Hyperallergic's May 2025 guide to New York City art shows highlights 15 exhibitions, including a survey of Hawaiian Japanese-American artists from the Metcalf Chateau group at Ryan Lee Gallery, a retrospective of Malian photographer Seydou Keïta at the Brooklyn Museum, and Renée Green's multimedia project 'Secret' at Bortolami Gallery. The article also features Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's quietude-focused works, a meditation on grief and death, and a document of a city devastated by the AIDS crisis through portraits of inanimate objects, among other shows.
This guide matters because it curates a diverse range of politically and culturally resonant exhibitions that respond to contemporary suppression by governments, corporations, and culture. The shows offer revolutionary perspectives—from Keïta's chronicle of Mali's independence to Green's autoethnography of living in a modernist ruin—and provide audiences with art that is playful, cerebral, and feral, serving as a way through difficult times.