An installation view of "Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold,"" which opens at the Met Breuer on Sunday. May 1, 2019.

New Exhibitions Announcements

'SIAH ARMAJANI: FOLLOW THIS LINE' at the Met Breuer (opens June 2). Born in Iran, Armajani has been living in the United States since 1960. This retrospective ranges from work he did as a teenage activist in Tehran to models of the many public sculptures he has produced across America over the past five decades. It introduces us to a sharp social thinker, a wry (and increasingly melancholic) metaphysician, a plain-style visual poet and, above all, an artist-ethicist. “Bridge Over Tree,” Armajani's wonderful large-scale sculpture presented by Public Art Fund at Brooklyn Bridge Park (on the Empire Fulton Ferry Lawn through Sept. 29) to coincide with the Met show, is well timed for our present era of sundering moral confusion and offers ways forward from it. (Holland Cotter)

'JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT' at the Brant Foundation (opens May 15). The opening of the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in the East Village, with an exhibition of nearly 70 works by Basquiat created from 1980 to 1987, serves as a fitting temporary shrine for this Brooklyn-born painter, who became a global sensation in the early 1980s and died at 27 of a heroin overdose. Basquiat sprayed poetic, enigmatic graffiti on walls in downtown Manhattan before moving to canvas, dated Madonna before she was famous and made paintings with Andy Warhol. Part of a group of Neo-Expressionist painters who were largely rejected by critics, he was embraced by an influential audience and a surging art market and ended up creating a brand of African-American history painting that still resonates today. Tickets to the exhibition have sold out, but you can add your name to the wait list by sending a request to ticketsnyc@brantfoundation.org.

'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image. The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program “Sam and Friends” before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft-faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show,” though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace-and-love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Jason Farago)
718-784-0077, movingimage.us

'FRIDA KAHLO: APPEARANCES CAN BE DECEIVING' at the Brooklyn Museum (opens June 12). This is not exactly an exhibition of Kahlo's art — it contains just 11 paintings, from compelling self-portraits to ghastly New Age kitsch — but an evocation of an artistic life through her elegant Oaxacan blouses and skirts, not to mention the corsets and spinal braces she wore after a crippling traffic accident. Do her outfits have the weight of art, or are they just so much biographical flimflam? Your answer may vary depending on your degree of Fridamania, but the woven shawls and color-saturated long skirts here, as well as gripping photographs of the artist by Carl Van Vechten, Imogen Cunningham, Manuel Álvarez Bravo and other great shutterbugs, suggest Kahlo's real accomplishment was a Duchampian extension of her art far beyond the easel, into her home, her fashion and her public relationships. (Farago) 
718-638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org

'THE LONG RUN' at the Museum of Modern Art (through May 5). The museum upends its cherished Modern narrative of ceaseless progress by mostly young (white) men. Instead we see works by artists 45 and older who have just kept on keeping on, regardless of attention or reward, sometimes saving the best for last. Art here is an older person's game, a pursuit of a deepening personal vision over innovation. Winding through 17 galleries, the installation is alternatively visually or thematically acute and altogether inspiring. (Roberta Smith)
212-708-9400, moma.org

'JOAN MIRÓ: BIRTH OF THE WORLD' at the Museum of Modern Art (through June 15). Drawn mostly from MoMA's unrivaled Miró collection, this fabulous exhibition is best when tracing the artist's brilliant early twists on Modernism and their swift ascent to “The Birth of the World,” a 1927 masterpiece that presaged the drips and stains of radical painting two decades hence. Unappreciated in its time, it was barely exhibited until 1968. (Smith)
212-708-9400, moma.org

'MONUMENTAL JOURNEY: THE DAGUERREOTYPES OF GIRAULT DE PRANGEY' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through May 12). This exhibition is a buffed jewel. In 1842, just a couple of years after Louis Daguerre unveiled the world's first practical camera, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, a French aristocrat with a yen for experimental technology, set off on a three-year road trip, lugging a 100-pound kit as he took the world's first photographs of Athens, Cairo, Constantinople and Jerusalem. More than 100 of Girault de Prangey's precise daguerreotypes glisten here under pin lights, and his systematic photos of Islamic architecture, in particular, express how the new technology of photography could flit between art and science, and would soon become a tool of colonial rule. Girault de Prangey's daguerreotypes were little seen before 2003, when his descendants put them on the market; their discovery was a landmark in the history of early photography, and this show is too. (Farago)
212-535-7710, meuseum.org

