With titles like a quaint interior decoration magazine, “Passionate Patronage,” “Mindfully Minimal,” and “Armed with Art,” it is clear that Sheri Warshauer’s paintings are patronizing the lifestyle she documents.

An embroidered scroll emanating from a fat papier-mâché kitten, a pop-up dungeon diorama, phone books twisted and turned into spiral waves, a flipbook of armpits bound in dirty tee-shirt cotton.

In the small back room of Leadbased, the artist-in-residence stands against the wall, paintbrush poised in its prosthetic hand, admiring four of its latest abstract landscape paintings.

If nothing else, Counter Culture is a clever solution to the transitional state that the New Museum—along with most museums—is in: it is an effort to find a middle ground between the new $20 admission at MoMA and the Star Wars exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum.

"When you’re in a city like New York you have to think of all the sounds like a symphony or else you go a bit crazy," warns Janet Cardiff at the beginning of her latest audio walk, "Her Long Black Hair," taking place this summer in Central Park.

The hot summer day that I visited The Free Library, Lou Reed’s cool voice filled the room, the hip gallery attendant was napping on a beanbag among books, and hanging plants were scattered around the room enjoying the gentle breeze of an industrial fan.

This modest show in the front room of Smack Mellon is easy to pass by, and after a closer look this effect is fitting.

Most of the projects in Shishaldin’s Untimely Career Retrospective were initiated as a quest for spirituality or transcendence within major cultural institutions.

A photograph of blood splattered in a sink greets you upon entering the Riviera gallery. A tube of white makeup rests on the side of the sink along with a dirty bottle of red liquid.

As part of 65 Hope Street Gallery’s visiting curator series, Eddie Martinez commissioned thirty-eight fine artists, commercial designers, and graffiti artists to make their own versions of Russian nesting dolls. The structure of these dolls— something that opens to reveal a smaller version of itself— was used as the conceptual point of departure for the show, which explored variations within a collective.