This week in Newly Reviewed, Will Heinrich covers a group painting show, Joe Brainard’s charming Nancy interventions, Pierre Obando’s print-like paintings and John Miller’s disappearing totalitarian.

Upper East Side

The Human Situation: Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh

Through June 21. Lévy Gorvy Dayan, 19 East 64th Street; 212-772-2004, levygorvydayan.com.

It’s enlightening and pleasurable to see Alice Neel (1900-1984) alongside her contemporaries Sylvia Sleigh (1916-2010) and Marcia Marcus (1928-2025) in this thoughtful group show.

Neither Sleigh nor Marcus quite achieves the balance of style and intuition that gives Neel’s figures so much life. But Sleigh, at her best, has an exhilarating intricacy, as in a late 1970s portrait of about 20 women associated with A.I.R. Gallery; and Marcus’s flat, sandy plains of color are memorably incisive.

A handful of more recent painters more than hold their own: Wangari Mathenge’s portrait of Faith Ringgold is right at home next to Neel’s of June Blum, and Jenna Gribbon’s turbulent eight-foot portrait of her wife splashing water on her face transmits a vivid, wet shock directly to the viewer.

With portraits, nudes and floral still lifes by Claire Tabouret, Nikki Maloof, Chantal Joffe and Karolina Jablonska, too, the show manages to be specific but expansive. It’s all figurative painting by women, in a relatively narrow range of subjects, emotional tones and approaches. But it demonstrates just how much depth and variation there can be even in such a framework. WILL HEINRICH

Upper East Side

Joe Brainard

Through June 28. Craig Starr Gallery, 5 East 73rd Street; 212-570-1739, craigstarr.com.

As Hilton Als points out in a catalog essay for “Joe Brainard: Love Nancy” at Craig Starr Gallery, “Nancy” can be a term for a gay man as well as a woman’s name. So when Brainard, working up a maquette for the cover of ARTnews in 1968, glued little drawings of Ernie Bushmiller’s comic-strip character Nancy over a collage of famous paintings — there she is jumping out of a wall of Warhol’s soup cans, or as Manet’s Olympia, or staggering down Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” — he was either adding himself to art history as a gay man or simply finding himself already there.

At the same time, moving that extremely simplified face into a fine-art context is a feat of appropriation even more complicated and astonishing, in its way, than those soup cans. Are we supposed to read it as a drawing or as a kind of icon? Is Brainard, who died in 1994, revealing himself, hiding himself or abstracting his emotional life into cutting satire?

My favorite piece in the show is a mind-bending 1972 gouache and ink drawing, “If Nancy Opened Her Mouth So Wide She Fell In.” A tiny Nancy drowning in the black abyss of her own angry mouth is one of the sharper and more efficient depictions I’ve ever seen of what the inside of a neurosis feels like. WILL HEINRICH

Brooklyn

Pierre Obando

Through May 18. Starr Suites, 281 Starr Street, Brooklyn; 310-895-5171, starrsuites.com.

Pierre Obando makes paintings that look like prints. The diagonal lines, brushy squiggles and slick, heavy triangles that echo around the room in his show “Some Kind …,” at Starr Suites, have a flattened, simplified quality that seems one step removed from the painter’s hand.

Yet as he moves them around and changes them from canvas to canvas, Obando gives the viewer a thrilling sense of inclusion in his creative process. Looking at “King’s Blue,” in which a dozen-odd bookmark shapes float and wiggle among broad streaks and tiny dots, I felt as if I were the one experimenting with different textures. And the balance of reddish browns and bluish grays in “Sprung” was so satisfying that I almost thought I’d made it myself. WILL HEINRICH

Lower East Side

John Miller

Not currently on display. The National Exemplar Gallery at Amalgamated Dwellings, 504 Grand Street (entrance on Abraham Kazan Street); thenationalexemplargallery.com.

Last fall the gallerist Eneas Capalbo installed a large Nate Lowman painting in the community room of the Amalgamated Dwellings, a lovely old Art Deco co-op on the Lower East Side. It remained there for three months.

Capalbo, who used to have a New York space but now stages pop-up exhibitions in the city, recently put a new work on display, an installation by the artist, writer and Barnard College professor John Miller called “The Totalitarian.” It included a child-size mannequin dressed as an inept magician dropping a deck of cards in front of a backdrop. In an associated text, Miller connected his piece to the current political situation in the United States and to “Mario and the Magician,” a Thomas Mann novella about fascism and mesmerism. I wanted to recommend this piece for its insightful tone and topicality, but the co-op’s board, without explanation, ordered the work taken down. WILL HEINRICH

Last Chance

East Village

Mungo Thomson

Through April 26. Karma, 22 East Second Street and 188 East Second Street; 212-390-8290, karmakarma.org.

