pieces; others are examples of clever makeshift pieces, and many were influenced by the popular styles and trends of their day. Visitors to Real Clothes, Real Lives will learn about the "real" women who worked and dressed in America for two centuries.

Featuring 25 site-specific, newly commissioned installations, Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial explores design’s role in shaping the physical and emotional realities of home across the United States, US Territories, and Tribal Nations. The exhibition is the seventh offering in the museum’s Design Triennial series, which was established in 2000 to address the most urgent topics of the time through the lens of design.

The exhibition “Tintoretto, The Power of Opposites” is a significant cultural event taking place in Domodossola from November 8, 2024, to June 1, 2025. This immersive and digital experience delves into the art of Jacopo Tintoretto, one of the masters of the Venetian Renaissance, offering an unmissable opportunity for art lovers and those eager to deepen their understanding of this extraordinary artist.

Photography has played a key role in structuring systems of power in society, including those related to crime and punishment. This exhibition presents immersive contemporary installations by the artist Jesse Krimes (American, b. 1982) alongside nineteenth-century photographs from The Met collection by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, who developed the first modern system of criminal identification before the adoption of fingerprinting. Krimes’s image-based installations, made over the course of his six-year incarceration, reflect the ingenuity of an artist working without access to traditional materials. Employing prison-issued soap, hair gel, playing cards, and newspaper he created works of art that seek to disrupt and recontextualize the circulation of photographs in the media. Displayed at The Met in dialogue with Bertillon, whose pioneering method paired anthropomorphic measurements with photographs to produce the present-day mug shot, Krimes’s work raises questions about the perceived neutrality of our systems of identification and the hierarchies of social imbalance they create and reinscribe. An artist for whom collaboration and activism are vital, Krimes founded the Center for Art and Advocacy to highlight the talent and creative potential among individuals who have experienced incarceration and to support and improve outcomes for formerly incarcerated artists.

Based on the 1960 film by Roger Corman and featuring a book by Howard Ashman, music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Ashman, Little Shop follows meek plant store attendant Seymour, his co-worker crush Audrey, her sadistic dentist of a boyfriend and the man-eating plant that threatens them and the world as we know it.