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9 Tips for Visiting NYC's Guggenheim Museum

TripSavvy / Brakethrough Media

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City  is popular with fans of modern art and architecture. The Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building is probably the most famous aspect of the Guggenheim Museum, but visitors can also enjoy exploring the permanent collection and the ever-changing array of exhibitions.

What You'll See

The Guggenheim Museum has an extensive permanent collection of modern art from Picasso to Pollock. Most of the museum's viewable artwork at any time is from the current exhibitions. Before you commit, check the website to learn what the current exhibition is, as well as whether the famous spiral ramp will be open when you plan to visit.

Avoid The Crowds

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The Guggenheim is open on Mondays, when many other New York City museums are closed, making this one of the busiest days to visit. If Monday is the best day for you to visit with your schedule, plan to arrive early (as close to 10 a.m. as possible) and you can enjoy the Guggenheim's exhibits and collections before the crowds take over.

Saturday evenings are "Pay What You Wish," so this is also a pretty busy time. To beat the crowds on Saturdays, plan to finish up before the 5:45 p.m. start of discounted admissions.

Save on Admission

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If you plan to visit a number of New York museums and attractions during your visit, you might consider investing in either the New York Pass and New York CityPass. Look into each one to see which is right for you and your itinerary.

If you choose to purchase one of these passes, you should skip the regular admissions line at the Guggenheim and instead go to the Membership Desk to get your ticket.

Another way to save on the admission price is to brave the crowds and go on Saturday nights when there is a pay-what-you-wish donation policy after 5:45 p.m. (the museum closes on Saturday nights at 7:45).

Creature Comforts and Time Savers

Steven Depolo/Flickr 

Take advantage of the Guggenheim Museum's coatroom to rid yourself of any coats, umbrellas, and bags that might be bogging you down once you enter the museum (you'll need to buy your ticket first because they'll want to see it when you check your items). The coatroom also has wheelchairs available for visitors who might need them, as well as baby carriers for those visiting with small children. The restrooms located off the main lobby tend to be very crowded, but there are unisex restrooms located throughout the museum, so head upstairs to avoid waiting in a long line to use the facilities.

Take a Free Tour

Fatboo/Flickr 

Tours are included with the cost of museum admission, so take advantage of them. Self-guided audio tours can be picked up in the lobby (or downloaded on your iPhone) and used as you explore on your own. Daily at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. there are free guided tours that lead visitors through the highlights of the Guggenheim's permanent collection as well as current exhibitions.

On select Fridays at 2 p.m. curators lead tours of current exhibitions. Throughout the museum, you can find Gallery Guides who are trained to engage with visitors in one-on-one discussions about the art and exhibits. Dressed in black, with colorful scarves/ties and a blue or orange button that says "Ask Me About The Art," they're easy to find throughout the museum.

Start at the Top

Philipp Klinger/Getty Images

When you visit the Guggenheim Museum, one of the best ways to methodically work your way through the museum is to take the elevator up to the top floor and work your way down the spiral interior while you explore the various exhibitions and galleries along the way. This way, you'll quickly escape the crowds hanging out in the lobby and have gravity working with you as you experience the museum's extensive exhibits and permanent collection.

Visiting with Kids

Children under 12 are admitted free to the Guggenheim Museum with a paying adult. Small strollers are allowed in the galleries, but jogging strollers and double strollers are not. The good news is that the coatroom offers backpack carriers that you can borrow to use while you visit the museum with your children. The Guggenheim has put together great resources for families visiting the museum, whether you want to do some preparation for a visit or plan to attend a special family-oriented event. There are fantastic workshops for families with children as young as 3, so check out the offerings that will be available during your visit. Family-centric programming is most frequently offered on the weekends.

Catch a Peek for Free

Santi Visalli/Archive Photos Collection/Getty Images

The Guggenheim Museum participates in the annual Museum Mile Festival, offering many visitors free admission during the annual street festival held in June. For visitors just wanting a peek inside, you can visit the Guggenheim Museum Cafe and gift shop free of charge (though they no longer allow visitors to enter the lobby/rotunda without paying admission). Families will appreciate that children 12 and under are always free!

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Your comprehensive guide to plan your visit to the Guggenheim Museum

Experience a world of modern art with your visit to the iconic Guggenheim Museum. From timings and directions to insider tips to make the most of your visit, learn about everything you need to plan your visit to the Guggenheim museum.

