By Asa Page
Across all mediums, awe-inspiring works of art typically defy easy description. But for interdisciplinary artists, the task of classifying their art is even more difficult, as they often intentionally blur boundaries and ask audiences to come to their own conclusions. If you’re up to the challenge, here are five current or upcoming art installations in New York you might want to check out.
Museum of Modern Art in New York City | Photo: Colin W
1. Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum
Opening our list of art installations in New York: this new exhibition at the Whitney Museum through February 9th 2025 explores the groundbreaking artistry of dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey. It features an immersive video montage with looped recordings of Ailey’s performance work around a gallery presenting a broad range of archival materials from his life. Ailey’s work is placed in conversation with the works of many other BIPOC artists who were among his contemporaries, including visual artists working in painting, collage, photography, and sculpture. There will also be monthly live performances by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater based on Ailey’s original choreography, as well as a number of additional performances by choreographers working today.
2. Ralph Lemon’s Ceremonies Out of the Air at MoMA PS1
Opening November 14th 2024 and running through spring 2025, this exhibition features the work of interdisciplinary artist Ralph Lemon, who emerged as part of New York’s downtown scene in the 1990s. The exhibition will include a number of scheduled live performances that explore storytelling through movement inspired by postmodern dance, presented alongside galleries filled with drawings, photographs, sculpture, paintings, and video. Foregrounding the body as a site where history, emotion, and physicality meet, Lemon’s work asks not to be viewed but experienced.
3. Renée Green at Dia Beacon
Starting on March 7th 2025, multidisciplinary artist Renée Green will have her first major solo museum presentation in New York. Her work draws on Conceptual art strategies to call into question the boundaries between fact and fiction by juxtaposing a wide range of materials including archival, documentary, and literary fragments, as well as personal work, found ephemera and speculative narratives. The installation will also intentionally engage with color, sound, and language, featuring text-based fabric banners as well as audio and video recordings from Green’s oeuvre.
4. Otobong Nkanga’s Cadence at the Museum of Modern Art
Next in our survey of art installations in New York: open now through June 8th 2025, this installation by Nigerian-Belgian contemporary artist Otobong Nkanga addresses simultaneously the rhythms of ecological life cycles and social upheaval. It features immersive sound works, poems by the artist imprinted on ceramic tablets, and sculptures suspended throughout the space made with dyed ropes, hand-blown glass, and ceramic forms. Nkanga has exhibited her art around the world–from the Tate Modern to the Centre Pompidou and beyond–but this will be her first major solo exhibition in New York.
5. Jasmine Gregory’s Who Wants to Die for Glamour? at MoMA PS1
Open now through October 25th 2025, this exhibition includes a large-scale, site-specific installation that engages with timeless questions concerning image-making and display. Gregory’s work arranges her canvases into a breathtaking sculptural tableau combined with wine bottles, plastic bags, and studio waste. She appropriates language and imagery from a variety of luxury advertisements to question the complicated lineages of artistic patronage and preservation, while also considering the difficulties of producing art within hyper-saturated cultural landscapes.