1. Jared Madere at The Whitney Museum of American Art is open until January 3, 2016.
Jared Madere (b. 1986), an emerging artist based in New York, will receive his first solo exhibition in the United States at the Whitney, creating a new installation in the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Gallery on the first floor, which is free to the public. Madere primarily creates installation-based works featuring disparate materials such as salt, flowers, foodstuffs, and plastic tarps that are assembled and aggregated in a manner that insists on their material connections to society, economics, industry, and human emotion. For Madere, the meanings and associations of objects are never stripped away—floral arrangements can point to longing or sadness and a burnt coat is imbued with isolation and dejection.
2. Greater New York is open at MoMA PS1 until March 7, 2016.
MoMA PS1 presents the fourth iteration of its landmark exhibition series, begun as a collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art in 2000. Recurring every five years, the exhibition has traditionally showcased the work of emerging artists living and working in the New York metropolitan area. Greater New York arrives in a city and art community that has changed significantly since the first version of the survey. With the rise of a robust commercial art market and the proliferation of art fairs, opportunities for younger artists in the city have grown alongside a burgeoning interest in artists who may have been overlooked in the art histories of their time. Bringing together emerging and more established artists, the exhibition occupies MoMA PS1’s entire building with over 400 works by 157 artists, including programs of film and performance.
3. Tim Prentice: New Work is open at Maxwell Davidson Gallery until October 31, 2015.
Tim Prentice’s new exhibition titled – simply – New Work incorporates an arrangement of among the most iconic of the artist’s forms. Prentice’s work has long sought – and succeeded – in expanding the definitions of sculpture and kinetic art. It transcends its own physicality as it seeks to make visible the organic world around us. Using mirrored aluminum, Lexan plastic, and colored PVC, Prentice creates work that defines air currents and moves freely, while also establishing the space in which it sits. Each piece is a careful amalgamation of movement and aesthetic, scale and proportion. With this exhibition, Prentice has created some of his strongest and most elegant work to date.
4. Salon de Mass-Age (Rudolf Schwarzkogler | Nobuyoshi Araki) is open at 66 Orchard until November 1, 2015.
Draped in corroding curtains of mystery, massage parlors primarily exist in cliché’d euphemisms seen and heard before: the dimmed lights, fake names, “happy-endings,”—all strained in an attempt of professionalism, have desensitized us to the moral taboos of past generations. We have therefore grown complacent and bored with our own imaginings. At 66 Orchard, Shin Gallery is providing a new conversation, which explores the universality of these images, bringing back the deliciously unsettling feeling of confronting what takes place behind closed doors. In black and white photography, the Actionist-based work of Rudolf Schwarzkogler meets the deliberately casual style of Nobuyoshi Araki in an open relationship between the former’s clinically grotesque images and the latter’s candidly erotic ones. Araki’s muses alleviate the pain and sexual frustrations of Schwarzkogler clients, reaching a torridly modern love affair based upon a foundation of economic value. On the precipice of trauma and eroticism, these two worlds merge into one.
5. Jim Shaw: The end is Here is open at New Museum until January 10, 2016.
Over the past thirty years, Shaw has become one of the United States’ most influential and visionary artists, moving between painting, sculpture, and drawing, and building connections between his own psyche and America’s larger political, social, and spiritual histories. Shaw mines his imagery from the cultural refuse of the twentieth century, using comic books, record covers, conspiracy magazines, and obscure religious iconography to produce a portrait of the nation’s subconscious. Although a recognized icon of the Los Angeles art scene since the 1970s, Shaw has never had a comprehensive museum show in New York. This exhibition, which encompasses three floors of the New Museum, reveals the breadth and inventiveness of his art. 