Guggenheim Museum opening hours

Timings : The Guggenheim Museum is open from 11 AM to 6 PM from Sunday to Friday, and from 11 AM to 8 PM on Saturday.

Closed : The museum is closed on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas (25 December).

Last admission : The last admission is 30 minutes before the museum’s closing time.

Best time to visit

The best time to visit the Guggenheim Museum is at 11 AM on most days, when the crowds are usually smaller and you can enjoy the exhibits peacefully. You can also visit at 4 PM when footfall is generally low. Try to avoid visiting on Mondays, which is one of the busiest days as other museums in New York are closed on Mondays.

On weekdays, the crowds tend to increase during mid-day as many school groups land to visit the museum. If you are visiting on a Saturday, try to finish up before 5:45 PM, as the ‘Pay What You Wish’ policy starts at 5 PM which attracts large crowds.

Where is the Guggenheim Museum?

The Guggenheim Museum is located on the Upper East Side in New York City.

Address : 1071 5th Ave, New York, NY, 10128, USA | Find on maps

Closest landmark : Central Park

How to get to the Guggenheim Museum?

By public transport

• Subway : Take the 4, 5, 6, or Q subway lines and get off at 86th Street.
• Bus : Take the M1, M2, M3, or M4 bus lines to Madison or Fifth Avenue.

You can drive down or hire a car to reach the Guggenheim Museum from nearby places. Alternatively, you can take an Uber or Lyft or any cab to reach the museum.

Parking: You can park your vehicles at the Impark Parking at 40 East 89th Street or Champion Parking at 60 East 90th Street. There are also municipal car parks available within walking distance of the museum.

Know before you go

• Cloakrooms : There are storage facilities at the museum, however only small bags (smaller than 22 x 14 x 9 inches) are allowed. Other carry-ons won’t be allowed inside the museum.
• Gift shops : There is a museum store where you can buy souvenirs and merchandise.
• Restrooms : There are restrooms available for guests on all the floors of the Guggenheim Museum.
• Restaurants : There is a café called Café 3 where you can dine with a view of Central Park.

The Guggenheim Museum is mostly accessible to visitors with disabilities. All levels of the museum are accessible by elevator with the exception of the High Gallery, which has two low stairs at the entrance. Standard manual wheelchairs are available free of charge and do not require reservations. Motorized wheelchairs are also allowed in the museum. Visitors can contact a staff member at the entrance for assistance.

Large backpacks and strollers are not allowed inside the Guggenheim Museum. It’s best to travel light or leave large items in your vehicle or at your accommodation. The museum offers audio guides and kid-friendly activities to inspire them to create their own masterpieces, making it a great place for a family visit.

• Firearms or dual-use items are not permitted.
• Large bags, suitcases, and backpacks are not allowed inside the Guggenheim Museum.
• Every visitor is subject to security screening before entering the museum.
• The Guggenheim Museum is a non-smoking facility. Smoking is not allowed anywhere on the premises.
• Drones, unmanned aircraft systems, and other remote-flying devices are not allowed.

The Guggenheim Museum has a café called Café 3, located on the third floor, where you can enjoy refreshments and light fare.

You can find souvenirs, merchandise, and other themed items at the Guggenheim Store, which is located on the 6th floor of the museum.

Visitors can enter the Guggenheim Museum from the main entrance located on Fifth Avenue.

Central Park : The most visited urban park in the US is located a short walk away from the museum.

Metropolitan Museum of Art : One of the world’s largest and finest art museums, located nearby on 5th Avenue.

Neue Galerie : A museum dedicated to early twentieth-century German and Austrian art and design, located a block away.

What to see at the Guggenheim Museum?

Permanent collections

The Guggenheim Museum is renowned for its extensive collection of over 1,900 artworks by over 625, including Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary artists. The collection reflects the breadth, diversity, and tenor of Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s extensive holdings from the late 19th century through the present day.

Rotating exhibitions

Through the year, the museum hosts several rotating exhibitions, showcasing a variety of artists and styles. Currently it is hosting 'Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility' and 'Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s'.

The Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, is an architectural study piece. Its unique spiral building contrasts the strict Manhattan city grid. The museum’s dramatic curves make your experience inside the museum unusual and interactive.

Performances and screenings

If you are visiting with your kids, check the museum’s calendar for activities where they can create their own masterpieces. The museum also hosts performances, film screenings, and other special events where you can learn about the art influenced by the modern era.

