80 Museum Exhibitions and Biennials to See in Fall 2025

During the course of his short career, Ulises Beisso exhibited few of the 300 works he made in his native Uruguay, but he has enjoyed a healthy afterlife, appearing alongside young artists in the most recent edition of Brazil’s Bienal do Mercosul. Now, he’s getting the survey treatment with this show, which charts how Beisso redirected his professional work in graphic design and illustration toward spare paintings that dealt in coded ways with his identity as a gay man. Periodically, however, he addressed his identity outright: one painting from 1992 features a heart above text reading “homosexual / solo partes humanes.”

Through November 10, 2025

One memorable performance staged by Aki Sasamoto at New York’s SculptureCenter in 2016 involved pushing a giant ball of laundry sheets around using her feet, an act that she said was meant to mimic the behavior of dung beetles. More recent installations and performances by her from the past decade have continued that inventive line of inquiry, with the artist forming assemblages of everyday objects to map the strange workings of the natural world. This survey, her first in her home country, is likely to allow her work to retain its mystique—a good thing, of course.

Through November 24, 2025

During the late 1960s and early ’70s, Robert Grosvenor made a splash with gigantic steel and plywood sculptures that hung ominously over gallery spaces, aligning him with the Minimalist movement. But he would go on to resist that classification, producing oddball sculptures resembling unusually sized cars, boats, and basins for water. The American sculptor’s work is thus tough to place, but this survey may help offer a solid grounding for viewing his art, in part because Grosvenor has so much history in Kassel, where his art has appeared in two editions of Documenta.

Through January 11, 2026

Since the 1960s, Beatriz González has been painting images sourced from art history, pop culture, and the media, rendering them anew in fiery reds and cool blues. In so doing, she has made these pictures seem unfamiliar and asked her viewers to see them with fresh eyes. Though González has made work explicitly dealing with issues of its time, most notably her paintings of the 1980s responding to abuses of power in her home country of Colombia, this retrospective asserts that every work she has made is a political gesture, even when it appears otherwise.

Through February 1, 2026

In 1989, the long-reigning Emperor Shōwa died, ushering in a period of economic expansion and artistic growth in Japan. This survey takes stock of that period, with a focus on Japanese greats such as Miwa Yanagi, Takashi Murakami, Tatsuo Miyajima, and the collective Dumb Type. But intriguingly, the exhibition also includes foreigners drawn to Japan by its culture, among them Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, who bought the rights to an anime character named Annlee from a Japanese company in 1999 and then made a series of videos involving her.

September 3, 2025–December 8, 2025

In 1998, Lee Bul kicked off her “Cyborg” series, a group of sculptures resembling partially constructed bodies whose curvy torsos were clad in armor. The Korean sculptor had always been interested in how technology shaped desire; now, it became the primary subject of her work. This 150-work survey takes those sculptures as its starting point, showing how Lee has continued to envision people of the future, often with an eye to the role that the male gaze will play in the remaking of women’s bodies.

September 4, 2025–January 4, 2026

The Uzbek city of Bukhara is known for its Islamic architecture, but now it has the ambitions of becoming a contemporary art destination, too. This new biennial ought to aid in that process, with curator Diana Campbell Betancourt on tap to organize a healing-themed inaugural edition. Its artist list is highlighted by a range of well-known artists, from Gabriel Chaile to Tavares Strachan, but the true stars are likely to be Central Asians such as Gulnur Mukazhanova, a Kazakh artist who marked the 700th anniversary of Marco Polo’s death at the 2024 Venice Biennale through dazzling textiles.

September 5, 2025–November 20, 2025

In 2010, Anna-Stina Treumund tried to find a lesbian artist in her native Estonia and said she was unable to do so. Treumund had by then already committed herself to photographing members of Estonia’s lesbian community, but the experience ignited a passion in her that burned until her untimely death in 2017, when she was in her mid-30s. Today considered an artistic pioneer in Estonia, Treumund is finally getting a retrospective that features her own art alongside queer artists who followed in her footsteps.

September 5, 2025–January 11, 2026

For more than three decades, Jennie C. Jones has been given visual form to sound in paintings and sculptures that are spare, abstract, and subtle. (Some of those sculptures resembling stringed instruments debuted on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s rooftop this summer.) Past works have demonstrated a canny ability to turn the loudness of Minimalism quiet and subdued, a feat she will perform once more here in a new installation responding a grand Ellsworth Kelly painting. That work will be accompanied by new sound pieces, as well as a separate show of others’ art curated by Jones, who has selected pieces by Carmen Herrera, Mavis Pusey, Anne Truitt, and more.

September 5, 2025–February 1, 2026

With his edition of the Venice Biennale now behind him, Adriano Pedrosa returns with the latest iteration of his canon-expanding “Historiás” series, this one themed around environmental issues and the natural world. As with other “Historiás” shows, this one has a vast scope evincing no single approach to its wide-ranging subject. Among the 117 artists featured here are Archigram, a 1960s British avant-garde group that embraced new technological developments, and Carmézia Emiliano, a Macuxi painter known for her colorful images of her community surrounded by towering trees.

