Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection (until 12 February 2017) is an exploration of both the Whitney Museum of American Art’s holdings and the melting pot of American identity. Through around 300 works that date from 1900 to the present, visitors can spot connections across the show: artists who depict one another, or family links like scattered depictions of the museum’s founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, her niece Gloria Vanderbilt and Vanderbilt’s son—baby Anderson Cooper, snoozing (anonymously) in a photo by Diane Arbus.
Discover the multifaceted work of a pioneering 20th-century landscape architect at the Jewish Museum with the exhibition Roberto Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist (until 18 September). Burle Marx was known for his lush, abstract gardens, his ecological focus and the black-and-white Copacabana boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro. Around 150 works chronicle his 60-year career—during which he designed more than 2,000 gardens internationally—and also demonstrate his lesser-known talents, such as sculpture and textile design.
Unplug at Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective, 1999-2016 at the Brooklyn Museum before it closes this Sunday, 14 August, for a celebration of a cultural artefact of mobile music that predates the digital age. The fun and funky show, installed in the museum’s glass entrance pavilion, plays music from 18 of Sachs’s installations made of re-jigged speakers, tricked out with materials like animal horns and a mop (one even boasts a full bar).
Three other must-see shows: Bruce Conner: It's All True at MoMA; Diane Arbus: In the Beginning at the Met Breuer; Moholy-Nagy: Future Present at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.