Visitor tips

• The Guggenheim Museum is a popular attraction in New York City, attracting large crowds. Book your tickets in advance to save time waiting in ticket lines.
• For a more relaxed experience, consider visiting during off-peak hours, such as mornings, when the museum opens. You’ll have fewer crowds and ample space to enjoy the museum.
• Don’t forget to charge your camera, smartphone, or other devices before your visit. You’ll want to capture all the memorable moments from inside the museum.
• To make the best of your visit, learn about the collections before visiting the museum.
• Set aside enough time to indulge in the culinary offerings at Café 3. Whether it’s a full meal or a refreshing drink, savoring the museum’s flavors while enjoying the art is a must-do experience.

Book Guggenheim Museum tickets

Frequently asked questions about visiting the guggenheim museum.

Visiting the Guggenheim Museum gives you a unique opportunity to admire an extensive collection of modern art and an architectural study piece. It is well worth a visit and also leaves you knowing more about the artists and their works through its immersive exhibits.

You can book your skip-the-line Guggenheim Museum tickets here .

Your Guggenheim Museum tickets start at $30.

The Guggenheim Museum is open from 11 AM to 6 PM from Sunday to Friday, and from 11 AM to 8 PM on Saturday.

The Guggenheim Museum offers several amenities for visitors. There is a coat check located on the ground floor which is free with admission. You must present your admission ticket prior to checking any items. Items larger than 22 in x 14 in x 9 inches (including baggage handles and wheels) are not permitted in the museum. The museum also provides complimentary Wi-Fi for visitors.

There is an extensive permanent collection of modern art, rotating exhibitions, and the unique spiral building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Yes, you can visit the Guggenheim Museum in a group. Group tours are available.

Unfortunately, you cannot re-enter once your ticket has been scanned at the entrance of the Guggenheim Museum.

The Guggenheim Museum is a strictly non-smoking facility, ensuring a smoke-free environment for all guests.

Yes, you can take photos and videos using hand-held devices. However, professional photographic equipment is not allowed without prior approval from the museum management.

Make sure you set aside at least 2 hours for your visit to the Guggenheim Museum.

Guggenheim Museum Collections

Plan Your Visit to Guggenheim Museum

Guggenheim Museum exhibitions

Visiting the Guggenheim Museum in New York | A comprehensive guide

Things to do in New York New York Attractions Museums in New York Guggenheim Museum

The Guggenheim Museum is one of the most renowned and influential museums of modern and contemporary art in the world. Located on Fifth Avenue in New York City, the museum is a study piece of architecture, designed by the legendary Frank Lloyd Wright. The museum’s distinctive spiral shape invites you to interact with its rich and diverse collection, featuring works by Picasso, Kandinsky, Pollock, and many more. Keep reading to explore the museum’s vast collection, learn about its history, and plan your visit.

Guggenheim Museum – In a nutshell

Handy information, artworks to see.

Thannhauser Collection Works of Wassily Kandinsky Post-Impressionist masterpieces

Things to know

Offical name: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Date of opening: 21 October 1959 Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright Architectural style: Modern, organic Function: Art museum

Opening hours and address

• 11 AM to 6 PM on Sundays to Fridays
• The last admission is at 5:30 PM
• Address: 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128, USA Get Directions

Why you must visit the Guggenheim Museum?

• The futuristic architecture: Step into a world where art meets architecture. Designed by the renowned architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, the museum’s unique spiral ramp and domed skylight are a sight to behold.
• A walk through NYC’s history: Immerse yourself in the rich history of modern and avant-garde art. The museum, founded in 1939, is a tribute to Solomon R. Guggenheim’s passion for art and is the first of five Guggenheim Museums worldwide.
• Artistic treasure trove: Discover a treasure trove of early modernist works in the museum’s extensive collection. From impressionist paintings to contemporary installations, there’s something to captivate every art enthusiast.
• A unique journey: Engage with art like never before as you descend the museum’s circular ramp. It’s not just about viewing art, it’s about experiencing the journey of discovery that the unique layout offers.
• Engaging art programs: Unleash your creativity with the museum’s diverse art programs. Whether you’re a student, a teen, or just looking to try out your strokes, these programs are a great way to engage with art and challenge your creativity. Don’t just visit a museum, become a part of the art world!

Recommended Guggenheim Museum tickets

Guggenheim museum – your experience deconstructed, 1 start at the top.

