October 2026
October opens hard. The Met hangs Krasner and Pollock together from the 4th, the Whitney opens Lichtenstein: Like New on the 11th, and MoMA rebuilds Brancusi's studio on the 25th. The Frick brings Sienese bronzes to Fifth Avenue. Six picks, and Hujar's contact sheets leave the Morgan on the 25th.
Permanent guide to October 2026 →
The Metropolitan Museum of Art · Opens 4 October
The Met hangs the two painters in one room, canvas against canvas, across the years they shared a house in Springs. The overlaps and the arguments are visible in the paint.
Whitney Museum of American Art · Opens 11 October
Ben-Day dots blown up close enough to see the printing logic behind them. The Whitney draws on its own deep Lichtenstein holdings, so the show runs from early comic panels to the late brushstroke paintings.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) · Opens 25 October
MoMA reassembles the Paris studio Brancusi treated as a single work: polished bronzes, the carved bases he counted as part of the sculpture, and his own photographs of the room.
The Frick Collection · Opens 15 October
Small Renaissance bronzes from Siena, shown at the Frick's own scale. You look at them from a foot away, close enough that the chasing and the tool marks still read.
The Studio Museum in Harlem · Opens 1 October
A year of studio work by the 2026 artists in residence, and the first thing the Studio Museum puts up this month in its new Adjaye building. New painting and sculpture.
The Morgan Library & Museum · Closes 25 October
Peter Hujar's contact sheets rather than his finished prints: the whole roll at a time, the near misses alongside the frame he chose. Last weeks before it comes down.
The Studio Museum in Harlem
The first Artist-in-Residence cohort in the Studio Museum's new building: Derriann Pharr, Simonette Quamina and Taylor Simmons use figuration across mediums to explore cultural memory and time.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Conceived by Si Lewen (1918–2016) in the aftermath of World War II, The Parade is informed by the artist's extraordinary life.
Brooklyn Museum
More than 50 modern European works by Cézanne, Modigliani, Degas, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Soutine, from the Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection gift.
Brooklyn Museum
The first exhibition to examine the Hopi kachina doll tradition from the perspective of the women and girls who receive them, presented at the Center for Feminist Art.
Brooklyn Museum
East Coast debut of the first major Americas exhibition on manga as an art form, with more than 600 original drawings including Inuyasha, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and ONE PIECE.
Brooklyn Museum
Twenty-one works from the collection trace 900 years of Japanese narrative imagery behind modern manga; a companion to Art of Manga.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
A survey of Surrealism's book-as-art-object experiments by André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Claude Cahun, Max Ernst and others, built around a major gift of rare artists' books from the Helen and Sam Zell Collection.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The first major New York presentation devoted to either artist in more than 20 years.
Whitney Museum of American Art
A comprehensive retrospective of roughly 130 works spanning the 1940s through the 1990s, tracing how Roy Lichtenstein transformed mass-culture imagery into iconic Pop art while probing duplication and the circulation of images across media.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Digital installation Berl-Berl reimagines Berlin's lost wetlands as a singing, digital swamp, blending ecological research, Slavic folklore and game-engine technology to explore human and more-than-human worlds.
The Frick Collection
Nearly forty Renaissance bronzes, including works by Donatello and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, exploring the innovations of Sienese sculptors in the second half of the 15th century.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The dazzling stained-glass windows, lamps, mosaics, and interiors from Tiffany's studios began as drawings created by the many talented designers who worked there.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
For the first time in decades, rarely lent sculptures leave Brancusi's Paris atelier (closed for renovation) to join MoMA's Brancusi collection, alongside his photographs, films, hand-carved furniture, tools and archival materials.
David Zwirner · Free
New paintings and drawings, recent sculptures, and early works spanning from the 1980s to today — the artist's first solo presentation with David Zwirner and his first major New York solo show in nearly a decade.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Brooklyn Museum
Michael Richards's sculpture of a pilot pierced with nails commemorates the Tuskegee Airmen, the US Air Force's first Black unit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
12 Nov · Neue Galerie New York
12 Nov · The Frick Collection
14 Nov · Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
21 Nov · The Shed
21 Nov · Whitney Museum of American Art
New Museum
The sixth edition of the museum's signature international triennial for early-career artists, co-curated by Vivian Crockett and Isabella Rjeille, examines how artists destabilize fixed notions of territory, identity, gender, and sexuality.
Whitney Museum of American Art
A video exhibition exploring American industry, oil culture and Arab immigration through the perspective of a jinn, blending documentary footage and personal testimony to examine identity in post-9/11 America.
Whitney Museum of American Art
Nearly two decades of work by Iñupiaq and Koyukon artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs — paintings, sculptures and installations on history, cultural continuity and land use — her first solo museum show in New York.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
The first major survey of Piet Mondrian's final New York years (1940-44), reuniting Broadway Boogie Woogie and Victory Boogie Woogie for the first time in 30 years and tracing boogie woogie's influence on his late compositions.
The Frick Collection
The first exhibition devoted to French enameler Susanne de Court, bringing together around fifty of her signed Limoges enamels for the first time.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Costume Institute's spring 2027 exhibition examines the career of John Galliano, one of the most inventive and influential designers of the past four decades.
Whitney Museum of American Art
The first traveling retrospective of founding Latinx artist Juan Sánchez, gathering over 60 works spanning four decades on Puerto Rican identity, community memory and social transformation.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.
