The winds of change blasted through New York in 2025. Dealers fretted about the state of the market as galleries closed. Curators privately worried about what could and could not be shown as an oppressive President returned to power in Washington, D.C. Deep-pocketed collectors died, raising questions who would take up their mantle, and longtime institutional directors vacated their posts. Everyone in the art world kept talking about uncertainty.  
 
There were many reasons to feel depressed over the state of arts and culture this year. Four artists from the roster of one mega-gallery received concurrent museum retrospectives during a single season. The Whitney Museum shamefully put its beloved Independent Study Program on hold amid a controversy over a performance about the war in Gaza. Sotheby’s took over a famed Marcel Breuer–designed building uptown, suggesting that anything and everything—even places where avant-garde art used to be shown—can be turned into a bastion of capitalism. Most galleries and institutions eschewed experimentation for pleasant, unprovocative, and largely unmemorable programming. 
 
But there were also glimpses of hope in an otherwise bleak climate, which, in a year like this one, is about as much as one could ask for. Two museums—the Frick Collection and the Studio Museum in Harlem—reopened after closures prolonged by the pandemic, with a third, the New Museum, soon to follow in 2026. Teeny-tiny galleries popped up in unexpected corners of the city, some with adventurous programming mounted on a shoestring budget. Blue-chip artists stepped in when others wouldn’t: Dan Colen launched a biennial upstate, Lucy Bull revived her art space, and Sanya Kantarovsky started a residency program. 
 
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that the best art I saw in New York in 2025—the art I’ll remember long after the year is finished—was often about perseverance in the face of adversity. That bodes well for society more broadly. Consider this quote by the painter Ben Shahn, the subject of a New York retrospective from this year: “It is not the survival of art alone that is at issue, but the survival of the free individual and a civilized society.” 
 
More on that Shahn show and nine other exquisite exhibitions below.