Begin your journey by taking the elevator to the 6th floor. Begin your descent along the spiral ramp. This will take you through a series of exhibitions featuring art from various periods and styles. The ramp offers a unique perspective on each piece as you approach it from different angles.

2 The Tower Galleries

As you continue your descent, you’ll reach the Tower Galleries. These four galleries are home to temporary exhibitions and offer stunning views of Central Park. Currently, there are two temporary collections that you must catch - “Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility” which features partially obscured or hidden figures, positioning them at the “edge of visibility” and “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea”, which reflect and the changing socioeconomic conditions following the Korean War of the 1950s.

3 The High Gallery

Further down, you’ll come across the High Gallery, a tall, windowless cylinder located off the ramp, which is a unique feature of the Guggenheim Museum. This space is separate from the main spiral and is known for hosting single-artist installations, allowing you to immerse yourself in the work of one artist at a time. The gallery’s design, with its high ceilings and focused lighting, creates a dramatic setting that enhances the impact of the artworks on display.

4 Interactive Displays

The Guggenheim often features interactive displays that allow you to engage with the art in a hands-on way. These displays give a deeper understanding of the artist’s intent and the historical context of the work.

5 Other Permanent Collections

The Guggenheim’s permanent collection is based on nine private collections, including Solomon R. Guggenheim’s collection of non-objective paintings, Karl Nierendorf’s collection of German expressionism and early abstract expressionism, and Peggy Guggenheim’s collection, concentrating on abstraction and surrealism.

6 Special Events

The Guggenheim hosts a variety of special events throughout the year, including lectures, workshops, and performances. Attending these events can provide additional insight into the artworks and offer the opportunity to learn from experts in the field.

7 Reflection

After your visit, take some time to reflect on your experience in the museum’s café or bookstore. The Guggenheim is not just a place to see art, but also a space for contemplation and inspiration.

History of the Guggenheim Museum

The Guggenheim Museum’s story is as fascinating as the art it houses. It all started with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which was established in 1937. The foundation’s first venue in New York, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, opened in 1939, showcasing Solomon Guggenheim’s diverse art collection. Here are some key moments in its history.

• The journey began in 1937, when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was established.
• The Museum of Non-Objective Painting was designed by William Muschenheim and opened in 1939.
• As the collection expanded, the need for a permanent building became apparent. In 1943, Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned to design a museum in New York City.
• After 16 years of planning and construction, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened on October 21, 1959.

Architecture of the Guggenheim Museum

The Guggenheim Museum’s architecture stands out from the conventional design of high-rise buildings of New York. 700 iterations later, Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision of an inverted spiral pyramid came to light to showcase the museum's interactive collections. Here are some architectural highlights.

• The museum’s exterior is a stacked white cylinder of reinforced concrete that spirals upwards.
• Inside, a massive atrium soars 92 feet in height, culminating in a vast glass dome.
• A continuous ramp flanks the sides of this skylight lit museum, uncoiling upwards for six stories.
• This innovative design allows visitors to move seamlessly from one floor to another while being able to see the exhibits from up close.

Artworks you must see at the Guggenheim Museum

Imagine a leisurely afternoon in the French countryside. Pissarro’s tranquil masterpiece transports you there, where the old hermitage is nestled amidst lush greenery under a canopy of dappled sunlight. It’s a serene escape, a moment frozen in time, waiting for you to explore.

Prepare for a sensory feast as you delve into Kandinsky’s abstract world. Dynamic shapes and colors dance across the canvas, creating a visual symphony that sparks your imagination and challenges your perceptions of artistic expression.

Intrigue awaits you in Renoir’s enigmatic portrait. A mysterious woman cradles a vibrant parrot, their story hidden within the canvas. The exotic allure of the scene beckons, inviting you to uncover the secrets it holds.

Meet Picasso’s muse in this striking portrait. Her arresting gaze, framed by electric yellow hair, tells a tale of confidence and individuality. Picasso’s bold shapes and vibrant hues bring her to life, inviting you to share in her story.

Venture into the heart of Pollock’s Enchanted Forest, where chaos and beauty intertwine. His signature drip technique creates a mesmerizing woodland, a place where vibrant colors and swirling forms form abstract art. It’s a magical, untamed realm that invites you to let your imagination run wild.

The bustling streets of Paris are captured in time with Vuillard’s Place Vintimille. His masterful use of color captures the vibrant essence of a Parisian square, transporting you back to a bygone era. It’s a nostalgic journey, inviting you to experience the energy and charm of Parisian life.

