Connecting the dots formed by New York gallery exhibitions is a perpetual art world pastime. The process involves matching little details or broad stylistic trends, recognizing recurring themes and common materials, or sometimes just finding the shared thread in one's own seemingly unrelated reactions. And everybody comes up with a different diagram.

Right now there are interesting connections to be drawn from a handful of exhibitions spread around Manhattan, including some impressive solo debuts and a remarkable group show. Visiting them takes one through a progression of neighborhoods, architectural settings and ways of making and presenting art - to arrive, at least by my lights, at the suspicion that there is something new and exciting percolating beneath the surface of the art world of New York.

For one thing, there's something of a youthquake going on, with a rash of young artists interested, as most young people are, in the thrills and dilemmas of being young. For another, New York art is having a hands-on moment. While artists have always worked with their hands, right now those hands seem to be especially busy. Knitting, sewing and quilting have a raised profile; so do quirky, even craftlike ways of drawing and painting, and approaches to video that make the medium feel thoroughly worked over - touched, so to speak.

And the underground is everywhere. It is no longer the pride or bane of a few gentrification-ready neighborhoods. You can find new art on the Upper as well as the Lower East Side; in Chelsea, which is much less the homogenized blue-chip zone it is often thought to be, as well as in Harlem.

Of course, these developments are not entirely unrelated. They are, to stretch observation into metaphor, all signs of people taking things into their own hands, of a healthy autonomy. They have, for me, the atmosphere of 1970's pluralism and laissez-faire, but this time more fleshed out and purposeful. It is less a pervasive condition than a question of personal style, if not a philosophy. It may be perpetuated by artists' collectives or by individuals working in so many mediums that each artist could appear to be a one-person collective.

These artists are confidant, free of ideology and, despite being camera savvy and computer adept, transfixed by the physical possibilities of art-making. Using Photoshop doesn't mean you can't also knit. Taking up a video camera doesn't mean you can't wield it like a paintbrush, or edit with the precision of a jeweler. Several of these shows may remind you that the children of the original flower children are becoming artists.

After all, boiled down to its essence, craft is simply concentration and care made manifest. It is materialized love, which partly explains the sincerity found in much of the new art that's around today.

Craft is also an effective way for young artists to reclaim pop culture: a direct grass-roots effort to subvert and reshape the stuff they have been force-fed from an early age.

Kenny Schachter Contemporary

The place to begin this tour, because it provides the most undiluted glimpse of youth-crazed craft and love, is "Air Show," the tour-de-force debut of Misaki Kawai at Kenny Schachter Contemporary, a gallery on an old alley in the West Village that is straight out of "Gangs of New York."

Ms. Kawai, who is 24 and lives in Tokyo, gives new meaning to the word aircraft with a fleet of elaborately handmade airplanes, accompanied by puffy cotton jet trails and blue felt clouds. The latter are sewn to the angled steel-mesh walls of the gallery, whose intimist (read: tiny) industrial interior was designed by the Acconci Studio.

Suspended in midair, Ms. Kawai's fleet ranges from a large airliner to fighter jets and biplanes, all stitched together from assorted fabrics - underwear, baby blankets, flannel pajamas - that remind you that patchwork is among the oldest forms of appropriation. Ms. Kawai has the funky exquisiteness of the classic dollhouse vernacular down cold, from tiny pillows and emergency instructions to busy flight attendants and imaginatively attired, werewolf-wigged passengers (their faces are all photographs of Beatles) who are reading, tending computers and, in one case, drawing.

She may be indebted to that master of miniaturization Charles LeDray, but she could also be the 21st century's version of Ettie Stettheimer, the dollhouse-building sister of the self-taught painter Florine Stettheimer, who was also one of the great art salonistes of 1920's New York.

While in the vicinity, some side excursions can provide further evidence of craft's current prominence and recent history in art: "Cheap," a group show at White Columns; Tom Sachs's miniature city at the Bohen Foundation; and, at Elizabeth Dee in lower Chelsea, Kevin Landers's latest excursion into handmade social commentary, which includes a plastic-putty-and-fabric re-creation of the wall of Nike sneakers made famous by Andreas Gursky's panoramic photograph.