8 Must See Art Exhibitions in NYC This March
From luminous still lifes and land art to music design and portraits, discover eight standout shows electrifying March in New York.
ERIC WHITE: Vignettes & Mutations | Source: GRIMM
March might still feel like winter, but the city’s art world is already in full bloom. Across Chelsea, Midtown and the Museum Mile, artists old and new are showing work that spans oil painting, collage, sculpture, photography, film and sound installation.
In Chelsea, Dike Blair’s paintings turn mundane corners into luminous still lifes, while Ralph Lemon revisits the civil rights history of the American South through video and photography. Uptown, the Guggenheim prepares for Taryn Simon’s immersive installation, and Cooper Hewitt’s Art of Noise reimagines the design of sound through more than 300 objects. At Gagosian, Michael Heizer cuts monumental negative sculptures into concrete. From the cinematic canvases of Eric White at GRIMM to Kristy Chan’s reflective paintings at Sean Kelly, the range is expansive. These eight exhibitions offer a compelling itinerary for the month ahead.
1. Dike Blair
Dike Blair | Source: Karma
Where: Karma | 549 West 26th Street, New York
When: February 19 – March 28, 2026
In his latest show, Dike Blair continues to focus on in between spaces such as windowsills, elevators and airport bars that most of us see without really noticing. The oil paintings on view were developed over the past two years and give mundane corners and surfaces an almost cinematic focus. Compositions are often framed within frames; peonies culled from several separate pieces are spliced into one canvas, while rectangles of televisions, windows and light switches echo throughout, even hinting at Piet Mondrian’s grids.
Blair also experiments with surface. He presses linen and plastic wrap into wet paint to create hazy panes or stippled walls. With heightened tonal range and repeated motifs, the works pause time and invite a slow look at everyday scenes.
About the Artist: Born in 1952 in New Castle, Pennsylvania, Dike Blair emerged from downtown New York’s punk and postmodernist scene in the 1970s. He uses gouache, oil and his own photographs to make diaristic tableaux that turn ordinary moments into exercises in composition. Blair is also a writer and teacher; his recent solo exhibitions span venues from Seoul to Vienna, and his paintings are held by institutions including the Whitney Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He lives in New York and Sullivan County.
2. Taryn Simon
Taryn Simon | Source: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Where: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York
When: September 18, 2026 – March 14, 2027
Although it doesn’t open until autumn, Taryn Simon’s project at the Guggenheim is already generating anticipation. The exhibition will fill Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiralling rotunda with an immersive installation of new photographs, text pieces, videos and sculptures. Visitors will be able to chart their own path through a swirling narrative that calls attention to the unseen forces shaping the worlds we inhabit.
Curated by Nat Trotman, the show will coincide with the 250th anniversary of the United States and promises to be both ambitious and interactive.
About the Artist: A multidisciplinary artist who works across photography, text, sculpture and performance, Taryn Simon was born and raised in New York and has been based there since graduating from Brown University in 1997. Her deeply researched projects investigate power structures and cultural systems and often combine documentary rigor with conceptual storytelling.
3. Eric White: Vignettes & Mutations
ERIC WHITE: Vignettes & Mutations | Source: GRIMM
Where: GRIMM | 54 White Street, New York
When: March 20 – May 2, 2026
For his fifth solo show with GRIMM and third in the New York space, Los Angeles‑based painter Eric White revisits two decades of his own work. Intimately scaled canvases isolate details from earlier paintings and reinterpret them, turning past ideas into new compositions. Typography flickers through signage, comics and title cards, weaving a connective thread across disparate source material.
White’s love of twentieth century film, music and pop culture still runs through these works, with warped screens, invented movie ephemera and ambiguous figures populating his dense scenes. By freeing these fragments from their original contexts, the exhibition operates as a refracted retrospective, showing how images persist and evolve over time.
About the Artist: Eric White was born in 1968 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1990. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts and was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts painting fellowship. White’s work has been shown in institutions from the Laguna Art Museum and the Long Beach Museum of Art to museums in Mexico City, Bruges and Rome. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
4. Michael Heizer: Negative Sculpture
Michael Heizer: Negative Sculpture | Source: Gagosian
Where: Gagosian | 522 West 21st Street, New York
When: February 10 – March 28, 2026
At Gagosian’s West 21st Street gallery, Michael Heizer presents two new negative sculptures from 2024: Convoluted Line A and Convoluted Line B. These winding steel earth liners snake across a raised concrete floor, each stretching more than eighty‑seven feet and encouraging viewers to walk around them. A small selection of early drawings situates the sculptures within an arc that stretches back to Heizer’s outdoor excavations in the deserts of Nevada and California.
Inserted into the floor like drawn lines rendered in three dimensions, the sculptures reflect his long‑standing interest in mark‑making at monumental scale. They connect to his early outdoor works and his ongoing exploration of line, size and negative space dating to the 1960s.
About the Artist: Born in Berkeley, California in 1944, Michael Heizer is a leading figure of the land‑art movement. Since the late 1960s he has created large‑scale, site‑specific works that engage directly with the natural environment. His early earthwork Double Negative (1969) consists of two deep cuts in a Nevada mesa, and subsequent projects have continued to explore absence and mass. Working largely outside conventional gallery spaces, he has redefined sculpture through massive gestures carved into earth and stone. He lives and works in Nevada and New York.