Best time to visit the Guggenheim Museum

If you want to try and explore every artwork museum’s collection, be sure to arrive at the museum early, ideally before noon. This way, you can avoid the crowds and enjoy the exhibits at your own pace. Avoid visiting on Mondays which is the busiest day of the week. Since most other museums in New York are closed, the Guggenheim tends to be packed. If you happen to be visiting on a Saturday, wrap up your visit by 5 PM, as a ‘Pay What You Wish’ policy kicks in to attract more visitors. While the museum is a delight to visit in all seasons, try to avoid holiday periods like Christmas, when the crowds tend to be large.

Guggenheim Museum – Opening hours

11 AM to 6 PM on Sundays to Fridays. The last admission is at 5:30 PM. 11 AM to 8 PM on Saturdays. A discounted ‘Pay What You Wish’ ticket policy kicks in at 5 PM on Saturdays drawing a larger number of visitors.

Getting there

• You can take the following bus routes that pass near Prudential Tower: 1, 39, 504, 9, BB.
• From various locations, you can take a bus to Prudential Tower. For example, from Kelly’s Roast Beef, Revere it takes about 102 minutes.
• The Green Line “E” train has a Prudential Center stop which exits into the Center.
• You can take the following subway lines that pass near Prudential Tower: GREEN LINE D, GREEN LINE E, ORANGE LINE.
• The complex is conveniently accessible from I-90 and I-93 and is located within two blocks of Back Bay Station with commuter rail, Amtrak, and MBTA subway access.

Insider tips for visiting the Guggenheim Museum

• Plan your visit: Guggenheim Museum can get busy, especially during peak tourist season. Plan your visit ahead of time to avoid long lines and ensure you get the most out of your experience.
• Explore the exhibits: Don’t miss out on the key attractions like the Thannhauser Collection and the special exhibitions. These will make your visit more fulfilling.
• Attend special events: Keep an eye on the special events like live lectures and create your own masterpiece sessions that take place at Guggenheim Museum. These can add a special touch to your visit.
• Dress appropriately: The museum can be chilly, especially in the evenings or during cooler months. Dress in layers or bring a jacket to stay comfortable.
• Make a pit stop: Be sure to stop at Cafe 3 or The Wright to grab quick bites or mouth-watering platters before you continue your journey down the spiral floors.
• Dress appropriately: The open-air roof deck can be chilly, especially in the evenings or during cooler months. Dress in layers or bring a jacket to stay comfortable.
• Capture the moment: Don’t forget your camera! There would be plenty of moments that you would want to capture at the museum.
• Learn about New York’s history: Use this opportunity to learn more about New York’s history, culture, and architecture through the exhibits and information available at the Guggenheim Museum.
• Relax and take your time: Lastly, don’t rush your visit. Take your time to explore all the collections, and make lasting memories.

Interesting facts about the Guggenheim Museum

• Movie and Pop Culture References: The Guggenheim Museum has been featured in several well-known films. For instance, in the 2009 film ‘The International’, a gunfight between Louis Salinger (played by Clive Owen) and assassins is made even more thrilling by the art museum’s concentric architecture. In addition, in the 2023 animated film ‘Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse’, Gwen’s Spider-Woman fights a Leonardo Da Vinci-themed version of the Vulture inside the Guggenheim Museum.
• A architectural benchmark: The Guggenheim Museum’s design was so groundbreaking that it sparked a sensation among top architects of the time. For instance, architects such as Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, and Frank Gehry have created dynamic, fluid spaces that challenge the standard notions of form and function inspired by the Guggenheim Museum's design.
• Colorful History: Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect of the Guggenheim Museum, originally wanted the museum’s exterior to be red, his signature color. However, this idea was shot down, and the original exterior ended up being painted a brownish yellow. During a $29 million restoration, conservators removed 11 layers of paint, unearthing the original hue.
• A Long Ramp: The museum is known for its unique spiral ramp, which is more than a quarter-mile long. Visitors who have walked up this ramp know it’s a bit of a workout. The entire ramp is 1,416 feet long and it’s set at an inclination of 18 degrees.
• Robert De Niro Sr.'s Connection: Robert De Niro Sr., an American abstract expressionist painter and the father of actor Robert De Niro, worked as a guard at the Museum of Non-Objective Art, which would later become the Guggenheim Museum. He was financially supported by the museum’s director, Hilla Von Rebay. In 1945, he was included in a group show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in New York.