September 5, 2025–February 1, 2026

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, director of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, helms this year’s edition of Latin America’s top biennial, which he has themed around the migratory routes of birds and the flow of rivers. The ambitious premise will be illustrated using works by a heaping of young up-and-comers, from Josèfa Ntjam and Precious Okoyomon. But like many other recent biennials, it also places an emphasis on deceased artists now getting their due. One is Mohamed Melehi, a leader of the modernist Casablanca Art School movement who posthumously made his Venice Biennale debut last year.

September 6, 2025–January 11, 2026

The majority of fiber art filling galleries across the world today has a raucous, celebratory quality, but this exhibition sounds a more subdued note, spotlighting textiles that bear out a relationship to death and survival in the face of it. It’s a big topic, and one the show tackles ambitiously, traversing many eras and multiple continents. Expect to see a fragment from ancient textile produced by the Nazca people alongside recent work by Barbara Teller Ornelas, a Navajo weaver who survived the traumatic of experience of being sent to a government-run residential school as a child.

September 6, 2025–March 15, 2026

The German-born, Ghana-based artist Zohra Opoku trained in fashion design and now relies heavily on textiles, onto which she prints photographs from her family archive. The resultant works, often produced using fabric in resplendent shades of blue, are meditations on how one’s identity is unstable, its parts woven together, stitched, and restitched over time. This survey of these works will feature such recent pieces as the 2020–24 series “The Myths of Eternal Life,” for which Opoku responded to her cancer diagnosis by printing textiles of legs, breasts, and arms.

September 11, 2025–October 4, 2026

The Kazakh artist Almagul Menlibayeva has described Central Asia as an unsettled region still reckoning with the loss of history, both during the Soviet era and afterward. Her multimedia practice accordingly deals often with the reclamation of knowledge, but she does so not only through research—one recent project involved using AI to remake images of anti-government protests in Kazakhstan that were censored by the mass media. (She has also worked in more conventional mediums, including painting, the one in which she was trained.) Menlibayeva thus reconstructs history as she excavates it, and her relationship to the past is one core focus of this retrospective, one of the inaugural shows held at Kazakhstan’s first-ever private museum.

September 12, 2025–May 2026

This Turner Prize–winning artists is well known for his intentionally unsettling sculptures of elongated human bodies; one such figure featured prominently in 28 Years Later. The eerie effect is intentional, for they meditate on the strangeness of human existence. But his sculptures can be beautiful, too, as this show aims to prove. Alongside four decades’ worth of art surveyed within the Nasher’s walls, Gormley is situating new sculptures on the roofs of Dallas buildings; onlookers below are asked to admire them with awe.

September 13, 2025–January 4, 2026

To mark the 300th anniversary of his birth, Paris will celebrate Jean-Baptiste Greuze not with a retrospective but with a survey specifically focused on the ways he represented children, whom he viewed as symbols of purity. He was equally attentive to the role that kids played vis-à-vis their adult parents, whom he viewed as educators that whipped kids into shape and taught them reason. No surprise, then, that Greuze found favor with such philosophes as Denis Diderot, making him one of the most popular painters of the Enlightenment era.

September 16, 2025–January 25, 2026

Yuko Mohri’s Japanese Pavilion was one of the more unusual attractions at least year’s Venice Biennale, where her sculptures formed from fruits, wood furniture, plastic piping, wiring, and more struck a wonderfully odd chord. With that pavilion, she displayed an interest in creating her own makeshift systems, something the artist will attempt once more in this site-specific show.

September 18, 2025–January 11, 2026

Following a postponement and a curatorial turnabout, the Istanbul Biennial is back with curator Christine Tohmé at the helm. Her edition centers around the notion of “The Three-Legged Cat,” a tripedal being that must practice “new gymnastics, often faltering yet resolving with ceaseless grace,” much like the artists involved, per her curatorial statement. Accordingly, the biennial has itself been split into three legs, the first of which will feature works by artists such as Simone Fattal, Lungiswa Gqunta, Khalil Rabah, and Jagdeep Raina.

September 20, 2025–November 23, 2025

The 2016 Kerry James Marshall survey that traveled the US was a revelation that spurred widespread interest in his home country. Now, Marshall mania will cross the pond in the form of this survey, which will feature some 70 of his works revisiting and revising canonical artworks to tell new versions of Black history. But even those who saw the US exhibition will want to pay this new survey a visit, for it features a big work that did not appear in the former show: Knowledge and Wonder (1995), a 23-foot-long mural of children gazing admiringly at a range of sights that has never before left its home at the Chicago Public Library.

September 20, 2025–January 18, 2026

When the 2022 Venice Biennale took its name from Leonora Carrington’s writings, it helped trigger a renewed interest in the Surrealist painter, who became one of the most expensive female artists at auction last year. Now, Carrington fever will retake Italy with this survey, which suggests that her dreamy paintings were not only rooted in the culture of Mexico, where the British-born artist spent much of her career. Instead, it proposes that Italy also made a significant contribution to her art, with Renaissance paintings and an extended stay in Florence influencing her greatly.

September 20, 2025–January 11, 2026

Just in time for spooky season, here’s an expansive survey centered around the notions of specters, possession, and haunting as pictured by 80 artists active during the 19th century and onward. Alongside contemporary artists such as Rosemarie Trockel, Thomas Schütte, and Gillian Wearing, all of whom conjure eeriness through conceptual stratagem, the exhibition will also include mystically minded modernists such as Meret Oppenheim, a Surrealist whose 1934 work Little Ghost Eating Bread must have the most adorable apparition ever painted.

