September 2026
September opens a new Taryn Simon commission across the Guggenheim's rotunda, Arthur Jafa's first US museum survey at the New Museum, and Roy Lichtenstein's last year of work at the Whitney. MoMA's Frida and Diego closes on 12 September. Six picks in Manhattan and Queens.
Permanent guide to September 2026 →
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum · Opens 18 September
New photographs, text, video, and sculpture, built into one interactive installation that climbs the whole rotunda. It opens 18 September and runs into March.
New Museum · Opens 25 September
Nearly four decades of work in Jafa's first US museum survey, including the videos "Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death" and the Golden Lion-winning "The White Album," plus new pieces on Black life in America.
Whitney Museum of American Art · Opens 5 September
Prints, photographs, sculptural maquettes, and studies for projects he never realized, all from 1997, the last year of Lichtenstein's life. Most of it is rarely shown, and it opens 5 September.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art · Opens 17 September
Beijing-based Liu Wei takes over the Met's Fifth Avenue facade with a work about cycles of rupture and resistance. It goes up 17 September and is free to see from the street.
MoMA PS1 · Opens 10 September
Posters, film, photography, sculpture, and ephemera from an international artists' campaign for the treaty banning nuclear weapons, with work by Regina José Galindo and Carlos Amorales. Opens 10 September.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) · Closes 12 September
Six Kahlo paintings and more than a dozen Rivera works from MoMA's collection, timed to the Met Opera's premiere of "El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego." It closes 12 September.
Whitney Museum of American Art
A focused show of rarely seen works from the final year of the Pop artist's life, including prints, photographs and sculptural maquettes alongside studies for unrealized projects, revealing his late-career experimentation.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The first US exhibition on the Savonnerie centers The Met's three monumental Baroque carpets woven for Louis XIV's Grande Galerie at the Louvre, tracing their making and dispersal.
Hauser & Wirth · Free
At the Wooster Street space in SoHo, Rita Ackermann's Chemical Alphabet paintings take letters from a Semitic alphabet as compositional anchors, built up in acrylic chalkboard paint over silkscreened canvas and repeatedly erased and redrawn.
Hauser & Wirth · Free
The first New York exhibition in nearly fifteen years devoted to Jean Arp, curated by Alexis Lowry with the Stiftung Arp, taking his late Threshold sculptures as a point of departure and tracing a line from his early cut-outs and reliefs to his mature work.
Hauser & Wirth · Free
London-based artist George Rouy's latest body of work, shown in sequential exhibitions with Hannah Barry Gallery, exploring the human body in states of transformation, reconstruction and becoming.
David Zwirner · Free
New and recent landscape paintings by Scott Kahn, blending representational and surreal elements—billowing clouds, ominous moonscapes, and bare trees electrified by unexpected hues.
David Zwirner · Free
New shaped canvases, paintings, and works on paper, including key-shaped pieces, in which Lowman reworks imagery from art history, news, and pop culture to probe access and exclusion.
Gagosian · Free
Deana Lawson's first solo exhibition with the gallery, at 541 West 24th Street: mirror-framed photographs and holograms from her Edge Control series, which reimagines beauty-supply-store surveillance imagery.
Hauser & Wirth · Free
At the 18th Street editions space, a survey spanning sixty years of the Brazilian artist's practice in three chapters — early prints and works on paper from the 1960s-70s, photography from the late 1970s-80s, and sculpture from 1990 to today — released alongside a documentary of the same title.
Hauser & Wirth · Free
The gallery's first exhibition with Lee Bul, guest-curated by Dr. Jiyoon Lee, bringing together major new sculptures with recent bodies of work that examine humanity's drive to transcend nature through technology and systems of control.
The Studio Museum in Harlem
A group exhibition exploring geometry as an organizational principle, translating sources from city maps to West African textiles into a shared visual vocabulary spanning figuration and abstraction.
MoMA PS1 · Free
An international artistic campaign in support of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, presenting posters, film, photography, sculpture and ephemera by artists including Regina José Galindo and Carlos Amorales, organized by Estudio Pedro Reyes and ICAN.
David Zwirner · Free
Twelve large-format works from Ruff's jpegs ny series, pixelated images of the September 11 attacks, shown for the twenty-fifth anniversary.
Pace Gallery · Free
New paintings by Torkwase Dyson drawn from her experiences as a deep-sea diver, exploring the "boundless state change of water" through distance, light, perception, and planetary transformation.
Pace Gallery · Free
Sculptures by Lynda Benglis spanning over five decades, in glazed ceramic, bronze, glass, and paper, exploring knotting, pleating, and folding across materials.