Dining at the Guggenheim Museum

Cafe 3, located on the third floor of the Guggenheim Museum is your perfect pitstop on your tour of the Guggenheim. It has a casual dining experience that’s perfect for a quick bite or a leisurely meal. The menu features a variety of options, including pastries, sandwiches, salads, and a selection of beverages. But the highlight of Cafe 3 is undoubtedly the stunning view of Central Park. As you enjoy your meal, you can gaze out at the lush greenery and bustling activity of one of New York City’s most iconic landmarks.

Things to do around Guggenheim Museum

Central Park is a must-visit when you’re in New York City. It offers a variety of attractions, including the Central Park Zoo, the Conservatory Garden, and the Belvedere Castle. You can also enjoy a leisurely stroll or a picnic in the park.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, also known as The Met, is one of the world’s largest and finest art museums. Its collection includes over two million works, spanning five thousand years of world culture, from prehistory to the present.

If you’re interested in natural history, this museum is a must-visit. It’s one of the largest museums in the world and is renowned for its exhibitions and scientific collections that illuminate human cultures, the natural world, and the universe.

The Alice in Wonderland statue is a charming destination for both kids and adults. This whimsical sculptural group depicts Alice, from Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The statue is a favorite among children.

Hotels Around Guggenheim Museuem

Luxury stays.

• The Carlyle

Economical Stays

• Courtyard by Marriott
• Mount Morris House

Budget Stays

• The Central Park North
• Aloft Harlem

Frequently asked questions about Guggenheim Museum

What can I see at the Guggenheim Museum?

The Guggenheim Museum offers a vast collection of modern and contemporary art. You can also explore the Thannhauser Collection, which includes works by artists such as Picasso, Van Gogh, and Monet.

What are some must-see artworks inside the Guggenheim Museum?

Inside the Guggenheim Museum, you’ll find a collection of modern and contemporary art, a unique spiral ramp gallery, and two dining options.

Is the Guggenheim Museum wheelchair accessible?

Yes, the Guggenheim Museum is accessible to guests with reduced mobility.

How long should I spend at the Guggenheim Museum?

We suggest spending about three to four hours to make the most of your visit to the Guggenheim Museum.

Are animals allowed in the Guggenheim Museum?

The Guggenheim Museum maintains a strict no-animals policy, even during non-public hours. However, Certified Service Animals and animals undergoing training for certification, are allowed to assist guests.

Can I take photos and videos during my visit to the Guggenheim Museum?

You are free to capture personal photos and videos using hand-held devices to document your experience. However, professional recording equipment is not permitted without prior approval from the Guggenheim Museum management.

Shravan Hiremath

A musician-songwriter, filmmaker & film buff, and foodie with a never-ending appetite - he is always on a quest for the finer things in life. As a traveler, he has climbed the highest of mountains and left his footprints along the prettiest of golden shores. Writing, as a form of expression, comes as second nature to him, building on his passion for writing songs and screenplays. But words don’t always flow out of his head like the notes of Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’. If you were to look up his search history, you'll find searches like, “word for beautiful + clean”; oh right, that’s ‘pristine’!

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Eight must-see works at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Contemporary art lovers will want to see these works at the Guggenheim.

In 2011, we spoke with then-associate curator Karole Vail at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum about works in the collection that are a must-see. The following pieces were her suggestions.

For an updated glimpse of what art is on at NYC’s museums, check out our guide to the best museum exhibitions right now.

8 must-see works at the Guggenheim Museum

E dgar Degas,  “ Spanish Dance” Degas loved dancers, and they became one of his favorite motifs. This tiny sculpture of a graceful nude figure mid-move, which appears alongside two other Degas sculptures, was actually cast from the artist’s model posthumously under the supervision of one of his friends, Albert Bartholom. Unlike most 19th-century sculptures, which, according to Vail, were academic and monumental, Spanish Dance represents something more expressive, vivid and lively. Where to find it: Thannhauser Gallery, level two

Edouard Manet, “ Before the Mirror” Fascinated by societal shifts in France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Manet often painted the working class and the underclass—especially prostitutes. Using large, loose brushstrokes (his signature style), he portrays a courtesan from the back while she looks at herself in the mirror, perhaps just a moment before she turns around and catches you peeking at her. "You have the impression of openness and great freedom of paint," says Vail. "At the same time the psychological mood is more restrained. The picture is actually very private." Where to find it:  Thannhauser Gallery, level two