Well before artificial intelligence images flooded our lives, more straightforward photographs, film and videos amassed at their own fevered clip. Not long after the technical innovations that made them possible, there were so many images that we didn’t know what to do with them.

Artists and thinkers like Aby Warburg, Andre Malraux, Frank Mouris, Harun Farocki and Camille Henrot examined and cataloged images. Mungo Thomson has developed his own system, rephotographing images in vintage instructional manuals, nature guides and art history textbooks. These are presented in rapid-fire succession as stop-motion animation videos — essentially animating Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century still images of human and animal “locomotion” — and accompanied with mostly experimental soundtracks.

“A Universal Picture” and “Time Life,” spread over two Karma locations, are stellar collections of these videos and more. Here are images from guides to hummingbirds and seashells, instruction manuals for playing guitar and throwing pottery on the wheel, and art history books. Accompanying the images are sounds and scores by John McEntire, Eiko Ishibashi, Lee Ranaldo, Mark Fell and Will Guthrie, as well as György Ligeti’s 1962 “Poème Symphonique.” The flicker effect of the images and expertly synced sound is oddly relaxing — the opposite of doom-scrolling.

Down the street in another gallery, nearly blank covers of Time magazine, with their distinctive red border, are silk-screened onto a series of mirrors (Time being, of course, one of the biggest purveyors of photographs before the internet). Stand in the middle of the room, between the mirrors, and your image is reflected to infinity.

With this work, the show’s title becomes clear: “Universal picture” is a farce. Every single photo ever made is programmed by an apparatus and replete with ideology. Therefore, if billions of images are uploaded to social media (alone) every day, Thomson’s exercise in painstakingly recuperating, rephotographing and recirculating a few thousand images helps explain, in part, why the world feels so crazy these days. We’re drowning in images. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Lower East Side

Amanda Rodriguez

Through April 26. Entrance Gallery, 48 Ludlow Street; 646-838-5188, entrance.nyc.

Playful new watercolors by Amanda Rodriguez in her debut solo show depict unlikely transmogrifications between animals, humans and inanimate objects that loop back on each other, forming a macabre cosmic wheel.

In the upstairs gallery, 16 square paintings run around the walls on a shelf. Between every pair of legible illustrations is a strange blend of the two. A stunned deer in headlights morphs into a lobster over the course of three panels; the deer’s star-struck blue eyes become the rubber bands binding the lobster’s claws. Two panels later, we have a lobster dinner. Phase through a woman at her toilette, a worm on a hook, a fish, a host of Gothic angels. And, finally, a red car striking a deer — which brings us full circle.

Downstairs, arched paintings work a quasi-Christian sense of narrative stained-glass windows or altarpieces into the layouts of pinball machines. In one, a central figure lugs sacks of cans and bottles rendered as colorful daubs; yellow pinball bumpers are decorated with a handgun or subway car doors closing. It’s a fairly romanticized picture of life in New York City, percussive shots and cries depicted as gossamer clichés.

Another watercolor echoes the transformations upstairs in a central rosette, showing a baby growing up, transforming into a fish-person, getting married and having a human baby of their own. While the details feel churning and random, the larger picture has a satisfying cyclical shape. TRAVIS DIEHL

More to See

Noho

‘Erotic City’

Through May 2. Eric Firestone Gallery, 40 Great Jones Street; 646-998-3727, ericfirestonegallery.com.

Between the onslaught of national news and lingering winter in the northeast, it’s easy to feel drained these days. But when I arrived at Eric Firestone Gallery and saw Helen Beard’s “The principle of pleasure” (2020) hanging in the window, my mood lifted. The painting features blocky shapes of color: a red hand touching a blue and green slit, with an oblong green — uh, cucumber? — hovering in front. It’s a slyly explicit work that makes the fun of deciphering it a stand-in for the action being depicted.

Many of the pieces in “Erotic City,” which includes more than 40 artists, are like this: intriguing and entertaining as they revel in both physical and aesthetic delight. The show was curated by Martha Edelheit, a 93-year-old artist who has been painting feminist nudes since the 1960s, and more recently quite funny ones, too.

Some of my favorites here are historical discoveries, like Jane Kogan’s painting of a gender-bending mermaid from 1978 and William Christopher’s realist rendering of a debauched sideshow from 1953.

