Renaissance Venice	Beer Here	Ellsworth Kelly
Art of Another Kind	Compass	Oskar Fischinger
Ghosts in the Machine	Quay Brothers	Jean-Michel Othoniel
Warm Up at MoMA PS1

Culling nearly four score artworks and related items—from drawings and sketches to maps, books and letters—this choice exhibition aims to portray Venice’s 16th-century Golden Age through formally representational as well as religious, literary and political lenses. Should that not suffice to entice, a few of the names on the roster might: Bordone, Carpaccio, Lotto, Tintoretto, Tiziano. A nice complement to the current show of northern Italian paintings at The Met, to wit.
Through September 23

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Renaissance Venice: Drawings from the Morgan, at The Morgan Library & Museum

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Everyone in the city who loves beer and knows a thing or two about it is aware that today’s beloved—and oh, oh really, oh how dearly beloved—craft brews and seasonally curated taps are but the most recent manifestations of this fair town’s love affair with ales, porters, lagers and the like. Yet it’s more than an affair of the heart in the form of the liver. It’s one that has had lasting and far-reaching socioeconomic, technological and political ramifications as well. Wait, maybe that is just like affairs of the heart and liver. Anyway, this show will teach us all a beery thing or two. See you there. Cheers!
May 25-September 2

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Beer Here: Brewing New York’s History, at The New-York Historical Society

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Kelly, who came to prominence as the cleanest, most ascetic of the New York abstract painters of the 1950s, is known for his Minimalist and Color-Field works, which skate right up to the edge of a kind of self-erasure in deference to the pure, flat properties of color and shape. But this career-spanning exhibition, which gets underway shortly after his 89th birthday, arranges something like Kelly’s b-sides: the much looser, figurative drawings he’s long made in communion with nature.
June 5-September 3

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Ellsworth Kelly Plant Drawings, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

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In which the Gugg celebrates its early canonization of the postwar abstract movements that defined the decade and a half before the museum opened. They’ll be drawing heavily from their own collection, both for New Yorkers like Pollock and de Kooning, and for international fellow-travelers like Yves Klein and Isamu Noguchi.
June 8-September 12

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Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949–1960

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Four galleries, housed by four South Street Seaport counting houses built during the Port of New York’s early 19th-century heyday, spotlight holdings from the American Folk Art Museum, which were inspired by the promise of the shipping trade during America’s great era of expansion and (self-) discovery: escape and wonder, commerce and weather.
June 20-October 5

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Compass: Folk Art in Four Directions, at The South Street Seaport Museum

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In which the Whitney recreates one of the first pieces of film-as-visual art, a three-screen projection first performed in 1926. Fischinger, who was active in the Weimar-era avant-garde, incorporated color projections and abstract film; he was among the first generation of artists to treat celluloid as a moving canvas, and cinema as a synthesis of color, movement, light and time.
June 28-October 28

This three-story show, spanning half a century of artworks and objects, traces our relationship with machines and other sorts of meta-humanoid forms, from hardware to virtual realities to the cloud. Expect dystopic sculptures, automated video works, resuscitated analog, Op Art, and a series of eight site-specific performances by Kraftwerk in the museum’s atrium. Or, wait, no. Definitely expect abundant technological anachronisms and cinematic references, intended or not.
July 18 - October 7

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Ghosts in the Machine, at the New Museum

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This exhibition of a wide range of multi-media works by the filmmaking twins Timothy and Stephen Quay will be enlightening for both fans and non-fans—or not-yet fans—alike, for the extent of their production embraces more than merely narrative films. Prepare to see their interventions in spheres such as dance, opera, drama and concert performances. And prepare to be at least slightly, albeit pleasurably, overwhelmed. The exhibition will be accompanied by a film retrospective, naturally.
August 12-January 7

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Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets, at MoMA

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A career-spanning retrospective of the French sculptor, whose sculptures and installations, often made with glass bubbles, evoke architecture and jewelry, and are suggestive of transformation, via dress-up and other more comprehensive modes of fantasy, in ways that resonate with contemporary issues of desire and belonging.
August 17-December 2

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Jean-Michel Othoniel: My Way, at The Brooklyn Museum

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MoMA’s hip, outerborough younger sibling expands its performance purview to encompass sound artists, experimental musicians, and DJs with enough of a coherent aesthetic to rock a museum space. In addition to PS1 director and noted Lady Gaga fan Klaus Bisenbach, the curators include Pitchfork’s Brandon Stosuy, and label dudes from DFA, XL and True Panther.
Saturdays, July 7- September 8

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Warm Up at MoMA PS1

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