Several museum shows are timed to close at the end of the holiday season; don’t let your chance to see Elizabeth Peyton’s and Mary Heilmann’s solo shows at the New Museum slip away. To much publicity, Peyton added a portrait of Michele Obama to her exhibition after November 4th, but the artist’s best work comes when she indulges her obsession with wan and pretty men. Plenty of female artists have depicted men in feminizing ways to in order to critique conventional portrayals of women, but Peyton doesn’t demean her subjects, instead giving them their own aura of exquisiteness. Downstairs, forty years of painting, ceramics and furniture by Mary Heilmann refreshingly demonstrate this much admired artist’s ability to conjure a range of moods – – electrifying, humorous, or serene – through her abstract canvases. Highlights include ‘Lovejoy, Jr.,’ a day-glo grid inspired by the stained glass windows in the church on The Simpsons and a row of blue and white paintings in the lobby gallery, which riff on the meeting of land and sea.