Art: © Estate of Archibald John Motley Jr. All reserved rights 2023. Bridgeman Images. Image courtesy Hampton University.

The new season in art is awash in amazing shows in galleries and museums. The first third of 2024 will feature the world-building artist LaToya Ruby Frazier and a new look at the Met at an immense topic: the Harlem Renaissance. There will be both young artists and older talents like Stephen Shore exploring unfamiliar terrain, as well as superstar Cindy Sherman showing new work. Indulge!

Art: © 2023 LaToya Ruby Frazier, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone gallery

The MacArthur-winning artist-activist’s images of her hometown, Brandon, Pennsylvania; Flint, Michigan; and other Rust Belt sites of industrial waste, decay, and ecological poisoning give us everyday people in everyday existence fighting for their lives. In many of her photographs, we see Frazier’s family and the artist herself, some of whom have been made sick by living so close to industry. Behold this quietly revolutionary testament to our time, a hybrid form of Black feminist world-building.

Art: Laura Wheeler Waring Family Collection

With over 150 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, and ephemera made between the 1920s and ’40s, the Met gives us the glory that was the Harlem Renaissance, when Black art and life and creativity flowed through and burst out of this magnetic, mythologized neighborhood. We will see the forming of a new American aesthetic that has been seeding art and artists ever since and is now finally being seen as important and primary, as it always was. It is a river.

Art: Courtesy of the artist and CANADA, New York; Photo: Joe DeNardo

There is a look that might be called Canada Gallery: loud, funky, materialist, handmade, strange, ugly, poetic, and smart — and 83-year old Joan Snyder was Canada before it even existed. Her paintings look like quilts, with their many textured sections, but also like magic carpets for the ways they transport us.

Photo: Rob McKeever, Courtesy of Gagosian

Juliano-Villani, a petite stick of dynamite, seems to channel 100 types of energy at once. Her paintings are flat conglomerations of images, each painted meticulously and nearly searing the eyes with color. And her own gallery, O’Flaherty’s, on Avenue A is one of the hottest, craziest artistic spaces in New York.

Art: © Huma Bhabha, Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner

Bhabha’s rough-hewn, totemic sculptures depict demons, deities, and warning spirits. They are neo-archaic, bringing us into close contact with something primary, stripped-down, and somewhat terrifying.

Photo: © Cindy Sherman, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Our moment under the existential blade needs this show by one of the art world’s resident shamans. She will don guises, assume poses, and make faces, manipulating the optical feed of her camera and bending it to convey the danger and banality of our time.

Photo: © Stephen Shore, Courtesy of 303 Gallery, New York

Shore is the poet laureate of non-moments that loom large in the imagination. Whether it’s a desolate highway, a TV dinner, or a parking lot, his images turn even the grandest subjects into incidents and accidents.

Art: © Estate of Hannelore Baron, Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

This visionary artist, who was born in Germany in 1939 and fled to America thereafter, began making art later in life. Her small collages are powerful summonings of deeply felt emotions, conveying a mind set on fire by materials.