Start at Olney Gleason with Tony Lewis, whose show title makes its argument before a single drawing is seen. "Abstract Slavery" isn’t a provocation — it’s a thesis. Lewis treats the Atlantic slave trade as an event so vast, so systematized, and so incompletely documented that it resists fixed representation. The slave ship is a logistics diagram. The plantation is a spatial technology. The manifest is a spreadsheet of human beings reduced to inventory. His response is to use drawing as an analytic instrument: Word Search puzzles where the hidden words are names from slave manifests. Color Shorthand that translates color theory’s neutral vocabulary into the racial grammar it was always encoding. White drawings on white ground, literally invisible under certain lighting. Floor drawings that make viewers complicit by walking across fragile surfaces. This is his first New York solo, and it closes June 6.

Walk into Chelsea’s gallery corridor. At Gagosian on 24th Street, Anselm Kiefer — whose title announces the stakes: "Seal My Ears Shut and I Shall Hear You Still." Kiefer has spent five decades burying German history in lead, ash, straw, and sunflowers. The paintings are enormous, the surfaces thick enough to cast shadows, and the weight is both literal and historical. One block away, Giuseppe Penone takes weight in the opposite direction. An original member of Arte Povera — the same movement that produced Kounellis, showing simultaneously on the Met walk — Penone casts his own breath in bronze, presses his body into clay, and grows trees through the centers of his sculptures. The reflection of bronze is a reflection of the body that made it.

Helen Frankenthaler, at the third Gagosian location on 21st Street, offers the walk’s counterpoint. Where Lewis, Kiefer, and Penone load the mark with history, Frankenthaler lets it go. Her soak-stain technique — pouring thinned paint onto unprimed canvas so the color becomes the surface — was an act of radical trust. The paint goes where gravity and weave take it. The hand guides but doesn’t control.

Gemini G.E.L.’s "Summer in the City" gathers Serra, Guston, Baldessari, Celmins, and others at a printmaking workshop where artists refused to treat the stone as a neutral servant. These are prints that carry the same physical conviction as paintings or sculptures — because the medium pushed back.

Five stops on the same neighborhood grid, and every room asks how much weight a mark can bear.