Pablo Picasso, “Woman Ironing” During Picasso's Blue Period, he famously depicted peasants, laborers, beggars and other downtrodden folks in shades of blue. Though this long-limbed, hunched woman is shown in grays and blacks, she represents that same period of gloom. "This is not so much a portrait of a particular woman," says Vail. "It's a kind of metaphor for the poor in general, the forever oppressed." Perfect viewing for jaded New Yorkers, this. Where to find it:  Thannhauser Gallery, level two

Henri Rousseau, “ The Football Players” Here, four disproportionately tall men wearing what appear to be pajamas play a jolly game of rugby in an autumn field. But curators have a hard time describing what it is about this piece—and Rousseau's paintings in general—that makes them so happy. "They're quite quirky, they're very humorous, and you can't quite pin them down," says Vail. The self-taught "Sunday painter," who worked as a clerk, didn't make art seriously until he was in his forties. "There's something quite naive about his work," says Vail. "But that is precisely what so many admired about it." Where to find it:  Thannhauser Gallery, level two

Paul Cézanne, “ Bibémus ” Cézanne frequently painted the Roman Bibémus sandstone quarry in Southern France. His nature paintings of the burnt-orange rocks, covered by green brush, helped turn the remote mine into a tourist destination. “I guess he had a kind of obsession with landscapes,. “He painted some of his most famous landscapes over and over again.” This piece demonstrates Cézanne's use of light and color, as well as his deftness at creating volume. Where to find it:  Thannhauser Gallery, level two

Paul Gauguin, “ In the Vanilla Grove, Man and Horse” In 1891, Gauguin left France to immerse himself in nature in the French colony of Tahiti (he later returned to France and then escaped again, to French Polynesia, where he died). “There was some kind of wish to reject Western culture and go back to some kind of primitivism, which was of course a very romantic desire,” says Vail. The result was several paintings like this one—depicting a muscular man leading his horse into the Tahitian woods—which combined elements of Greek architecture with the breathtaking beauty of the island’s landscape. Where to find it:  Thannhauser Gallery, level two

Georges Seurat, “ Farm Women at Work” As the inventor of Pointillism—a series of short brushstrokes that combine to create pixelated images much like an old dot-matrix printer—Seurat spent his short life studying the science behind color, line, optics and how light plays out on a canvas—"unlike the Impressionists, who were more spontaneous," says Vail. Seurat often worked outdoors to explore the effect of light on his subjects, as he did in this depiction of agrarian life. Where to find it:  Thannhauser Gallery, level two

Vasily Kandinsky, “ Several Circles” Kandinsky is the backbone of the Guggenheim, which has an entire gallery devoted to rotating works by the Russian artist. And this piece is one of his most famous: The colorful, overlapping circles on a black background, like a solar system made of candy, is a highlight of Kandinksy's Bauhaus years. "It speaks of a harmonious cosmic order," says Vail, "and for Kandinsky, there was some kind of inner force about the circle that endlessly inspired him." Where to find it:  Thannhauser Gallery, level three

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum , 1071 Fifth Ave at 89th St (212-423-3500, guggenheim.org ). Open e very day, 10:30 am–5:30 pm; $30,  $19, seniors and students with ID $15, children under 12 accompanied by an adult free.  Mondays and Saturdays, 4–5:30 pm pay what you wish.

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Art: Retrospective in the Round

T he current retrospective show at Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum is the meeting ground for the ideas of three dead giants: Solomon Guggenheim, the copper-tycoon tastemaker; Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect; and Vasily Kandinsky, the father of abstract expressionism. For patrons making the spiral descent into the museum’s terrazzo maelstrom to view the largest collection of Kandinsky oils and watercolors ever assembled, it is almost as if this were the event the three men had had in mind all along.

It would have pleased Guggenheim, who built his nonobjective collection around Kandinsky. It would have brought a wry smile to Wright, who knew that crowds would first flock into the Guggenheim Museum only to see what Wright had wrought but would eventually come to see a show perfectly suited to its chambered-nautilus setting. And surely it would have delighted Kandinsky, who once wrote: “I would like above all an exhibit as comprehensive as possible; quantity aids the discovery of inner meanings.”