But the contemporary contributions more than hold their own, including psychologically charged textiles by Claudia Renfro, Sal Salandra and Pierre le Riche. And, like any good erotica, there’s work that offers a visual tease, like Letitia Quesenberry’s quasi-meditative breast made from lacquer, plexiglass and resin, and Marcus Leslie Singleton’s carefully cropped and thickly painted bodies.

The show’s sensuality is a release: Amid so much fear and suffering, there’s still plenty of pleasure to be found. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Lower East Side

‘American Job’

Through May 5. International Center of Photography, 84 Ludlow Street; 212-857-0000, icp.org.

The 1963 March on Washington is remembered as a historic civil rights event, but it was also a landmark moment for American labor. The full title was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and its progenitor was A. Philip Randolph, a labor organizer. By including photographs of the march in “American Job,” the curator Makeda Best reclaims that aspect of it.

She also rebuts the myth that the face of work in this country is a white, working-class man. If the show has a thesis, it’s that who we are and where we come from shape our access to economic opportunities — an idea that should be common wisdom but still isn’t.

The exhibition moves chronologically, beginning with the invigoration of organized labor in the 1940s and ending with the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. Some of its most fascinating images were shot by unidentified photographers, while others were taken by well-known practitioners; Gordon Parks is here, with a striking picture of the litter-strewn aftermath of the 1963 march. There are also photographers whose names have faded with time, like Nina Leen, one of the first women to shoot for Life magazine. Her 1947 image shows a smiling housewife amid rows of beds, dishes and food — a “symbolic display of her week’s work,” according to the wall text.

Moving into the 21st century, labor shifted largely from an organizing principle to a disorganizing one; Joseph Rodriguez and Dylan Vitone soulfully document the struggles of working-class communities. But at the end of “American Job,” I wanted to see pictures that weren’t there: of nurses, coders, Amazon drivers. In many ways labor looks different now. Who’s doing the work of capturing that? JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Tribeca

Carolyn Lazard

Through May 10. Artists Space, 11 Cortlandt Alley; 212-226-3970, artistsspace.org.

In the United States, a simple visit to the doctor can be demoralizing. “Vital,” one of two new short films by Carolyn Lazard — a 2023 MacArthur Fellow who makes work about disability and care — dramatizes that experience. It follows a Black person named Maxine Smalls at a prenatal appointment.

The camera moves with quiet, almost clinical precision. Nothing outwardly dramatic happens, yet problems abound: Smalls arrives to find that their doctor is out. The substitute is a condescending white man who dismisses her questions with terse responses. When Smalls checks out, the receptionist says insurance won’t cover the visit.

Smalls weathers this all stoically, probably because they know that Black women, and those presenting as women, are frequently discriminated against in medical settings. That reality is the impetus for Lazard’s second film, “Fiction Contract,” which documents a childbirth simulation at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. The care team is exclusively Black women, and the “patient” is a Black medical mannequin (something that until recently wasn’t widely available).

Both films, commissioned by Artists Space, are stylistically so direct that initially I wasn’t sure what to make of them. But after I left, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. They capture the simultaneous intimacy and coldness of health care experiences so well, the contradiction of feeling both cared for and exhausted. The show’s title, “Two-way,” could suggest a street — a relationship of reciprocity — or a mirror: a medical system that’s watching you, while concealing its mechanisms from view. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Midtown

Camp

Through July 20. Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street; 212-708-9400, moma.org.

Cameras are everywhere. Smartphones, surveillance cameras, doorbell cameras, even inserted into humans and other animals. In “Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP” at MoMA, a collaborative art studio in Mumbai, India, muses on the uses and possibilities of cameras.

The grandest work in the show, “Bombay Tilts Down” (2022), is a multi-screen video made during the pandemic using a closed-circuit television camera mounted on the 35th floor of a building in the middle of Mumbai (sometimes called by its former name, Bombay). From dawn to dusk, the camera pans over modern buildings, but also low-income settlements covered in tarp and brick. Another work, presented on a series of monitors, features villagers in different locations gathering around screens in a rich tradition of storytelling.

My favorite work is “From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf” (2013), an 83-minute video compiled from camcorder and cellphone videos made by sailors traversing the Indian Ocean. The clips show them working, playing cards and attending festivals on land, and the piece as a whole becomes a slice-of-life document that feels both timeless and contemporary.

What really makes this show, though, is the music, including a the soundtrack to “Bombay Tilts Down” by BamBoy (Tushar Adhav) and the popular songs accompanying the sailors on their odysseys. The music here harks back to old Bollywood scores — a reminder that when cameras were combined with sound, their ubiquity and impact was cemented. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Soho

John Zorn

Through May 11. The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street; 212-219-2166, drawingcenter.org.

