Our guide to new art shows and some that will be closing soon.
‘ARTS OF CHINA’ and ‘ARTS OF JAPAN’ at the Brooklyn Museum (ongoing). Redesigning an American museum’s Asian wing is no mean feat. But these exhibitions, reopened after a six-year renovation, successfully integrate stunning pieces by contemporary Chinese and Japanese artists into the institution’s century-old collection of antiquities, drawing 5,000 years of art into a single thrilling conversation. Look out for the 14th-century wine jar decorated with whimsical paintings of a whitefish, a mackerel, a freshwater perch and a carp — four fish whose Chinese names are homophones for a phrase meaning “honest and incorruptible.” (Will Heinrich)
718-638-5000, brooklynmuseum.com
‘AUSCHWITZ. NOT LONG AGO. NOT FAR AWAY’ at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (through Aug. 30). Killing as a communal business, made widely lucrative by the Third Reich, permeates this traveling exhibition about the largest German death camp, Auschwitz, whose yawning gatehouse, with its converging rail tracks, has become emblematic of the Holocaust. Well timed, during a worldwide surge of anti-Semitism, the harrowing installation strives, successfully, for fresh relevance. The exhibition illuminates the topography of evil, the deliberate designing of a hell on earth by fanatical racists and compliant architects and provisioners, while also highlighting the strenuous struggle for survival in a place where, as Primo Levi learned, “there is no why.” (Ralph Blumenthal)
646-437-4202, mjhnyc.org
‘AGNES DENES: ABSOLUTES AND INTERMEDIATES’ at the Shed (through March 22). We’ll be lucky this art season if we get another exhibition as tautly beautiful as this long-overdue Denes retrospective. Now 88, the artist is best known for her 1982 “Wheatfield: A Confrontation,” for which she sowed and harvested two acres of wheat on Hudson River landfill within sight of the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty. Her later ecology-minded work has included creating a hilltop forest of 11,000 trees planted by 11,000 volunteers in Finland (each tree is deeded to the planter), though many of her projects exist only in the form of the exquisite drawings that make up much of this show. (Holland Cotter)
646-455-3494, theshed.org
‘HANS HAACKE: ALL CONNECTED’ at New Museum (through Jan. 26). For this German-born American artist, what matters most about art is what you can’t see: the hidden systems of class, power and capital that assign value and importance to the pictures and objects we see. Haacke won fame and grief in the 1970s for polling museumgoers about their beliefs and their bank accounts, and for deadpan installations that disclosed one collector’s links to the Nazis, another’s to the coup d’état in Chile. There’s no denying these midcareer works were Haacke’s best: His early fan-blown tarps or water-pumping tubes look hippie-dippie today, while more recent antigovernment installations (torn flags, MAGA hats, dismembered Statue of Liberty dolls) are embarrassing. But his example pervades the work of today’s young artists, who never even knew a time before we were all connected. (Jason Farago)
212-219-1222, newmuseum.org
‘EDITH HALPERT AND THE RISE OF AMERICAN ART’ at the Jewish Museum (through Feb. 9). This rare show covers the life of an influential art gallery, founded in 1926 by Halpert. Skilled at both business and publicity, she represented stellar prewar American artists like Stuart Davis, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Charles Sheeler and Jacob Lawrence, promoted folk art and selected some wonderful pieces for her own collection, which have a room of their own here. (Roberta Smith)
212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org
‘THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION’ at the Museum of the Moving Image (ongoing). The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America’s great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program “Sam and Friends” before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft-faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother’s old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show,” though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace-and-love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago)
718-784-0077, movingimage.us
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