Autumn in New York provides a nostalgic feel and a source of inspiration for many creatives alike. The textural contrast of fallen leaves against the city’s red brick façade is a visually harmonious partnership, and this month is abuzz with an array of intriguing and thought-provoking art from group shows to subversive installations.
New York continuously proves to be a powerhouse of creativity, and we don’t want you to miss a thing. Plan your next visit with our handy, monthly updated guide to the best exhibitions to see around the city.
Wanting a longer stay? See the Wallpaper* edit of New York's best design hotels.
The best New York art exhibitions: what to see this month
Sean Scully: Duane Street, 1981-1983
Lisson Gallery until 1 February 2025
Lisson Gallery presents the works of Irish-born American-based artist Sean Scully. Scully’s work incorporates varying mediums and intriguing compositions, including his painting ‘Four Musicians’ which combined reclaimed wooden struts, and assembled in the loft space of an old textile warehouse on Duane Street, in the then unfashionable and run-down neighbourhood of Tribeca. Venturing back to the 1980s, the exhibition focuses on the painter and sculptor’s breakthrough bodies of work.
Francesco Clemente: Summer Love in the Fall
Lévy Gorvy Dayan until 21 December 2024
‘Francesco Clemente: Summer Love in the Fall’ is presented across multiple floors across the gallery’s Beaux-Arts townhouse. The exhibition showcases the artist’s oil paintings, and watercolours which combine influences from India, West Africa, Egypt, and Italy to classical Greece and Rome. However, the underlying theme throughout is solidified through personal connection and relationships.
Kim MacConnel: Slice of Life
Luhring Augustine Chelsea until 21 December 2024
From paintings on bedsheets, to smaller gouache works on paper, ‘Slice of Life’ showcases works by Kim MacConnel, produced between 1979 and 1981. The exhibition highlights MacConnel's statement cotton-sheet pieces which are scattered with diluted acrylics and pinned to the walls, which channel a subliminal message nodding towards the issue of climate change and its anticipated impact over the near future.
Light of Winter
Perrotin New York until 21 December 2024
The group show, which brings together a variety of international, established and emerging artists, investigates the rich relationship human nature has with the natural world, and with cultural history, through the process of creating art, and introspection. ‘Light of Winter’ invites visitors to think about where they belong in an ever-evolving world.
Tania Franco Klein: Long Story Short
Yancey Richardson Gallery until 21 December
‘Long Story Short’ presents the first New York solo exhibition for Mexico City native Tania Franco Klein. Her work examines the modern anxieties and the ‘performative stresses that come from living life online’. Noting the constant need for self-improvement, productivity and self-obsession, Franco Klein explores how we fit in today’s eclectic reality and the adaptations of social behaviours.
Matthew Schreiber: Undertow
Almine Rech, Tribeca from 8 November to 14 December
Holographics and lasers are the anchor of Matthew Schreiber’s first solo exhibition with Almine Rech. The artist, who for the past 30 years has been making art with light technologies, presents his laser installation which is crafted specifically for the gallery’s interior dimensions. Boasting elliptical shapes covered in hazy smoke plays tricks on the eyes, an installation which dances between solid and fluid states.
The Street. Curated by Peter Doig
Gagosian until 18 December
Collaborating with the gallery, Peter Doig presents ‘The Street’, a curated exhibition of a personal selection of works by artists who have informed Doig’s own art work and development. Taking its name from Balthus’s 1933 painting ‘The Street’, the exhibition will explore urban life, labour, and architecture by a variety of artists including Francis Bacon, Max Beckmann, Vija Celmins, Prunella Clough, Giorgio de Chirico, Denzil Forrester, Jean Hélion, Mark Rothko, and Martin Wong, among others, along with new works by Doig himself.
Electric Op
Buffalo AKG Art Museum until 27 January 2025
In a collection of 90 works across six decades, Electric Op explores how artists use abstraction to unveil the complex relationship between perception and technology. In the 1960s ‘Op’ short for ‘Optical’ became an emerging movement whereby Op artists used abstract patterns to create optical illusions. The exhibition is an ode to this movement, which helped pave the way for art to be abstracted into analogue and digital movements.
Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies
Brooklyn Museum until 19 January 2025
The Brooklyn Museum has partnered with the National Gallery of Art to spotlight Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012), a pioneering Black female artist of the twentieth century, who has not received mainstream art world attention as she should have. With over 200 works, the exhibition showcases a variety of sculptures and prints all derived from her lifelong devotion to feminism, and social justice.
Edges of Ailey
Whitney Museum until 9 February 2025
'Edges of Ailey' is a large-scale exhibition celebrating the life and work of artist and choreographer Alvin Ailey (1931-1989). The exhibition focuses on his life, dances, and influences through live performances, music, a variety of archival materials and a multi-screen video installation. It is presented in two parts, with an immersive exhibition in the museum’s fifth floor galleries, and a performance in the third-floor theatre.
Who Wants to Die for Glamour
MoMA until 17 February 2025
Artist Jasmine Gregory’s latest exhibition is a visually tactile experience. Intertwining her paintings with wine bottles, vitrines, plastic bags, tinsel, and studio refuse, she creates scenarios which can be viewed as a satirical poke at patrimony and preservation. This is her first institutional exhibition in the US, which features a selection of new works, including a site specific installation.
‘Mexican Prints at the Vanguard’
The Met until 5 January 2025
The tradition of printmaking in Mexico is explored in this colourful exhibition. The early works from printmaker José Guadalupe Posada, who is known for his characterful skeletons which helped shape a global identity for Mexican art, through to printmaking following the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), the exhibition showcases a blend of works from eighteenth century through to mid-twentieth century. The exhibition looks at artists who took advantage of printmaking to address social and political concerns and voice resistance to the rise of fascism around the world.
‘Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage’
The Museum of Modern Art until March 2025
Robert Frank, who is best known for capturing post-war America and its following social and political unrest, is celebrated in MoMA’s latest exhibition Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage. After he passed away in 2019, it was in great discovery that tucked away in film canisters and tapes was an archive of unseen footage which spans the years 1970 to 2006. In partnership with the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, Frank’s long-time film editor Laura Israel and the art director Alex Bingham have used these fragments to create a moving-image scrapbook that conveys life through Frank’s lens.
‘What It Becomes’
Whitney Museum of American Art until 12 January 2025
Featuring the work of 11 artists, What It Becomes explores new and rarely seen works which explore what drawing is and what drawing can be. The exhibition presents a variety of processes and techniques inherent to drawing. Some artists have explored this through drawings on paper, in photography and video, while others have explored different tools, or using their body as a surface. The cohesive nature of the exhibition lies between identity and the beauty and possibility of reshaping or redefining oneself.
‘Ice Cold: An Exhibition of Hip-Hop Jewelry’
The American Museum of Natural History until 5 January 2025
Be immersed in the sparkling world of Hip-Hop jewellery at the American Museum of Natural History. Oversized gold chains and diamond encrusted keyrings are accompanied with star-studded names- The Notorious B.I.G., Jam Master Jay and Erykah Badu among them. But ‘Ice Cold’ aims higher, going way beyond the brilliantly audacious designs to illuminate hip-hop jewellery as part of a multi-layered trajectory of style, politics and sociocultural trends.
Writer Caragh Mckay
'In the Shadow of the American Dream: David Wojnarowicz'
Museum of Modern Art, ongoing
Wojnarowicz's work has been recontextualised by MoMA, who have presented it alongside his contemporaries from the eighties New York downtown scene including filmmaker Marion Scemama, Donald Moffett, Agosto Machado and painter Martin Wong. Important works here include Wojnarowicz's's 1987 Fire, while Machado’s Shrine is a moving time capsule of ephemera. It includes a ‘Justice for Marsha’ sign, referring to questions around the suspicious death of trans activist Marsha P Johnson in 1992, as well as club flyers and memorial service cards.
Writer: Lauren Cochrane
