It is no secret that Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot (1926), the source text behind New York-based sculptor Covey Gong’s solo exhibition at SculptureCenter, presents a mythic and embellished vision of dynastic China. The opera’s narrative, in which a princess who poses riddles to vet suitors is bested at her own game, comes from Haft Peykar, an epic poem by the twelfth-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi. This was reworked into a short story by an eighteenth-century French orientalist and adapted for the stage in Germany in 1801 before making its way into the Italian composer’s imagination. Puccini never visited China; his posthumously-produced opera illustrates something akin to what artist Astria Suparak, in her ongoing critique of science fiction cinema, calls “Asian futures without Asians.” One need only to swap the word “futures” with “pasts” or “legends.”

The notion of crisis in its various manifestations—war, illness, addiction—appears throughout this collection of Schjeldahl’s final assignments for the New Yorker after his lung cancer diagnosis in 2019. Schjeldahl’s writing serves as a model for criticism in some ways and falls short in others.

The figures in Graham Little’s works on paper—sixteen of which are spread across four rooms at the FLAG Art Foundation—all appear to be posing in service of an external gaze, even those who are engrossed in reading, stretching, and pouring tea.

This latest collection resembles a scrapbook of still-fresh memories—miscellaneous, uneven, and indispensable. I wanted to spend time, alongside the author, focusing on the practices and legacies of figures like Hilton Als, Prince, Tala Madani, Kara Walker, Fred Moten, and Nayland Blake.

In her first US solo show, Lorenza Longhi casts a harsh fluorescent light on the fantasy-cloaked interiors of department stores. The exhibition takes its title, World of Yum Yum, from the essay “Glamour Wounds” by Rhonda Lieberman, in which the phrase is given as a moniker to the Chanel boutique where the writer suffers a vivid anxiety attack. “The symbolic efficacy of the staff and products as mocking accusers was such that I couldn’t have felt worse if Coco or Karl Lagerfeld himself were there looking at me,” Lieberman narrates, mid-spiral.

Featuring eleven essays and three transcripts from Rethinking Residencies Symposiums, the book examines residencies as networked entities uniquely positioned to address the evolving needs of artists and communities.

Curated by art historian Midori Yoshimoto and Japan Society’s Tiffany Lambert and Ayaka Iida, the exhibition surveys the transnational Fluxus network (1962–78) through the lenses of geography and gender, focusing on four members—Shiomi, Kubota, Yoko Ono, and Takako Saito—whose prolific output of performances, scores, and “anti-art” objects is enriched when considered in conjunction with their experiences as Japanese women in New York in the 1960s.

Despite the radicality of her practice in the context of twentieth-century modernism, Gego’s work has been largely overlooked in the US, an issue that the Guggenheim sought to redress in her first museum retrospective in New York. Building on a selection of nearly two-hundred sculptures, drawings, prints, textiles, and artist’s books, Gego: Measuring Infinity, curated by Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães and Pablo León de la Barra, attempts to summarize a rich and varied oeuvre through a spiraling procession of geometric constellations in the museum’s vertiginous rotunda.

In March 2019, designer and researcher Mindy Seu tweeted, “I’m creating a cyberfeminist index,” and shared a link to a spreadsheet she hoped would become a site of collaboration. As the spreadsheet grew to nearly seven hundred rows—at a time when info-activism and open-access libraries proved crucial to consciousness-raising in the context of global exigencies like the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests—Seu used the data to create an easy-to-search website, cyberfeminismindex.com. In January 2023, Seu again repackaged the data as a book, Cyberfeminism Index, this time hacking the strictures of academia by challenging the perceived primacy of printed matter over identical open-source content.

An anthology of six hybrid works that approaches translation as an act that occurs not only between languages but also between media and disciplines. Through this dual lens, fourteen contributors on four continents examine timely and thorny questions about the limitations of witness and testimony.

The sculptures, installations, films, and videos in Cuentos de cuentas/Accounts of Accounting, Zaccagnini’s first solo show in the US, contain similar anecdotes that are at once purposely naïve and endearing.