September 20, 2025–February 1, 2026

Three camels in the middle of a Brutalist building? It was an unlikely sight, but it was one that visitors to the Whitney encountered back in 1969 when they witnessed these Nancy Graves sculptures made from such materials as wax and burlap. Fifty-six years later, those camels return to the Whitney as the introductory works to this survey, which traces Surrealism’s impact on American art between 1958 and 1972. That was a period of turmoil in which artists sought to variously disarm and disquiet with works that channeled dream states, unseeable forces, and a weirdness distinct to this nation—topics generally skirted by dominant movements such as Pop and Minimalism. The show is thus devoted primarily to nonpareils who couldn’t be categorized, among them Ching Ho Cheng, Shigeko Kubota, Luis Jimenez, and more.

September 24, 2025–January 19, 2026

Many of Gabriel de la Mora’s paintings are painstakingly constructed from materials other than paint: thousands of obsidian fragments, many little butterfly wings, old posters and radio fabric. De la Mora, an assiduous collector of used treasures and discarded refuse, uses his art to show objects die only to gain a second life—hence the name of this survey, which puns the French phrase for “orgasm,” gesturing toward the sensuality of the Mexican artist’s work.

September 25, 2025–February 8, 2026

During the ’80s, Leda Catunda began using fabrics and graphics in her work, striking a lighter tone that was at odds with much of the steely conceptualism on offer in Brazil at the time. From the start, her work was light and buoyant, and the art she has produced since—much of it soft paintings hung with elements recalling appendages—has maintained that quality. But her art is not without ideas: beneath all its bright colors lies a bitter critique of consumerism. Her first major survey outside Brazil will explore why Catunda chooses visual resplendence as a conduit for that commentary.

September 26, 2025–February 8, 2026

Do you really need to be convinced to see this once-in-a-lifetime show? If so, consider this: it’s the first large-scale exhibition devoted to the Renaissance painter in the city where he once worked in roughly 70 years. In Florence, one can find a good deal of Fra Angelico’s lush religious scenes, which situate Biblical subject matter in settings that looked and felt contemporary—a departure from Medieval art, which often appeared to take place in a gold-leafed realm all its own. But you’re unlikely to find so many works by him—140, to be exact, spread across two museums—in Florence, or anywhere else in Italy, again anytime soon.

September 26, 2025–January 25, 2026

Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1972), a conceptual work that involved Eleanor Antin dieting and photographing her nude body as it changed, remains the artist’s calling card. The piece is deservedly shown often and widely, and is now regarded as a cornerstone of the feminist art movement. But this retrospective will prove that Antin was no one-hit wonder, with plenty of photographs, films, and conceptual pieces about the performance of femininity that merit just as much attention as Carving has received.

September 26, 2025–February 8, 2026

To ascribe any one set of interests to Lutz Bacher—who worked under a pseudonym and never revealed her actual name—is just about impossible. Here are some of her various projects: a piece composed of surveillance footage shot at the gallery of her dealer Pat Hearn, a stack of giant foam blocks, videos of the Empire State Building projected onto Plexiglas, abstractions derived from Donald Trump’s signature. Little of her work is easy to understand, but nearly all of it is easy to love. Here comes a retrospective that may or may not provide some answers about what she was really up to.

September 26, 2025–January 4, 2026

Anders Zorn may be one of the few foreigners with work in the collection of the White House—a portrait of William Howard Taft, one of two Presidents who modeled for him—and that’s because at a certain point in his career, Zorn was more famous in the US than he was in his homeland of Sweden. But this 150-work survey suggests that Zorn’s Swedishness is essential to his paintings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which picture subjects such as a Midsummer dance and sun-dappled Baltic seas via wispy strokes clearly inspired by Impressionism.

September 26, 2025–January 25, 2026

In the past few decades, queer art history has come in for a rewrite, with greater attention paid to queer artists active before the postwar era, a less explored part of this lineage. This survey looks to add even more new chapters to art history—not just by focusing on queer artists like Romaine Brooks, George Platt Lynes, Richmond Barthé, Claude Cahun, and plenty of others, but also by revisiting queer content to be found in work by straight artists. One particularly intriguing section of this show will focus on representations of androgyny and intersexuality in Surrealist art by René Magritte, Max Ernst, and the like.

September 27, 2025–February 15, 2026

When Suzanne Jackson gave birth to her son in 1971, she published a book of her poetry and art called What I Love, whose cover was a painted heart-shaped face. The book’s title and cover implied that Jackson’s art has always been warm with compassion—even when she’s working in abstraction and not explicitly representing people—hence why she tweaked that book’s name for her SFMOMA retrospective titled “What Is Love.” The show will explore how Jackson, the founder of Los Angeles’s trailblazing Gallery 32, lends her art a human touch, with recent “anti-canvases” taking the form of hanging masses of scavenged lace, netting, seeds, and more that gain new life in her hands.