5. Ralph Lemon: From Out of Space
Ralph Lemon: From Out of Space | Source: Paula Cooper Gallery
Where: Paula Cooper Gallery | 521 West 21st Street, New York
When: February 26 – April 11, 2026
Ralph Lemon’s latest exhibition brings together video and photographs produced during travels through the American South in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The works stem from Lemon’s research into the history and afterlife of the civil rights movement, including a reenactment of the Freedom Rides undertaken on Greyhound buses. He recorded historically charged sites, staged intimate “living room dances” and created counter‑memorial performances at places marked by racial violence.
The show includes Edmund Pettus Bridge Walk (2001), a video in which Lemon crosses the Selma bridge while repeatedly stumbling and dropping a stack of thrift‑store records. Photographs from Money, Mississippi (where Emmett Till was murdered) and new digital images from his 2018 return visit meditate on memory, erasure and the passage of time. A separate short video, Wounded Rabbit (2009), screens in a nearby vitrine.
About the Artist: Born in 1952, Ralph Lemon is a choreographer, writer and visual artist who founded the Ralph Lemon Dance Company in 1985. A prominent figure in New York’s post‑modern performance scene, he pushes the boundaries of performance to embrace installation, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and film. Lemon authored the Geography Trilogy, a series of performances, writings and drawings that traverse three continents.
His work has appeared at The Kitchen, the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans, the Studio Museum in Harlem and MoMA PS1 and is held by major museums. He has received numerous awards, including three Bessie Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur grant. He lives and works in New York and Philadelphia.
6. Emmet Gowin: Baldwin Street: Photographs 1966–1994
Emmet Gowin: Baldwin Street: Photographs 1966-1994 | Source: Pace Gallery
Where: Pace Gallery | 508 West 25th Street, New York
When: March 12 – April 25, 2026
Pace’s exhibition revisits Emmet Gowin’s long‑term project documenting his wife, Edith Morris, and her extended family in Danville, Virginia. The Baldwin Street series takes its name from the dead‑end road where many of Edith’s relatives lived. Most of the prints on view have never been shown before; Gowin unearthed them from his archive and printed them between 2020 and 2022.
The images (portraits of Edith in her bedroom, children playing outside and funeral onlookers) are marked by tenderness and familiarity. Gowin describes Baldwin Street as “the center of my spiritual universe” and notes that the gestures and faces of this family never ceased to fascinate him. The exhibition coincides with the release of a Princeton University Press book on the series and runs concurrently with AIPAD’s Photography Show. Gowin’s work is held in major museum collections including MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Canada.
About the Artist: Emmet Gowin was born in 1941 in Danville, Virginia. Raised in a close‑knit religious family, he began photography seriously while studying graphic design and later studied under Harry Callahan at the Rhode Island School of Design. Early on he turned his camera toward his own family, and that intimacy has remained a through‑line in his work.
Gowin joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1973 and later expanded his practice to include European landscapes, aerial views of volcanic devastation and nuclear test sites. He has been honored with Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and is considered one of the most accomplished printers in American photography.
7. Art of Noise
ART OF NOISE | Source: Cooper Hewitt
Where: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum | 2 East 91st Street, New York
When: February 13 – August 16, 2026
For a deep dive into the design of sound, head to the Cooper Hewitt. Organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and adapted to reflect the New York music scene, Art of Noise brings together more than 300 objects that trace how people have listened to and visualized music over the last century. From concert posters and record sleeves to phonographs, boomboxes and sleek digital players, the exhibition explores how graphics, materials and mechanical innovations shape our sensory experiences.
A handmade listening room by multi‑disciplinary artist Devon Turnbull invites visitors to sit and hear music through a custom audio system, while the exhibition design by teenage engineering includes interactive seating and curated playlists. The show runs across the museum’s third floor and promises to be a multisensory soundtrack to the city.
About the Exhibition: Rather than centering on a single artist, Art of Noise is a curatorial collaboration. The show is organized by Joseph Becker of SFMOMA with support from Divya Saraf and adapted for New York by Cooper Hewitt’s associate curator Cynthia Trope. It features installations by Stockholm‑based firm teenage engineering and New York artist Devon Turnbull; together they underscore how design mediates the way we hear and remember music.
8. Kristy Chan: Short Letter, Long Farewell
Kristy Chan: Short Letter, Long Farewell | Source: Sean Kelly Gallery
Where: Sean Kelly Gallery | 475 Tenth Avenue, New York
When: February 27 – April 11, 2026
Sean Kelly introduces London‑based painter Kristy Chan to New York with a suite of paintings and drawings that dwell on movement, longing and the everyday. The exhibition borrows its title from Peter Handke’s novel and unfolds like a reflective letter to America, balancing the promise of renewal with the uncertainty that accompanies it.
Chan’s canvases, produced between 2024 and 2026, draw on fleeting moments (a sunset, a walk in the park or a remembered conversation) and they hover between figuration and abstraction. Literary references and cultural memory sit alongside scenes rooted in direct observation, touching on inheritance, displacement and belonging. Her dense applications of oil and oil stick and improvisational brushwork lend the paintings a sense of spontaneity; as writer Izzy Bilkus notes, they carry a playful energy that resists stagnation.
About the Artist: Kristy Chan was born in 1997 in Hong Kong and currently lives and works in London. She received a BFA from the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London and an MA in Contemporary Art from Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Although this is her first solo outing in New York, her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions internationally.