Speed Round! 13 Critics Review 25 NYC Shows Before You Finish Your Morning Coffee

“Afterlives: Contemporary Art in the Byzantine Crypt”

The Metropolitan Museum | 1000 Fifth Avenue
Through January 10, 2027

Staged as a literal underbelly to what is sure to be a ticket- and money-printing exhibition of the great 16th-century “influencer”—the museum’s words, not mine—Raphael, upstairs, contemporary works spanning the last few decades, including the recently late Melvin Edwards’s welded steel evocation of lynching and Michael Aschenbrenner’s blown-glass bones bound into splints with cloth and twigs, are densely clustered with artifacts of late Roman, Byzantine, and Coptic origin, forming an almost injuriously compact yet conceptually weighted exhibition stashed in a solemn brick gallery unearthed during the museum’s structural renovation.—Paige K. Bradley