September 27, 2025–March 1, 2026

Curvaceous wooden forms and oblique references to American history recur throughout the rich sculptures of Martin Puryear, an artist who specializes in sedateness. His work can be so sedate, in fact, that it is sometimes hard to parse—something the artist has embraced, once saying, “The most interesting art for me retains a flickering quality, where opposed ideas can be held in a tense coexistence.” This survey, his first major one since representing the US at the 2019 Venice Biennale, offers a prime chance to make sense of that flickering quality, with 45 of his works—including some monumental sculptures—marshaled here.

September 27, 2025–February 8, 2026

Rather than call his groups of paintings “series,” as most artists do, the Austrian painter Tobias Pils prefers the word “families,” a term that underscores the way his tangles of figures are all related to one another. Then again, his paintings, often done in grey tones, are about how visual ideas modulate as they are translated between spaces, as perhaps befits an artist whose work is so pleasantly odd. This survey will offer a chance to try to make sense of Pils’s unusual painterly logic.

September 27, 2025–April 12, 2026

The title of this show implies that artmaking has always been a form of survival for the Anishinaabe, a group of 21 tribes based in the Great Lakes region, and is likely to remain that way far into the future. Though the show includes such well-known artists as the Bingwi Neyaashi Anishinaabek First Nation painter Norval Morrisseau, most of the 60 artists included are still awaiting recognition. Those artists, whose contributions range from beadwork to sculpture, include Frank Big Bear (White Earth Band of the Minnesota Chippewa), Maggie Thompson (Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa), and Jim Denomie (Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa).

September 28, 2025–April 5, 2026

Katlijne Van der Stighelen, a Belgian art historian, recalled three years ago that she discovered Michaelina Wautier’s Triumph of Bacchus (1650–56) in the storage facilities of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which she said had classified the piece as a “second-class” work, in part because it was by a woman. Now, the 12-foot-wide is the centerpiece of this retrospective, which aims to show that Michaelina Wautier was no run-of-the-mill artist. It will feature still lifes abundant with flowers, bacchanal scenes rife with drunken figures, and portraits filled with lavish fabrics, all in service of its thesis that Wautier deserves a place among the pantheon of great Baroque artists.

September 30, 2025–February 22, 2026

Lee Miller’s colorful life included modeling work, photography commissions for Vogue, and a professional and romantic relationship with Man Ray that lured her into the orbit of the Surrealist movement. Renewed interest in female Surrealists has made Miller popular in recent years—and perhaps may have been an indirect impetus for the making of a biopic in which Kate Winslet played the artist. But exhibitions for Miller on the scale of this 250-work retrospective have been rare, and that makes it something of an event. Included among those works will be her solarized self-portraits, for which Miller reversed the positive and negative qualities of her images to create images that were deliberately off-kilter.

October 2, 2025–February 15, 2026

Many performance artists of the 1970s placed themselves in precarious situations that required endurance. Few did so with such commitment as Tehching Hsieh, whose “One Year Performances” involved undertaking difficult tasks for an entire 12 months: spending a year on the streets, tying himself to the artist Linda Montano for seasons on end, repeatedly punching a time clock. In part because of the rigor involved in making these works, Hsieh is something of a hero to performance artists working today. Dia’s retrospective—astonishingly the first one ever awarded to the artist—seeks to grow his following.

Opens October 4, 2025

The landscapes of Andrea Carlson, an Ojibwe painter of European descent, dazzle the eye, with plenty of text, symbols, and natural forms piled atop one another. But Carlson has warned that these painting may not be so charming as they might appear, for as she recently told Art in America, “If you actually entered these landscapes, you’d be cut into pieces.” Thirty of her fraught meditations on the landscape genre will be featured here.

October 5, 2025–February 16, 2026

The Hammer’s Made in L.A. biennial has always been a font of talent to watch, but even more people will be watching this exhibition now than in the past, for the show will inevitably have to contend with the wildfires that wracked the city at the start of the year. From those blazes have sprung the seeds of creativity, and no doubt this show’s many wonderful creators, from the photographer Widline Cadet to the filmmaker Na Mira, will attest to the continued richness of LA’s artistic fabric. Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha will curate.

October 5, 2025–March 1, 2026

To curate this exhibition about sparse aesthetics, the Bourse de Commerce has wisely tapped Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Art Foundation, the New York institution that helped shape the Minimalist movement. But despite the show’s name, this is not a Minimalism survey. Instead, it’s a more expansive look at why artists around the world made the decision to pare down their work during the 1960s and ’70s, with the Korean Mono-ha movement, the Italian Arte Povera tendency, and the German Zero group all addressed alongside representative Minimalist artworks.

October 8, 2025–January 19, 2026

Joy Gregory’s 1989–90 piece Autoportrait, a grouping of cropped images of herself staring back at her camera, never offers a full picture of the artist—which is intentional. For decades, Gregory has been using photography to show how our conceptions of Blackness, Britishness, and femininity are cobbled together, though she has only recently gained recognition for it. Having won the £110,000 Freelands award in 2023, she will now have a retrospective that will pay special mind to her Jamaican heritage in series such as 2018’s “I’m Home,” for which Gregory shot family heirlooms and domestic spaces to envision all that her parents left behind when they came to England.

