5 Must See Shows in NYC Right Now- Every time Brooklyn-based art writer Vittoria Benzine returns to New York City, she feels like an animal rolling around in its nest to get the smell back on it. A whole new batch of shows opened across the city these past weeks, and a few really solid ones remain on view. She surveyed the scene to present these five for your radar. Each comes with a concise review to help decide whether it’s for you. If you want to see in small part what Benzine has been recovering from, take a look at our roundups from Felix and Frieze art fairs.
Hew Locke: Listening to the Land @ PPOW
I got another visceral feeling looking at light streaming into British sculptor Hew Locke’s “Jumbie House 2,” a model of an abandoned plantation house featuring staggering detail and precarious engineering. But the real center pieces of this show are suspended in the front room — massive ships, among the most fraught symbols of human history, adorned with an obvious labor of love that could raise necessary questions to progress through horror and healing. Locke’s latest isn’t about the past, though. The artist grew up in Guyana. Now the country’s grappling with the imminence of an oil boom. Like this show, just another place place where climate change, colonialism, and culture intersect. Through April 1.