Pre Covid-19 we searched the internet everyday looking for the very best of What’s Happening, primarily on Manhattan’s WestSide, so that you didn’t have to.” We made it as easy as 1-2-3.

Covid-19 has required some changes. First of all, some very important information:

How to Get the Coronavirus Vaccine in New York City – NYT

“There are multiple websites, disappearing slots and even attempts to game the system. Here’s our guide to what you have to do to get a dose in your arm.”

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New York magazine is biweekly these days and every issue has a wonderful section, “The Culture Pages,” which includes a “To Do” list – 25 things to see, hear, watch, and read. Here are my favorites from the current issue (Feb.3-Feb.17), PLUS some worthy ongoing events.

Art

Jack Pierson
New works made in quarantine in Ridgewood.
It’s wonderful that one of Tribeca’s best galleries is also one of its oldest and most congenial. Here, Jack Pierson both returns to his assemblage aesthetic of the 1990s and spreads his wings in captivating wall works that have the presence of magic carpets and love letters and a fantastic ease and material intelligence. Then chat with gallerist Schuss himself. —Jerry Saltz
Kerry Schuss Gallery, 73 Leonard Street, through February 13.

Me, Myself and I
Paintings by Polina Barskaya, Aubrey Levinthal, and Justin Liam O’Brien.
For almost two decades, Monya Rowe Gallery, one of the best archaeologists of new figurative painters, has flown a little under the radar. This three-person show gives us painterly perfections of regret in small works by three super-promising young artists. Portraits of family, lovers, and the artists themselves — here are paintings that metamorphose into idols of loneliness, love, vulnerability, and the deeper pleasures and pains of being inspired while in seclusion. —J.S.
Monya Rowe Gallery, 224 West 30th Street, No. 1005, through February 13.

Theater

Theatre@Home Winter Festival
Everything auld is new again.
Many of the theaters that moved virtual mountains to mount productions online in 2020 are now ready to burst into 2021 with … the same work they made in 2020. Return “engagements” of last year’s digital seasons are popping up everywhere, and New York’s own Irish Repertory Theatre cranked out nine screen works in 2020, including a hypnotic Zoom-adapted Molly Sweeney and the musical Meet Me in St. Louis with the divine Melissa Errico and Max Von Essen. Now they throw a winter rerun festival of all nine, a bit o’ luck for those who missed them the first time. —Helen Shaw
irishrep.org, through February 21.

Classical Music

BSO NOW
“The Spirit of Beethoven” program.
As the prospect of a return to concert life appears as a dot on a hazy horizon, the Boston Symphony Orchestra has started tiptoeing back into its hall, with pared-down ensembles of masked musicians spread out on the stage, playing to the cameras and the world. Even with those restrictions, though, the programs can be ambitious. Conductor Andris Nelsons launches a three-concert festival pairing Beethoven works with new ones, starting with Hannah Kendall’s Disillusioned Dreamer. —Justin Davidson
bso.org, February 11 at noon.

Simone Dinnerstein
Filmed in Brooklyn.
A master of intimate music-making, Dinnerstein is the ideal pianist for this time of enforced separation. The Meany Center in Seattle presents a recital recorded in her Brooklyn home, with music by Glass and Schubert, from her recent album A Character of Quiet. —J.D.
meanycenter.org, February 12 to 19.

Louisville Orchestra
A classical pairing.
Long an advocate of new and recent American music, the Louisville Orchestra has lately been reinvigorated under its music director, Teddy Abrams. This livestreamed program, pairing Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 and John Adams’s adrenalized Chamber Symphony, seems calculated to show off the ensemble’s durable vim. —J.D.
louisvilleorchestra.vhx.tv, February 13.

Voces8
Live from London.
The precision-tuned vocal ensemble, heir to the fused traditions of England’s church choirs and collegiate a cappella groups, hosts a winter-to-spring festival of nature-oriented music, streamed live from London. The series opens with a performance that covers music from the reigns of both Queen Elizabeths and centers on Jonathan Dove’s song cycle The Passing of the Year. —J.D.
voces8.com, opens February 13.

SoundBox: Nostalgia
A series for “adventurous listeners.”
Esa-Pekka Salonen, who, in his debut season as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, has found himself a conductor without an audience, is using the time to tinker with the concert format at a time when there’s no downside. The orchestra is launching a digital SoundBox series of streaming concerts organized around a mood, a concept, or a literary conceit. The first features new music with a veneer of antiquity, as if the composers, Freya Waley-Cohen, Missy Mazzoli, and Caroline Shaw, were trying to reconstruct a music history — or a sonic world — they couldn’t quite remember. —J.D.
sfsymphonyplus.org, February 4.

*This article appears in the February 1, 2021, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

PLUS ONGOING EVENTS

Art

JR: The Chronicles of New York City The self-described “photograffeur.” For a blast of fresh air and abstract love, enter the atrium at the Brooklyn Museum. There, you will be engulfed by and surrounded in about the largest wraparound mural you likely have ever seen. From the legendary anonymous French photographer, this wildly collaged panorama presents 1,128 individual New Yorkers. Each subject posed for JR inside a 53-foot trailer-truck the artist parked in numerous local spots. He offered to take pictures of anyone who came by. All of these were then put together into this masterpiece of ambition, love, life, celebration, and audacity. —Jerry Saltz Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, through February 14.

Countryside, The Future An urgent look. Organized by Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal — director of the think tank at Koolhaas’s firm, OMA — this extravaganza of art, design, models, photographs, installations, charts, and diagrams wraps its way up the famous Guggenheim ramps. The visual multiplex lets us consider the countryside that makes up 98 percent of the Earth’s land surface. Possibilities abound, proposals runneth over, and solutions are thrown into the air. Come away amazed and inspired. —J.S. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, through February 15.

“In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at the Met” Ongoing. The ultimate balm to the soul in all of Western painting may be the Dutch works that include Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hals. Thanks to the very deep pockets of the collectors and robber barons of New York, the Met has them and is now displaying 67 of these masterpieces. Get lost in some of the finest brushwork and deepest color in all of painting; glimpse infinity. —J.S. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue.

Reggie Burrows Hodges He starts with a black canvas. Streams of glowing light wash over the accumulated tapestry of Black figures in the new canvases of Reggie Burrows Hodges. Here are post-Impressionist fields with soft edges and colors changing as if by iridescence, infusing these works with dignity and sparks of optical urgency. These almost visionary works give us an artist, in his mid-50s, at the height of his powers. —Jerry Saltz Karma, 188 and 172 East 2nd Street, through February 28.

Gordon Hookey: Sacred Nation, Scared Nation A Gary Simmons curation. Waanyi Aboriginal artist Gordon Hookey is a diamond in the visual rough, a political firebrand and the bringer of a cartoonish pictorial wisdom that makes his works ring with urgency and insight. His paintings connect “Black Aboriginal experience to that of African Americans.” His mural-scale paintings and colorful images light up space as much as the mind and show us that art is where we find it if we only keep looking and stay open to it. —J.S. fortgansevoort.com/online-exhibitions/gordon-hookey, through February 20.

Theater

Silver Lining Streaming Series Still mint condition. The much-loved New York stalwart the Mint Theater is in the business of reviving forgotten classics, so it’s unsurprising that it took a serious look at its own archive, offering a full (and free) slate of digital releases, films of productions from past seasons — including Lillian Hellman’s superb labor drama Days to Come (through February 22) and Teresa Deevy’s earthy but eerie Katie Roche (February 1 to March 28). —H.S. minttheater.org, through June 13.

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WFUV Live Online (January 28 – February 3)