October 8, 2025–March 1, 2026

No matter where it sprung up, modernism was made, not born, and this 250-work show examines how it was constructed, painting by painting, artist by artist, in Nigeria. In curator Osei Bonsu’s conception of the movement, forging a modern aesthetic began in Nigeria as an anti-colonial gesture during the 1940s, with artists like Ben Enwonwu applying the visual language of European abstraction to distinctly African subjects. Many artists followed after him, reimagining Igbo motifs and Yoruba lore for a new era. The modernist canon, once limited largely to Western Europe, has grown to include many more perspectives in the past couple decades; this show already seems poised to be a gargantuan contribution to that project.

October 8, 2025–May 10, 2025

Artist Jeffrey Gibson follows his US Pavilion for the 2024 Venice Biennale with a less conventional project: an exhibition co-curated with Jenelle Porter, based on their book of the same name, that offers an intergenerational constellation of Indigenous artists. There are just 15 artists featured in the show itself—a fraction of the multitude surveyed in its printed counterpart—but the exhibition is decidedly a metonym, not an all-encompassing endeavor. Those artists include George Morrison, the late Ojibwe painter who worked alongside the Abstract Expressionists, and Teresa Baker, a Mandan and Hidatsa artist who makes her abstractions out of fiber and astroturf.

October 9, 2025–March 8, 2026

In 2007, when the Trinidadian painter Boscoe Holder died, Peter Doig purchased the artist’s entire record collection and immersed himself in the sounds of the Caribbean music Holder held so dear. Doig is typically discussed as a painter with an eye for color. Might he have quite a refined ear, too? This show suggests he does, implying that music has always been more central to his paintings than many have thought. It will feature at its core a Western Electric / Bell Labs sound system that will play tunes throughout the show, which will also be activated throughout its run by musically inclined artists such as Lizzi Bougatsos and Brian Eno.

October 10, 2025–February 8, 2026

From 1948 to 1963, in the Malian capital of Bamako, Seydou Keïta operated a photography studio; the pictures he shot there, featuring fashionably dressed youngsters garbed in dazzling patterns, act as crucial documents of their time. Keïta, who went on to work for his country’s government, is now commonly considered a pillar of African photography, though he has rarely been given flashy retrospectives in the US—the last one was staged at the Studio Museum in Harlem more than two decades ago. Thank goodness, then, for this Brooklyn Museum show, whose 275-item checklist includes plenty of his photographs alongside the clothes that inspired them.

October 10, 2025–March 8, 2026

Retrospectives always offer moments for profound reflection, but this one will provide that more so than most: its subject, the photographer Erwin Olaf, died unexpectedly following a lung transplant in 2023, leaving behind a video called For Life that will here make its debut in an unfinished form. While the content of that video still hasn’t been made public, the Stedelijk has said it will contend with death and survival in the face of it—a topic that always pervaded Olaf’s oeuvre, much of which dealt with queer self-expression in the Netherlands.

October 11, 2025–March 1, 2026

Claude Monet’s name calls up ponds in Giverny, a cathedral in Rouen, the seaside of Le Havre. What it likely does not bring to mind is Venice, the Italian city that this show proposes is more central to the Impressionist’s oeuvre than most imagine. Across the exhibition’s 100 works are many images of the city’s canals, which Monet rendered in his signature brushy way, allowing churches and palazzos to dissemble into bluish strokes. Monet said he left Venice with a “better eye”; the hope of this show is that viewers will leave it with a better eye for his work.

October 11, 2025–February 1, 2026

First there was the Met mega-exhibition “Manet/Degas”; now there is another two-person blockbuster centered around Édouard Manet, this one devoted to Berthe Morisot, a French painter who was close to him. Until very recently, Morisot was considered a secondary figure of the Impressionist movement, but surveys devoted to her have helped raise her profile. This show suggests that her loose painterly style, with her strokes left disparate and rough, owed something to Manet—who may even have learned a thing or two from her.

October 11, 2025–March 1, 2026

The use of the word “divine” in this show’s title refers to its subject matter—the 1,500-plus gods of ancient Egypt as represented in art—but it is also likely be an apt adjective to describe the exhibition as a whole, since the Met has a rich history of doing amazing blockbusters. The more than 200 pieces included here will run the gamut from grand statues to small metal and wood objects. Though the main attraction here is the masterworks on loan from other institutions, some of the exhibition’s true gems will be pieces held in the Met’s unequaled collection of Egyptian art.

October 12, 2025–January 19, 2026

Surprisingly, this Yayoi Kusama retrospective is being touted not with her immensely popular “Infinity Mirror Rooms”—one of which will figure here, fear not—but with the promise of offering Europeans a rare view of her early work of the 1950s and ’60s, which tend to get less play. In works of that era, Kusama foreshadowed her future interest in obsession via assemblages of air mail stickers and mesh-like pieces that she called “Infinity Nets.” They quickly established repetition as a fixture of her oeuvre, which has since gone on to mull topics like the male gaze and her own hallucinations.

October 12, 2025–January 25, 2026

What vision of America ought artists to put forward right now? It’s a question being debated widely right now, and nowhere more so than at the Smithsonian Institution, whose museums have been derided as “woke” and unpatriotic by the President of the United States. But long before that was a topic of mainstream discussion, the self-taught artist Grandma Moses was thinking through it in her own odd way, with paintings that represent quaint images of rural life in the Northeast. During the postwar era, her paintings gained widespread attention popular in the mainstream media—and polarized artists and the public alike, since few could agree on what she really meant with them. The debate is now likely to continue with this survey.