Pace Gallery · Free
New monumental metal sculptures and intimately scaled ceramic works exploring "lightness, precarity, color, and construction" in aluminum, Cor-Ten steel, and clay, including a revived terra sigillata series.
Brooklyn Museum
Michael Richards's sculpture of a pilot pierced with nails commemorates the Tuskegee Airmen, the US Air Force's first Black unit.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Choreographer Sarah Michelson performs a daily dance in the Marron Family Atrium, treating it as her working studio alongside a rotating cast of dancers.
Gagosian · Free
A comprehensive survey of Brice Marden's paintings spanning six decades at the West 21st Street gallery, the first such show of his work in New York in twenty years, with major loans from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney, and other collections.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Beijing-based artist Liu Wei (born 1972) inspires visitors to ponder cycles of rupture and resistance for the 2026 Genesis Facade Commission.
David Zwirner · Free
Abstract paintings and works on paper by the New Zealand-born, LA-based artist, who pours oils and unconventional materials like oxidized iron to balance spontaneity and control.
Gagosian
New uniformly scaled sculptures by Jordan Wolfson incorporating emblematic color and black-and-white photographs sourced online and from personal and academic archives, at 555 West 24th Street — the artist's first exhibition with the gallery in New York.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
A major new commission premieres never-before-seen photographs, text, video, and sculpture in a single interactive installation spiraling through the entire rotunda.
Whitney Museum of American Art
The inaugural solo museum presentation of Senegalese American artist Coumba Samba, an immersive installation examining nuclear power and African resource extraction through symbols of the U.S. military-industrial complex.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Marianne Wex's 1970s feminist photo survey of gendered body language is shown alongside contemporary artists Nona Faustine, Martine Gutierrez, K8 Hardy, Yuki Kihara, Joiri Minaya, Paulina Olowska, and Wendy Red Star, reappraising bodies in public space.
Gagosian · Free
Bea Scaccia's debut exhibition with the gallery, at the Park & 75 space: seven new paintings of nocturnal, sumptuous scenes assembled from fabric, wigs, jewelry and other accoutrements of feminine style, curated by Francesco Bonami.
The Shed
A live performance honouring the activism of a civil rights legend.
New Museum
Jafa's inaugural US museum survey spans nearly four decades of work, including "Love is the Message, The Message is Death" and the Golden Lion-winning "The White Album," alongside new pieces exploring Black life in America.
New Museum
The Italian artist's first solo New York museum show presents three recent films alongside the newly commissioned "Krapfen" (2025), blending horror, comedy, and animation to explore desire, memory, and perception.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Multidisciplinary artist David Hartt transforms John Vanderlyn's 19th-century painting Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles into a site-specific installation exploring place and perspective.
New Museum
The inaugural exhibition traces five centuries of the Bowery's history, from Lenape footpath through skid row to thriving arts community, examining the street as a site of ongoing reinvention.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
A survey of painter Nilima Sheikh's five-decade practice, tracing her engagement with Kashmir through narrative scroll paintings including a new, site-responsive series debuting at MoMA.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
MoMA's first exhibition devoted entirely to information design, presenting 30 works of digital and analog design — including six new acquisitions — that explore how designers help visualize and shape our understanding of complex data.
David Zwirner · Free
A benefit exhibition of new and recent works by more than 40 contemporary artists, with proceeds supporting the Ali Forney Center's work with homeless LGBTQ+ youth in New York City.
Gagosian · Free
A landmark gathering of Marcel Duchamp's revolutionary readymades, the everyday objects he declared art and that upended the 20th century, on Madison Avenue.
Gagosian · Free
Six important early works by Robert Rauschenberg from the Cy Twombly Foundation, including pieces from his Black Painting, Elemental Sculpture, and Combine series, shown alongside the Duchamp exhibition marking the Rauschenberg centennial.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The first major show on the bond between musical instruments and the body brings together some 130 works across 4,000 years, from ancient rattles and Degas to one of Prince's guitars.
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
More than 70 large-format photographs by Christopher Payne documenting American factories and craft, from musical instruments and flags to semiconductors and aerospace components.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Two of Peggy Weil's immersive underscapes, 88 Cores and 18 Cores, visualize Earth's deep climatic history on the 24-foot screen in MoMA's lobby.
The Morgan Library & Museum
A two-part show tracing tarot from a Renaissance courtly card game to its embrace by 20th- and 21st-century artists seeking new symbolic and spiritual languages.
Brooklyn Museum · Free
In this site-specific installation, Keisha Scarville overlays portraits and still lifes onto abstract patterns, many sourced from garments owned by her late mother, Alma. Several images come from her series Mama's Clothes.
