Winter Culture Preview | The New Yorker

Nothing says the holidays quite like Franz Kafka, who died of tuberculosis in 1924, right when the Morgan Library was admitting its first visitors. The pairing, a century later, of author and museum should delight anybody who cares about literature, and even some people who don’t, provided that they’re fans of Andy Warhol—he included Kafka in the silkscreen “Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century.” Among the juiciest morsels in “Franz Kafka” (Nov. 22), besides that Warhol, are the original manuscript of “The Metamorphosis” and mounds of letters, photographs, drawings, and diaries.

While the centennial shows continue at the Morgan, the Dia Foundation celebrates a still respectable fifty years. Its Chelsea location ends 2024 with “Echoes from the Borderlands” (Dec. 11), a four-part, twenty-four-hour sound piece, created by Valeria Luiselli, Ricardo Giraldo, and Leo Heiblum, that mixes unadorned field recordings and the artists’ imaginative replies.

MOMA kicks off 2025 with a charismatic selection of furniture, clothes, games, and gadgets, all from the misty land known as “design.” If there is a governing theme, it’s the power of this kind of art to alter the world in subtle ways—to make a computer easy enough for a child to use, say, or to render the “Wheelchair Accessible” sign more proudly kinetic. Good design is unobtrusive, but “Pirouette: Turning Points in Design” (Jan. 26) takes some of the most sneakily influential art of the past century and gives it a welcome chance to obtrude.

If you’ve ever stared out at the ocean and felt huge and microscopic at the same time, stop by the Met for a dip in “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature” (Feb. 8), occasioned by the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the great German Romantic painter’s birth. You probably know him, even if you don’t recognize his name, for 1818’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” but his bench is deep—depths, geographic and otherwise, being to Friedrich roughly what apples were to Cézanne.

After a year of bangers, the American Folk Art Museum hosts the third and final part of its exhibition “Somewhere to Roost” (Feb. 12), a characteristically compact, thoughtful exploration of the themes of home and belonging. The name comes from the title of a mixed-media piece, by Thornton Dial, Sr., that joins some sixty art works assembled for the occasion.

The Purim story was among the few that both Jews and Christians of seventeenth-century Holland celebrated, and Rembrandt’s lustrous “A Jewish Heroine from the Hebrew Bible”—quite possibly his imagining of the story’s protagonist, Queen Esther—is the sturdy trunk of a show at the Jewish Museum. The painting shares wall space with drawings, prints, and ceremonial art for “The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt” (March 7), a splendid way of celebrating democratic pluralism at its best, or just bidding goodbye to winter already.—Jackson Arn

Dance

Camille A. Brown, Kyle Abraham, Maria Tallchief

The soaring Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory tends to infuse anything that happens there with an aura of grandiosity. And yet Kyle Abraham has chosen the most intimate of themes—the sadness that comes with the passing of time, the feeling of being alive in this world—for his new work, “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful,” to be performed there Dec. 3-14. Along with Abraham’s silken physical language, the new piece is built on the contrast between the layered movement of groups and the isolation of the individual—as in a solo for Abraham—all bathed in immersive visuals by the artist Cao Yuxi.

A solo, danced on some nights by the choreographer herself, is also at the heart of “I Am,” Camille A. Brown’s newest work, which comes to the Joyce Feb. 5-9. Brown’s influence can now be seen everywhere from Broadway (where she created the dances for “Hell’s Kitchen,” among other shows) to the opera, but the root of her approach to theatre—which is explosive, polyrhythmic, honest—can be felt most clearly in the dances she makes for herself and her own handpicked dancer-collaborators. Here, she explores an idea drawn from the HBO series “Lovecraft Country”: a character who can be whatever she imagines herself to be.

While the cultural reverberations of Alvin Ailey receive their due at the Whitney Museum’s “Edges of Ailey” exhibit (through Feb. 9), the company he founded, in 1958, leans into the idea of forward motion. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre’s season at City Center (Dec. 4-Jan. 5) introduces a raft of new works, three of them by former Ailey dancers. Matthew Rushing’s “Sacred Songs” is set to nine spirituals that Ailey cut from his great “Revelations” after its première. Hope Boykin uses her open-hearted movement style, in her jazz-inflected “Finding Free,” to explore the theme of individual freedom. And, in Jamar Roberts’s “Al-Andalus Blues,” dancers take a musical excursion to Moorish Spain, on the wings of Miles Davis’s adaptation of the “Concierto de Aranjuez” and Roberta Flack’s rendition of the poem “Angelitos Negros.”

New York City Ballet’s winter season (at the David H. Koch Theatre, Jan. 21-March 2) brings new works from two artists-in-residence, Justin Peck and Alexei Ratmansky, each reflecting the character of its maker. Peck, who has shown a knack for channelling a kind of raw millennial energy, will harness the electronics-heavy sound of Dan Deacon; Ratmansky draws from the nineteenth-century ballet “Paquita,” out of which he will carve a suite of dances designed to challenge the performers’ classical technique. And Balanchine’s brilliant “Sylvia Pas de Deux” (set to Delibes) returns, for the first time since 1994, as part of a program of works originally choreographed for the Osage-born ballerina Maria Tallchief, one of the company’s first stars.—Marina Harss

Classical Music

Angel Blue, Barbara Hannigan, Tallis Scholars

If there’s one thing you can rely on hearing around the holidays—even though it was written for Easter—it’s Handel’s “Messiah,” which falls in flurries throughout December. Performers include the choirs of St. Thomas Fifth Avenue (with New York Baroque Incorporated, Dec. 10 and 12) and Trinity Church (conducted by Jane Glover, Dec. 11-13); Musica Sacra with the New York Philharmonic (David Geffen Hall; Dec. 11-14); Masterwork Chorus and Orchestra (Carnegie Hall; Dec. 19); the Oratorio Society (Carnegie Hall; Dec. 23); and Grace Chorale and the Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra (St. Ann’s Church, Brooklyn; Dec. 22).