The drawings and diminutive objects in “John Zorn: Hermetic Cartography” at the Drawing Center are redolent of Asian calligraphy, mystical writings and wisps of smoke. Above all, they’re full of movement, which makes sense since Zorn is best known as an avant-garde composer.

Evidence of that is everywhere. You feel the echoes of Dada in “My Wife Remodeled” (1972), a little collage made from ticket stubs. And there are references to other avant-garde composers: John Cage’s poetic approach to musical notation, along with Zorn’s “Hymen 2” (1973), which pays homage to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Hymnen,” only Zorn’s instructions to the woodwind musicians was to “blow their guts out.”

A darkened room devoted to Zorn’s 1970s “Theater of Musical Optics” includes meticulous arrangements of tiny found objects used in these séance-like presentations; they also resemble idiosyncratic Fluxus boxes and chess sets. Zorn was obsessed with the cartoon music of Carl Stalling — known for his “Looney Tunes” scores — and notations here include cutout comics with sounds like “Womp!” and “Thud!”

A series of performances accompanies this show. At the one I attended, Zorn directed by holding up letters and numbers, and the musicians would respond. As with the drawings and objects in the show, there was a sense of rigor mixed with improvisation and play: a refreshing reminder that when chance and experimentation are a significant part of the process, anything can happen. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Closed

Lower East Side

Anna-Bella Papp

Through April 13. Dracula’s Revenge, 105 Henry Street; 203-517-8385, draculasrevenge.net.

In this elegant show by the Romanian artist Anna-Bella Papp, four clay slabs, each about 13 inches by 10 inches and one inch thick, are arranged on blond wood Ikea shelves. They’re as precisely, inseparably installed as four frames of a film. Each bears a high-contrast image of a wrought-iron fence. From left to right, the view starts with a flower, then gradually pulls back to show more of the ironwork.

As information emerges, so does distance. If you were to imagine a narrative, it could be as simple as: The metal bloom catches the artist’s eye, then the artist notices that the whole fence is made of these springy curlicues — a revelation that’s joyful, since the more the merrier, but also cut with loss, since that first flower is not so special after all.

Papp works almost exclusively in clay slabs like these, always laid flat. For this group, the images are pressed into a thin layer of powder blue clay on top of a gray base, then the relief is filled smooth with milky white. The white on powder blue recalls a classic Wedgewood china pattern. Here the effect is wispy and waxy, and the sculptures feel almost animated.

The show hinges on the tension produced by small decisions, like the slabs’ tantalizing closeness to the wall: Shouldn’t they be on it? But the slabs, for all their earthy weightiness, feel fragile, bound by impossibly sharp edges. You may also notice the color variation, a clue that the two outer panels are baked ceramic, while the middle two are unfired. The idea of moving them seems treacherous. Papp’s show is cryptic and evasive in a way that doesn’t need solving. TRAVIS DIEHL

Noho

Kianja Strobert

Through April 5. Marinaro, 678 Broadway; 212-989-7700, marinaro.biz.

The gallery has the aura of a city park, equal parts hospitable and estranging. That feeling comes from Kianja Strobert’s bench sculptures, arranged in rows and alcoves, inferring a social structure you intuitively understand and want to respect. The benches, wood and papier-mâché at their core, are forbiddingly painted with leaden silver gloop but invitingly unpristine.

Piles of refuse litter the seats, as do blankets, fresh clothes and trinkets like pearls and barbells and a votive candle. Colorful pages from home décor magazines and a retro-looking 2024 calendar of flowers pop against the uniform gray. A paper shopping bag labeled Medium Brown Bag, like those from Bloomingdale’s, is encased in clear vinyl and sits on the end of one bench like someone just forgot it.

And, as with many ostensibly public urban spaces, there’s tension: One bench, “Untitled #10,” is laced with saw-toothed strips resembling the kind of hostile architectural interventions meant to keep the huddled masses moving. Next to them is an elongated photo of a woman’s legs. The benches are deployed with qualified generosity, like casting pearls before swine — a contradiction compounded in the gallery because it’s unclear if you may sit on them.

The triple lines of draped pewter-hued flags in “Bunting,” a papier-mâché wall work set above — what else — a bench, offer another counterpoint, a surge of celebration. It’s like the city, after all: a harsh buffet. The benches benefit from their arrangement, the cross-references of the possible plots. As a whole lot, the scene is twee apocalypse; it’s hard to imagine a single sculpture having the same resonance. TRAVIS DIEHL

See the March gallery shows here.