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

Szara (1965), the feminine form of “gray,” in Polish, is the earliest work on view in this slender showcase of eight relatively small, sometimes minor pieces from different points in Magdalena Abakanowicz’s otherwise vast and marvelous career. Typical of her work from the ’60s and ’70s, Szara is made from sisal and horsehair—but as my friend, art historian Dorota Biczel, pointed out to me, less typical is its painterly approach, with a clear figure-ground relationship (natural fibers making the ground, fibers died black and gray making the “figure,” a glitchy abstract ovoid marred by woven seams). The ebony horsehair is bundled into ponytails cascading down its surface, begging to be pulled. In later works, like Vieux Rouge (1983), it’s all ground, or maybe all figure—the piece is entirely colored the deep reddish-orange of dried blood, with gashes through its surface on either side of a magnificent mane of projecting fibers protecting (or presenting) the vulva-like seam in its center.

Abakanowicz, who survived the war and Soviet rule, is famous for her textile works, especially her massive, swooping Abakans. She came to textiles to escape the demands of Soviet realism—a woman-coded craft, weaving avoided suspicion, allowed for experimentation, as no one cared to look too closely. The joke ended up being on the authorities, because by the 1970s she had become a wild success, exhibiting widely and internationally. Abakanowicz has said her works are about “ancient sensations and feelings,” history and “humanity prior to history,” and “the problems of mankind.” This little show, which also includes examples of the artist’s eerie figurative sculpture, seems to be specifically about one of mankind’s greatest problems: woman. —Ania Szremski