'THE ORCHID SHOW: SINGAPORE at the New York Botanical Garden (through April 28). This 17th annual orchid extravaganza features the natural species and hybridized sensations of Southeast Asia — upward of 70 percent of the display in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. Thousands of them, in hundreds of varieties and every conceivable — and inconceivable — shape, size and color. The partners on this show are Singapore Botanic Gardens, whose National Orchid Garden has the largest collection in the world, and Singapore's Gardens by the Bay, a green-themed entertainment attraction where the wedding party finale in “Crazy Rich Asians” was filmed. There are two major attractions: a pair of supertrees — 18-foot-tall steel armatures in the trunklike, canopied shape of actual trees — and a promenade of arches, dripping with orchids, that leads to the conservatory's main dome. The colors move through a spectrum from yellow — Oncidium ‘Goldiana,' or the “dancing lady” orchid — to pink to darker, hotter shades. It is like walking under a rainbow. (William L. Hamilton)
718-817-8700, nybg.org

'SCENES FROM THE COLLECTION' at the Jewish Museum. After a surgical renovation to its grand pile on Fifth Avenue, the Jewish Museum has reopened its third-floor galleries with a rethought, refreshed display of its permanent collection, which intermingles 4,000 years of Judaica with modern and contemporary art by Jews and gentiles alike — Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and the excellent young Nigerian draftswoman Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The works are shown in a nimble, nonchronological suite of galleries, and some of its century-spanning juxtapositions are bracing; others feel reductive, even dilettantish. But always, the Jewish Museum conceives of art and religion as interlocking elements of a story of civilization, commendably open to new influences and new interpretations. (Farago)
212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org

'TOLKIEN: MAKER OF MIDDLE-EARTH' at the Morgan Library & Museum (through May 12). J. R. R. Tolkien did more than write books like “The Hobbit” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy; he invented an alternate reality, complete with its own geography, languages, religion and an era-spanning history. This exhibition of his artwork, letters, drafts and other material reminds visitors that the stories Tolkien wrote, however impressive, represent only a fraction of his efforts, and it highlights his unparalleled ability to create an immersive experience using only words and pictures. After a visit you, too, may find yourself believing in Middle-earth and the hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs and wizards that live there. (Peter Libbey)

'T. REX: THE ULTIMATE PREDATOR' at the American Museum of Natural History (through Aug. 9, 2020). Everyone's favorite 18,000-pound prehistoric killer gets the star treatment in this eye-opening exhibition, which presents the latest scientific research on T. rex and also introduces many other tyrannosaurs, some discovered only this century in China and Mongolia. T. rex evolved mainly during the Cretaceous Period to have keen eyes, spindly arms and massive conical teeth, which could bear down on prey with the force of a U-Haul truck; the dinosaur could even swallow whole bones, as affirmed here by a kid-friendly display of fossilized excrement. The show mixes 66-million-year-old teeth with the latest 3-D prints of dino bones, and also presents new models of T. rex as a baby, a juvenile and a full-grown annihilator. Turns out this most savage beast was covered with — believe it! — a soft coat of beige or white feathers. (Farago)
212-769-5100, amnh.org

'NARI WARD: WE THE PEOPLE' at the New Museum (through May 26). The persistent and liberating message in Ward's sculpture and room-size installations is that art can be made from virtually anything. In this midcareer retrospective, anything means old carpets, plastic bags, bottles, zippers, bed springs, keys and furniture. Although the exhibition includes a number of large installations, Ward is best as a creator of curious and discrete sculptures, ones that remind us that our world is filled with potentially magical objects. We enter museums expecting to be transformed, but if we shift our perspective and look around us, we'll see that everyday life is really just art waiting to happen. (Schwendener)
212-219-1222, newmuseum.org

'THE WORLD BETWEEN EMPIRES: ART AND IDENTITY IN THE ANCIENT MIDDLE EAST' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through June 23). The Met excels at epic-scale archaeological exhibitions, and this is a prime example. It brings together work made between 100 B.C. and A.D. 250 in what we now know as Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. In the ancient world, all were in the sphere of two competing superpowers — Rome to the west and Parthia to the east — and though imperial influence was strong, it was far from all-determining. Each of the subject territories selectively grafted it onto local traditions to create distinctive new grass-roots cultural blends. Equally important, the show addresses the fate of art from the past in a politically fraught present. (Cotter)
212-535-7710, metmuseum.org