Through May 29th (so run now!) The Whitney has a retrospective of work by sculptor Tim Hawkinson

"The Whitney presents two decades of work by one of America’s most singular and inventive sculptors in Tim Hawkinson, the artist’s first major museum survey, opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art February 11, 2005. The show, organized by the Whitney and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—where it will be seen after its New York presentation—offers a fascinating cross-section of Hawkinson’s body of work, including meticulously detailed drawings, minute constructions, inflated latex casts, and uncanny mechanical contraptions."

Through June 5th, The Brooklyn Museum has an exhibition of works by Jean-Michel Basquiat

"This exhibition presents more than ninety works by the American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988), whose spectacular career contributed to the revival of American painting in the 1980s. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum and co-curated by Fred Hoffman, Kellie Jones, Marc Mayer, and Franklin Sirmans, Basquiat will include approximately seventy paintings and twenty works on paper, some of which have never before been on view in the United States. The most comprehensive retrospective in over a decade, Basquiat celebrates the artist’s extraordinary use of color and drawing, his integration of text and complex iconography, and his development of themes related to the African Diaspora."

To say that either artist is "inventive" or "spectacular" is the height of understatement. Hawkinson's work often functions simulatenously on an intimate and monumental level in ways I've never seen another sculptor achieve. Basquiat was the last great painter of the 20th century. Go. Go now.