VVVIDE

The sixth in an intermittent series of Studio Museum shows featuring young Black artists and all titled with words beginning with “f,” Fade is the most spiritual installment. It goes to the bath house, the beach, fiction, and the family photo album, turning up ghosts, labyrinths, and saints. The theme is overdetermined by the inclusion of blurred photographs, washy abstractions, and Lola Ayisha Ogbara’s installation of ceramic kola nuts each titled Forget Me Knot (2023–2025). (Kola nuts, a caffeine-rich stimulant, keep you from “fading.”)

Antonio Darden’s video Untitled (Perform 2) (2026), which loops a short clip from a Luther Vandross concert at high volume in the main gallery, gives the impression that the late singer, nicknamed “The Velvet Voice,” now can’t stop wailing. The piece ought to have headphones. The sound steals focus from the exhibition’s substantial pleasures, such as Chiffon Thomas’ Epilogues of the Disremembered I (2026), a wing-like form roughly cut into the wall and filled with embossed sheet music for spirituals; Jesús Hilario-Reyes’ A River Opens Up Into Many Windows (2025), a steel latticework evoking medieval church architecture; Utē Petit’s drawing In Red Bed Country (2023), depicting a human figure curled up crying beside a bloodied deer; and Kiah Celeste’s Sink Belly (2025), where maroon spandex stretched over a frame suggests a full stomach and, in place of a belly button, there is an open drain. Almost a goddess, this riveting body seems designed to ingest and carry away unwanted fluids.

  —Marcus Civin

It’s a heart-racing summer of sports in New York City, and for the next three estival months, spectators can embody the joy by turning into athletes themselves, sending balls flying with a flick of the wrist as part of the Public Art Fund’s Between Tides exhibition. At the surf-only (alas!) Beach 67 in the Rockaways, artists Moko Fukuyama, Ilana Harris-Babou, Las Hermanas Iglesias, Carlos H. Matos, Amalia Pica, and SUPERFLEX have installed captivating custom-made ping-pong tables that even the most casual of sports enthusiasts can compete on.

When I visited on a sleepy, steaming Tuesday, a buff surfer bro and his girlfriend tried to take a turn on Las Hermanas Iglesias’ DiMeLo, only for the dude to throw down his paddle and complain, “This is impossible to play on!” Too bad he gave up so quickly—he would have discovered the table is actually a living instrument, one side embedded with drums, the other with tuned metal bars, so that each ping and pong of the ball can elicit beats and melodies. Good thing he didn’t try out SUPERFLEX’S Fish Ping-Pong—this gorgeous, brutalist coral-pink stone table is penetrated with large holes that threaten to devour the plastic balls. But as frustrating as the structure may be for humans, it was designed more charitably for sea creatures, who, if the sculpture were to be plunged into the waters, would find it a pleasing, nurturing habitat, according to the artists. All six tables are by turns fun and funny, sometimes mysterious, sometimes menacing, and make for a truly exuberant experience of public art.

  —Ania Szremski

Angels, dragons, and unicorns, of course, but also: peanut-men, potato-men, snake-women, lima-bean warriors, puffer fish–chickens, lion-eagles, plumed serpents, monk faces growing out of curling vines. In the gasp-eliciting Creatures of Myth and Imagination at the Cloisters, ivory, gold, silver, feathers, stone, paint, glass, and ceramics are among the materials transubstantiated into the most fantastical hybrid forms in completely different historical traditions (the show includes objects, from the larger-than-life to the tiny, made in Europe and the Americas almost entirely pre-contact, from about 500 to 1500 CE). But on both sides of the ocean, they tended to serve similar purposes: of metaphor and mythmaking, of proving devotion and illustrating power, of powerfully demonstrating the extraordinary capacities of their makers.

These wildly inventive creatures could often cross between human and spiritual realms in a way plain old humans could only dream of. See, in an upstairs gallery, the incredible and fabulous Tzinacantecuhtli, or bat lord, from central Mexico, dating about 800–900, a ceramic-and-slip humanoid figure taller than an NBA player with a bat head and leafy nose who could travel from the underworld to the heavens. Or, downstairs, the graphic stone depiction of the Aztec earth deity Tlatecuhtli, who could swallow the sun.

Wandering in and out of the exhibition, pausing to visit the Cloisters’ lovely terrace gardens, and then having a smoke perched on a stone wall outside, where I saw a greedy woodpecker and a curious rabbit, reinforced what these objects had most in common, perhaps: their expression of the universal human longing for the plants and the animals, to magically transcend our own limited human consciousness through them, to feel less alone among our own stupid boring species.

  —Ania Szremski

Peter Hujar’s work has never looked more cinematic or attentive to everyday life than it does in this show. The roughly one hundred contact sheets on view feel like silent filmstrips ready for reanimation. In one from 1955, Daisy Aldan, the poet and Hujar’s high school teacher, reads from a book and extends her arms, as if attempting to illustrate the text. Another from 1972, a nude identified in Hujar’s notebook only as “Andrew, an English boy,” shows a soft-shouldered young man seated, then standing contrapposto, then scratching his back—attention given to his shifting gestures, value achieved in the sum of the parts rather than in a definitive image. These contact sheets are not quite artworks. They’re not exactly tools either. Akin to most programming at the Morgan, they’re more like manuscripts or drafts of screenplays. What Hujar bracketed, circled, or check-marked on the contact sheets isn’t always better than the alternatives; often, it just indicates a particular direction. In 1974, for instance, trees in a forest took precedence over images of Andy Warhol reading the newspaper.

Hujar’s cityscapes and pastures, which critics have struggled to situate within his oeuvre, appear here as establishing shots for the episodic narratives unfolding elsewhere—John Waters in the crowd hanging out at Christopher Street Liberation Day in 1973; Fran Lebowitz waking up in New Jersey in 1974. What is typically onstage or off, on camera or off, or edited out, remains connected, intact, and satisfyingly in frame.

  —Marcus Civin