Late December marks one of the rare periods in which the commercial art world actually slows down. Most galleries close for at least a week starting around December 20, creating a brief lull in a calendar otherwise engineered for constant motion. But museums, with the exception of a few days, remain open, making this a good time to do something the hustle and bustle of the rest of the year seldom allows. Namely, not just catching an exhibition or two, but spending real time with them.

In a city like New York, where cultural events pile up at a pace that can leave even the most committed art professional scrambling to keep up, these all-too-brief holiday weeks offer a chance to finally see some of the shows at the city’s globally envied museums that can get lost in the churn of gallery openings, art fairs and (for us) deadlines. What follows is our holiday gift to you: a roundup of the New York City museum shows we think you should make time for in the next few weeks.

The first major U.S. survey dedicated to the visionary Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam is one of the season's true highlights. His surreal paintings offer not only a deep journey into an emotional and oneiric subconscious but also an entry into a broader realm of archetypes and ancestral symbolism shared across cultures and time, reemerging in altered states where the boundary between the time-bound and the mythical, eternal dimension grows thin. Mythic, atmospheric, slightly uncanny yet deeply revealing, Lam’s paintings arise from an imaginary universe shaped by his own lived experience: of African and Chinese descent, born in Cuba, long exiled in Europe, and returning to the Caribbean after 18 years to radically reimagine and reactivate the region’s Afro-Caribbean heritage from a syncretic and revolutionary perspective. Lam considered his art an “act of decolonization,” and hybrid both formally and conceptually, his dense jungle scenes become sites of experimentation with universal symbologies capable of disrupting the colonial structures he encountered in art and in life, as African, Caribbean and European visual languages coexist without hierarchy. “I knew I was running the risk of not being understood either by the man in the street or by the others,” Lam said, “but a true picture has the power to set the imagination to work, even if it takes time.”

This is one of the last chances to catch a rare showcase of Anish Kapoor’s early works in the city, currently on view at the Jewish Museum. In these early experiments with pure color and pigment, the foundations of Kapoor’s lifelong investigation into the physical, spiritual and poetic properties of color are already visible—an inquiry that challenges the boundaries between sculpture, sensation, idea and form. At the core of this research lies a philosophical and psychological question about the nature of human experience itself, unfolding through a continuous exchange between sensation and imagination, reality and illusion. On view are the artist’s pigment sculptures presented in richly hued, evocative groupings alongside select examples of his more recent works made with Vantablack. This nanotechnological substance absorbs nearly all light, and the exhibition underscores Kapoor’s masterful play with perception, drawing on the psychic effects of color—and its absence—as well as the enduring allure of objects that seem to defy their own material nature.

MoMA is hosting Ruth Asawa’s first major museum survey to reach New........

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