October 14, 2025–July 12, 2026

Of all the retrospectives taking place this fall, none are quite so momentous as this one for a leader of the Neoclassical movement in 18th-century France. It is possible in part because only the Louvre could ever mount such a show: the museum owns some of the greatest David works, including Oath of the Horatii (1784) and The Coronation of Napoleon (1805–7), which resurrected the flourishes of ancient Greek and Roman art to preach order and moderation for audiences of David’s day. But this remarkable museum has also flexed its might to gain some crucial loans for the show, including The Death of Marat (1793), which is regularly housed in Brussels. For once, it will join the more widely seen replica version held by the Louvre.

October 15, 2025–January 26, 2026

Smeary recreations of photographs found in newspapers, squeegeed abstractions, shocking meditations on the specter of Nazism, melancholy images of candles: Gerhard Richter has done it all and then some, revolutionizing painting over and over. The 93-year-old German artist has been explicit about the fact that he is done making new work, proclaiming that his 2023 David Zwirner exhibition in New York was his last show. And so, all we can do now is look back on Richter’s many innovations and take stock of them. This 270-work retrospective is a prime opportunity to do just that.

October 17, 2025–March 2, 2026

Following two well-received shows in Amsterdam earlier this year, Anselm Kiefer embarks on yet another big museum show with this survey, which places his monumentally scaled landscapes of the 1970s and ’80s alongside newer works that are even larger. Those new paintings, like the old ones, ponder Germany’s stricken postwar consciousness while offering plenty of eye candy by making heavy use of gold leaf. But it is the quieter, less visually appealing pieces of the ’70s and ’80s that act as the show’s centerpieces. These paintings were controversial during their time for reviving Nazi ideals while also obliquely commenting on them; for better or for worse, they remain potent today.

October 18, 2025–January 25, 2026

The notion that Europeans invented abstraction—a pervasive one ever since the days of modernism—has increasingly come under scrutiny, with many artists today reviving age-old styles derived from Indigenous and non-Western cultures as a rejoinder. One of those artists is Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota), whose paintings cast traditional Lakota motifs at a grand scale. But more than merely exposing the Western canon’s limits, White Hawk’s art also affirms the value of women’s labor: she often produces her work using labor-intensive processes involving quillwork and beadwork, and has occasionally enlisted Native collaborators. Three years after a star turn in the Whitney Biennial, the Minneapolis-based artist is now getting a mid-career survey in the city she calls home.

October 18, 2025–February 15, 2026

Billed as the biggest show of Indigenous Australian art ever staged in the US, this epic exhibition will see more than 200 works from the National Gallery of Victoria make a rare journey to another National Gallery across the Pacific. The exhibition takes its name from the abstractions of Yolŋu artist Gulumbu Yunupiŋu, whose gorgeous abstract paintings feature clusters of white dots as stand-ins for stars. The show’s artist list is thus a constellation, and it also includes people who worked in a much more conceptual vein, such as the late Destiny Deacon, a photographer who shot images of dolls depicting Aboriginal people that she labeled “Koori kitsch.”

October 18, 2025–February 28, 2026

Perhaps because of the queasy way Henri Rousseau painted dark-skinned figures as a locus of intrigue, there hasn’t been a major US show devoted to the Frenchman in nearly two decades. But this exhibition featuring nearly 60 of his works suggests that Rousseau’s dreamy jungle scenes may be more complex than some realize. Whether suspicious viewers will be swayed remains to be seen, but the show does at least include some impressive loans: The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), a famed painting of a lion and a dozer in a desert landscape, is making the rare journey from MoMA for the exhibition.

October 19, 2025–February 22, 2026

Guggenheim Museum deputy director and chief curator Naomi Beckwith is hard at work on the 2027 edition of Documenta, but in the interim, she’s getting ready to unveil another major curatorial endeavor, this survey of the ways that American artists have drawn on French theory. With an intergenerational artist list ranging from Cindy Sherman to Char Jéré, the exhibition proves that thinkers like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Frantz Fanon continue to retain a strong allure for Americans.

October 22, 2025–February 15, 2026

In an executive order earlier this year, Donald Trump wrote of a need for “solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage,” and remonstrated those who wanted to cast the nation in what he described as a “negative light.” Curator Hamza Walker had been at work on this survey of monuments and their discontents long before Trump’s executive order, but it now seems poised to make an even bigger splash. The exhibition will feature decommissioned monuments from across the US, placing them alongside contemporary artworks such as a newly commissioned Stan Douglas video installation that remakes a portion of Birth of a Nation.

October 23, 2025–April 12, 2026

Many of Truman Lowe’s sculptures involved taking symbols and objects associated with his Ho-Chunk heritage—totems, canoes, headdresses—and remaking them in forms so spare that they appeared barely there at all. His art suggests a fascination with what disappears across time. His first-ever retrospective should ensure that his work does not get forgotten. It’s a homecoming for the late artist, who was once a curator at this very institution.