The Morgan Library & Museum
Ephemera from Richard L. Menschel's collection — gallery announcements, price lists, and promotional materials — chronicling the 1970s–80s "photo boom" that established photography as a fine art.
Whitney Museum of American Art
The 82nd edition of the Whitney's landmark survey of contemporary American art, gathering fifty-six artists, duos and collectives exploring interspecies kinship, geopolitics, technology and precarious ecologies.
The Met Cloisters
Set in the medieval galleries of The Met Cloisters, this exhibition gathers over 50 works from Europe and the ancient Americas (500 to 1500 CE) exploring myth, hybrid creatures and the imagination.
Whitney Museum of American Art
A collection of Polaroid photographs Andy Warhol shot in 1972–73, drawn from the personal "family albums" he kept documenting collaborators, celebrities, friends and daily life.
The Morgan Library & Museum
Over 110 contact sheets and 20 enlargements trace photographer Peter Hujar's creative evolution from the 1950s through 1987.
The Morgan Library & Museum
About twenty-five works on paper from poet John Ashbery's personal collection, including portraits and collaborations by his artist friends, 1945–2007.
Brooklyn Museum
An exhibition that puts America's past in dialogue with its present.
The Morgan Library & Museum
Nineteenth-century oil sketches from the Thaw Collection exploring how artists captured light and luminosity through color.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Freestanding screens throughout the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden use machine learning and fMRI-derived data to generate hallucinatory images in real time, exploring nonhuman and machine cognition.
Brooklyn Museum
North American debut of Dutch couturier Iris van Herpen, with 140+ sculptural haute couture creations shown alongside contemporary art, design, and natural history specimens.
Pace Gallery · Free
Nine life-size drawings by Talking Heads' David Byrne line the stairwell landings between the flagship's first and seventh floors, reflecting his surreal, playful sensibility.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
The first major survey of modern architecture across seven West African nations from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, exploring how building shaped newly independent states. Most objects have never been shown publicly.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Inaugurating the new Conde Nast Galleries, the Costume Institute pairs nearly 400 garments with paintings and sculpture to explore how art has depicted the dressed body.
Whitney Museum of American Art
A touring retrospective of self-taught artist Minnie Evans's work from 1935-1981 — vibrant drawings, paintings and collages blending spiritual imagery with natural motifs, made in North Carolina during the Jim Crow era.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Early 20th-century European avant-garde painting drawn from the collection, with works by Kandinsky, Goncharova, Franz Marc and others who reimagined painting for a rapidly changing world.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
A sweeping survey of Pop art from the 1960s to today, with works by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Hamilton and Chryssa shown alongside a Yayoi Kusama Infinity Mirror Room and recent contemporary acquisitions.
Dia Chelsea · Free
A comprehensive survey of Argentine Conceptual artist David Lamelas, tracing his work from 1965 to today across film, sculpture and performance, unfolding as exhibition, film program and live work.
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg's immersive video and sound installation digitally resurrects an extinct male Northern white rhino using AI and visual effects, questioning whether species resurrection is a justified answer to extinction.
The Studio Museum in Harlem
Photography by seventeen teen artists from the Studio Museum's signature Expanding the Walls program, capturing New York's streets alongside intimate moments at home.
Brooklyn Museum
Three chapters of longtime favorites and new standouts, bringing fresh narratives to the fore while exploring the collection's history and future evolution. Marks the Museum's bicentennial.
The Studio Museum in Harlem
The first exhibition to tell the story of arts advocate Peggy Cooper Cafritz as a collector, drawing on her bequest of over 200 artists of African descent across multiple media.
The Studio Museum in Harlem
A site-specific installation by Kapwani Kiwanga reworking the quilting "flying geese" pattern in natural dyes, evoking the Underground Railroad and histories of Black resistance.
Brooklyn Museum
An immersive sound installation built around Representative John Lewis's speech on the floor of the US House during the December 1998 impeachment debate.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Treasured Korean objects are turned around to reveal their interiors, reverses, and hidden details, offering a fuller view of each work's form across two rotations.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Results from a collaborative exchange among curators, conservators, and digital specialists studying The Met's Della Robbia sculptures.
National September 11 Memorial & Museum
Historic American flags tied to 9/11, including the Ground Zero Flag, paired with personal stories in Foundation Hall to mark the nation's 250th anniversary.
Brooklyn Museum
A six-year installation of the Rubin Museum's beloved Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room within the Arts of Asia galleries: over 100 thangkas, sculptures, and ritual objects arranged as an elaborate household shrine, with chanted prayers, butter lamps, and incense.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.
