The anchor is a deceptively quiet show: eight artists — Ed Ruscha, David Hockney, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Joan Mitchell, Barnett Newman — working at Gemini G.E.L., the Los Angeles lithography workshop that Ken Tyler turned into a laboratory for artistic collaboration. The stones they pulled aren’t reproductions. They’re original works in a medium that requires the artist to think in reverse, to negotiate with the physical resistance of the stone, to accept what the press gives back. Tyler’s workshop became a place where painters had to unlearn their own habits — and what emerged was often stranger than what they made in the studio.

Walk south to Marian Goodman for Julie Mehretu, whose title alone is worth the trip: "Our Days, Like a Shadow (a non-abiding hauntology)." The paintings are translucent — shadows literally pass through the surface as gallery light changes. She layers architectural drawings, maps, gestural marks, and Ben Day dots into strata that record their own making, then makes the whole assembly permeable to light. The new collaboration with Nairy Baghramian presents translucent panels clamped in metal brackets that hold them vertical but allow light through — the sculptures hold the paintings open for inspection. Closing June 6.

Lucia Hierro at Marc Straus makes the walk’s argument physical. A Dominican-American sculptor who inflates the contents of bodega shelves to monumental scale — soft sculptures of plantain chips, phone cards, Goya cans. The objects of daily life in immigrant neighborhoods, enlarged until they can’t be overlooked.

At Schoelkopf, the context deepens. "New York City Circa 1960" gathers Wolf Kahn, Elaine de Kooning, Bob Thompson, Milton Resnick, and Robert De Niro Sr. — the generation that built the downtown scene the later artists inherited. This is the city before it was mythologized, when painters lived in lofts because they were cheap.

The New Museum’s "New Humans: Memories of the Future" closes the loop — technology, embodiment, and what the city is becoming. Five stops, one afternoon, and the argument runs from the lithographic stone to the algorithmic future.