October 24, 2025–January 2027

Most artists gain media attention for putting their work on view; Beau Dick, a Kwakwaka’wakw Hereditary Chief, became the subject of national news in Canada when he removed his art. In 2012, Dick removed his carved masks from a gallery in Vancouver and returned them to his community in Alert Bay. They were then ritually danced and burned, an act that he said “keeps them alive.” How he did just that with all of his masks is the subject of this show, billed as his first US survey.

October 25, 2025–January 18, 2026

Juan Uslé once called his abstract paintings “cartographies of sorts, mapping the psychological, the organic, and the scientific.” Many viewers have seen in them imagined spaces—his last major Reina Sofía show, in 2003, was even called “Rooms.” Core to the Spanish painter’s celebrated art is an inquiry: can a grouping of strokes form an entire world? Find out in this retrospective.

November 25, 2025–April 20, 2026

Even as President Trump turns up the pressure on museums that show art about xenophobia and racism along the US-Mexico border, this institution is not shying away. One of its big presentations this fall is a survey for Alejandro Cartagena, a photographer born in the Dominican Republic and based in Monterrey, Mexico, where he has shot memorable images of border walls and suburban sprawl. This retrospective will feature those works alongside more recent videos made using AI.

November 22, 2025–April 19, 2026

Robert Therrien remains most fondly remembered for his 1994 sculpture Under the Table, which takes the form of a 10-foot-tall kitchen table that towers over viewers. That work, like many others by Therrien, takes domestic objects and then enlarges them, questioning whether these items still seem familiar when their scale is so dramatically altered. Fittingly, the size of this show is quite large. At 120 works, it’s the sculptor’s biggest show since his death in 2019.

November 22, 2025–April 5, 2026

Can watching a film—or acting in one, for that matter—help revive lost history? This is the question that has animated Yang Fudong’s video installations, which have poetically and cryptically considered cultural amnesia in China. His work has struck a chord internationally, and it is likely to prove even more moving when seen in his home country at this survey, which will include works from his “Library Film Project,” a cycle of works that was conceived in 2005 as a 22-film series. Yang said at the time that the project asked: “Where is everyone’s spiritual life?” He’s still searching for answers; the project remains incomplete.

November 22, 2025–April 5, 2026

With this survey, curator Alison M. Gingeras attempts to distill 475 years of art by women into just a grouping of works by 130 artists—not exactly a small task. Gingeras’s project is ambitious and epic in scope, and she will approach it by dividing all this history into eight sections, each with their own fascinating mix of artists. One area about self-portraiture, for example, will feature the Italian Mannerist painter Lavinia Fontana alongside Somaya Crtichlow, a young British painter whose small-scale images of nude Black women meditate on centuries of female representation.

November 21, 2025–May 4, 2026

Imagine a painting of a wintry landscape, and you may well call to mind a Lawren Harris canvas depicting a snow-capped mountain beneath a gleaming sun. Paintings like those are famous in Canada, where they are commonly admired for their opulence—but this show proposes that Harris—and others like him—concealed a lot beneath the blankets of snow. Accordingly, this survey pairs works by him and Europeans like Camille Pissarro with Indigenous artists such as Pitseolak Ashoona, an Inuit printmaker whose works depict the animals that Harris wiped clean from his landscapes.

November 21, 2025–March 22, 2026

A show of Tom Lloyd’s sculptures kicked off the Studio Museum in Harlem’s inaugural program in 1968, and now, they will help usher this venerable New York institution into a new era when it reopens in November, following a seven-year closure and the completion of a $300 million new home. His sculptures of the ’60s tended to feature light bulbs stowed behind plastic lenses; they were a response, he said, to the pervasiveness of light in our modern media environment. It’s criminal that Lloyd remains lesser known than Chryssa and Dan Flavin, who also took light as their sculptural medium, though this show may help raise his profile.

Opens November 15, 2025

As a kid, Minnie Evans was kept awake at night by visions so intense that she found herself compelled to draw them starting in 1935. Filled with kaleidoscopic plants and mysterious faces, the resultant drawings and paintings channeled what she called “the lost world.” She would go on to gain quite a few fans for these works. In 1975, she became one of the first Black artists to have a Whitney Museum solo show; next year, that same New York institution will give her a full-dress retrospective. But before going on view there, the exhibition will make its debut at the High Museum, which has a reputation for its first-class presentations of folk and self-taught art, a category into which Evans has frequently been lumped.

November 14, 2025–April 19, 2026

It’s hard to look at Teresa Margolles’s work, and also hard to look away from it. Perhaps that only makes sense, given that Margolles has long been interested in that which cannot be seen, whether by choice or not, in her home country of Mexico—namely, all the carnage all around her. In paintings, sculptures, and installations that recall Minimalist art objects, she uses real blood and other ephemera associated with death to tackle such topics as femicide and the drug war. The toughness of her material may explain why, until this exhibition, no one had ever organized a comprehensive show of her art in Mexico.

November 13, 2025–March 2026

The long-awaited Museum of West African Art is finally here. Touted as a Nigerian institution that can house returned Benin Bronzes and masterworks of modern art alike, the museum formally kicks off its programming at its David Adjaye–designed home in Benin City with an expanded version of the Nigerian Pavilion for the 2024 Venice Biennale, which considered all the ways the nation’s culture and people have filtered out beyond its borders. Fresh to this iteration of the show is a site-specific installation by Modupeola Fadugba, whose paintings contend with the loss of history.

