Art Shows to Give You an Eyeful This Summer
Seeing the arts is always a good choice for a Summer city sojourn.
When the cities empty out and it’s hot outside, there’s nothing quite like stepping into a cool and pristine art gallery space and feasting your eyes. We’ve found some shows you can pop into this summer while you’re out and about in the Northeast.
New York City
Saturn Return by Jared Freschman
Gotham, NYC’s female-owned, premium cannabis dispensary and concept store, who will present “Saturn Return” a debut solo exhibition by Jared Freschman this summer. The mission driven, arts and culture forward, legal cannabis dispensary will be showcasing Freschman’s work in their mezzanine-level gallery space now until August 1st, 2025.
Saturn Return references the astrological transit that people face in their late 20s and early 30s. In astrology, Saturn represents karma, structure, limitations, and perseverance. When Saturn returns to the place where it was when someone was born, individuals face karmic lessons, significant life changes, and increased responsibility.
Gotham Bowery 3 E 3rd St, New York, NY 10003
Now until August 1st, 2025
Give Them The Fantasy showcase by Design Dysphoria
Give Them The Fantasy showcase by Design Dysphoria, a queer designer-led exhibition of artists and designers, at Gotham’s Chelsea Gallery. The collaboration celebrates the intersection of design, identity, and play by translating the bold, tactile, and immersive aesthetics of the Design Dysphoria collective into physical objects and a space curated and led by queer voices.
With Give Them The Fantasy, Design Dysphoria crafted an immersive environment within Gotham’s Chelsea Gallery, drawing inspiration from influential queer films and the exploration of gender in video games and various art and design media. The featured vignettes showcase works from twenty-three artists including video, furniture, glass lighting fixtures, textile artwork, and interactive design objects by a majority of women, nonbinary, and trans designers and artists that seek to foster connections and a sense of belonging within the LGBTQIA+ community.
Gotham Chelsea 146 10th Ave, New York NY 10011
Now until August 1st, 2025
Alyssa Alexander presents Sonic Womb: Leaving Gender on the Dance Floor
Project for Empty Space’s Feminist FUTURES Fellow Alyssa Alexander proudly presents “Sonic Womb: Leaving Gender on the Dance Floor,” a two-part exhibition series.
Sonic Womb seeks to replicate the subterranean refuge of both the mythological underwater kingdom of Drexciya and the underground clubs of 1970’s New York City within two site-specific installations by Billy and Jesús Hilario-Reyes. The second installation, on atmospherics by Jesús Hilario-Reyes, takes up “edging” or “edge worlds” as a framework for understanding both the ecstatic potentiality of the club and the adaptive nature of the mangrove—spaces where “the bounds of the individual and the environment are indistinguishable.” These connections are not to make synonymous but rather seek a dialectic or relational poetics—a tinted mirror or a reflection in rippled waters where we see erotic joy burst out of entanglement.
For the duration of his presentation, the exhibition space will be partially engulfed in the dense fog synonymous with clubs and performance spaces as both a world-building tool and a means of further obfuscating individual identity.
PES Futures, 128 Baxter Street New York, NY 10013
Now until August 16th, 2025
Sag Harbor, New York
Superposition Gallery presents Mami Wata Group Exhibition
Superposition Gallery is presenting the first ever contemporary collection at the Eastville Heritage House Museum in historical Sag Harbor. Mami Wata is a group presentation curated by Storm Ascher featuring Derrick Adams, Patrick Alston, Jessica Taylor Bellamy, Sanford Biggers, Layo Bright, Michael A. Butler, Alisa Sikelianos-Carter, Renée Cox, Damien Davis, Ellon Gibbs, Ashanté Kindle, Audrey Lyall, Eilen Itzel Mena, Ludovic Nkoth, Tariku Shiferaw, and Khari Turner.
With a multitude of celebratory moments, a total of eight works included in the exhibition will also be donated to the institution on behalf of The Hamptons Black Arts Council founded by Storm Ascher to initiate the newly established “Hamptons Black Arts Council Contemporary Art Collection.” A labor of love and true intentions, Ascher is working closely with Executive Director Dr. Georgette Grier-Key to ensure lasting legacy for Black folks in site specific spaces reclaimed for Black history such as this.
139 Hampton Street Sag Harbor, NY 11963
Now until November 30th, 2025
Newark, New Jersey
When Civilizations Heal by Helina Metaferia
When Civilizations Heal is an interdisciplinary project that imagines the exhibition space as an anthropological site, creating artifacts as art objects, assembled from archives of the last sixty years of activism, with an emphasis on the role that women-identifying people of color have played. Working across a diverse range of mediums, the artist brings together collage, sculpture, printmaking, video performances, and installation as methods for visually articulating the power of organizing as a political, communal, and artistic act.
800 Broad Street, Newark, NJ
Now until August 17th, 2025
The Ocean Doesn’t Recognize Tears by Andrea Chung
Andrea Chung’s use of actively dissolving sugar that she casts into intricate sculptures pays homage to the Caribbean’s most popular product export during slavery, more specifically through the Atlantic Slave Trade. Chung’s work is research-heavy, diving into patterns and themes that have shown up throughout history at this time; migration involving perishable and precious materials, post-colonial countries, and the human body.
110 Edison Place, Newark, NJ 07102
Now until August 17th, 2025