November 11, 2025–April 11, 2026

Even before the Surrealist canon was expanded significantly in the past decade, the Cuban-born Wifredo Lam was considered a fixture of the movement for his paintings of human-animal hybrids. His proximity to European Surrealists—he was based for part of his career in Paris—certainly helped in that regard. But this retrospective, billed as his biggest to date in the US, asserts that he retained a strong connection to Afro-Cuban traditions, even while he was based abroad. Paying special mind to his work’s ties to Cuba, the show seeks to provide an explanation for why Lam once described his art as “an act of decolonization not in a physical sense, but in a mental one.”

November 10, 2025–March 28, 2026

For the first time ever, the Shanghai Biennale, Asia’s most high-profile biennial, is being led by a woman: Kitty Scott, who has picked Daisy Desrosiers and Xue Tan to serve alongside her as curators of the event. The biennial hasn’t released an artist list yet, but its concept, centered around the notion of information-gathering, sounds juicy enough. Scott has promised that her show, titled “Does the flower hear the bee?,” will also turn its attention to nonhumans, showcasing “a wider network of communicative agents collectively shaping the world,” as she recently told the Observer.

November 8, 2025–March 31, 2026

Der Blaue Reiter, the German artists’ group credited with helping to launch Expressionism during the 1910s, tends to be thought of as a movement headlined by men, most notably Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky. But this survey shines a light on one of its few female members: Gabriele Münter, who has often been reductively labeled Kandinsky’s partner in modern art surveys, if she has been mentioned at all. Like her colleagues, Münter was fascinated by all that color could signify, painting mountains in unnatural shades of red and blue. Intriguingly, this show suggests that she was influenced to do so not only by her German compatriots but also by sights seen while traveling the US early on.

November 7, 2025–April 26, 2026

In 1981, Eric Fischl painted a young man fishing his way into a purse while an older, nude woman sprawls out before him. What did Fischl mean by that? It wasn’t clear then, it isn’t clear now, and the strangeness of tableaux like this one has continued to unsettle. And his work has grown ever stranger in recent years with its explicit references to contemporary hot-button issues. Among the works featured in this survey, staged in the city where Fischl was raised, is October 7: Heading Out (2023), which features a woman dressed in business attire staring at a laptop that may or may not display images of that day’s Hamas attack, which killed 1,200 people in Israel.

November 7, 2025–June 14, 2026

This imaginative Korean artist is having quite a moment, having recently received the Guggenheim Museum’s $100,000 art and technology prize and a show at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. At that museum, Kim showed videos about battling delivery workers in Seoul, speeding around landscapes that are partly generated with AI and video game engines. Those videos, part of a trilogy called “Delivery Dancer,” will here make their US debut. Also this November in New York, Kim will debut a new performance at the Performa biennial.

November 6, 2025–March 16, 2026

Who better to curate a show about the relational aesthetics movement than Nicolas Bourriaud himself? In 1998, Bourriaud theorized the influential style, which he said was art based largely around social interactions rather than objects—a squishy definition, to be sure, but also a flexible one. Nearly three decades later, Bourriaud has now returned to the movement, amassing key works by many of its greatest adherents, among them Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pierre Huyghe, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerester.

October 31, 2025–March 8, 2026

Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptualism all passed Alice Neel right by. While her colleagues devoted themselves to these styles, Neel remained committed to portraiture, highlighting all the people she saw around her in New York in a figurative mode that bucked the trends of her day. This retrospective thus presents her as a humanist, one whose perspective, as a woman working during male-dominated times, led her to focus on the marginalized.

October 31, 2025–April 5, 2026

Kazuko Miyamoto, an artist born in Japan in 1942 and long based in New York, is having an unlikely moment in the German capital, where she currently appears in the Berlin Biennale. Now, she’s having this survey centered around her pieces of the 1970s and ’80s composed from segments of string that are nailed or affixed to walls. Seen from afar, those strings look like solid blocks of matter; up close, however, the pieces are semi-transparent and flimsy-looking. The show positions these works as important, if under-recognized, contributions from an era when artists were making much-needed edits to the masculinist impulses of Minimalist sculpture.

October 31, 2025–January 18, 2026

Understandably, Lisette Model is most commonly associated with the American art scene, with her quirky photographs of bathers at Coney Island ranking among the most memorable New York pictures ever snapped. But in fact, she was Austrian by birth, and this retrospective marks an attempt to reclaim the artist, who redefined street photography during the postwar era with off-kilter images of New Yorkers going about their business: jazz musicians at work, old women at lunch, people traversing city streets, and more.

October 30, 2025–February 22, 2026

While battling a heroin addiction during the 1990s, Joyce McDonald found that working with clay helped occupy her hands and put her mind at ease. Art became a healing force for her, and has continued to be ever since. An ordained minister since 2009, she has crafted gorgeous sculptures of mothers and children, as well as galvanizing pieces responding to recent police killings. At last, McDonald is having a survey in the city she calls home, whose populace will now get a chance to see how her HIV diagnosis and her upbringing informed her warm, compassionate body of work.

September 5, 2025–January 11, 2026