Fancies & Nightmares. In the early ’30s, Art Collector Guggenheim, who had already shifted his allegiance from the old masters to modern art, was prodded by his great and good friend, the Baroness Hilla Rebay, into discovering Kandinsky. With the Baroness saying “That one and that one, and that one . . .” Guggenheim bought up more than 100 of Kandinsky’s works, becoming the first great U.S. champion of the artist and his disciples.

The show is arranged chronologically from the top; the viewer passes down the ramp past the polychrome landscapes and medieval fancies of Kandinsky’s early period (1902-08), then by the transitional things—romantic, mildly experimental, Fauvish exercises—of 1910 to 1911 when he began to break the tether of traditionalism and started to experiment in earnest with paintings like Romantic Landscape (see color). In 1912, while living in Germany, Kandinsky reached a point of no return. From there on, he was committed to expressing a world of darting lines, moiling colors and nightmare shapes. Abstract expressionism, which went on to produce many other and better painters, was born on his palette.

Sand & Paint. There is an unexpected mood of joy in most of Kandinsky’s work, almost an air of frivolity in some of it. Color, which he seemed to have made an honest effort to subdue in some of his early abstractions, keeps churning to the surface, and in the end he surrendered to it completely. He never ceased to experiment: one painting in the show, Accompanied Contrast (1935), has sand mixed in with the paint on the canvas. Later he seemed to be looking into a world of microscopy; his (Surroundings) (Environment) of 1936 resembles a blown-up slide of gaudy amoebae sprawling on a speckled lab culture. And in one of his last works, A Conglomerate (1943), he slyly reintroduces some recognizable figures in the form of a pointing hand, a pair of seated people, some chimneys and a gable. But always Kandinsky was primarily concerned with form: “It must be finally understood that for me form is but the means towards an end, and that I am occupied with the theory of form and give up so much because I want to fathom what is innermost in the form and make it clear, very clear for other people.”

The show at the Guggenheim was put together mainly from the museum’s own impressive collection of Kandinskys, from the Gabriele Münter Foundation of the Stadtische Galerie in Munich (which now owns the Kandinskys collected by his pupil and onetime beloved, Painter Gabriele Münter), and the collection of Nina Kandinsky, the artist’s widow, who lives in France. But Director Thomas Messer pulled off an even more impressive coup of roundupmanship: with the help of Mme. Kandinsky and Paris’ Musée National d’Art Moderne, he engineered delicate negotiations with Moscow, bringing seven paintings in the show from Russia, on loan from Moscow’s Municipal Museum of Modern Western Art, the Russian Museum in Leningrad, and the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow, all dating from the pre-1914 period of Kandinsky’s transition from nice painter to artistic revolutionary. When the giant retrospective closes in Manhattan this spring, it will travel to Paris, The Hague and Basel, and another show organized by the Guggenheim (minus the Russian loans) will open in Pasadena and later visit ten cities in the U.S.

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Vasily Kandinsky

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1866, Moscow, Russia — 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

Vasily Kandinsky was born December 4, 1866, in Moscow. From 1886–92, he studied law and economics at the University of Moscow, where he lectured after graduating. In 1896, he declined a teaching position in order to study art in Munich with Anton Azbe from 1897 to 1899 and at the Kunstakademie with Franz von Stuck in 1900. Kandinsky taught in 1901–03 at the art school of the Phalanx, a group he had cofounded in Munich. One of his students, Gabriele Münter, would be his companion until 1914. In 1902, Kandinsky exhibited for the first time with the Berlin Secession and produced his first woodcuts. In 1903 and 1904, he began his travels in Italy, the Netherlands, and North Africa and his visits to Russia. He showed at the Salon d’Automne in Paris from 1904.

In 1909, Kandinsky was elected president of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM), a newly founded group that in the same year gave its first show at the Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie in Munich. In 1911, Kandinsky and Franz Marc withdrew from the NKVM and began to make plans for Der Blaue Reiter Almanac . In December of the same year the Blaue Reiter group’s first exhibition was held at the Moderne Galerie in Munich and Kandinsky published On the Spiritual in Art . In 1912, the second Blaue Reiter show was held at the Galerie Hans Goltz, Munich; Der Blaue Reiter Almanac was published, and Kandinsky’s first solo show was held at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin. In 1913, one of his works was included in the Armory Show in New York and the Erster deutsche Herbstsalon at the Der Sturm gallery in Berlin. Kandinsky lived in Russia from 1914 to 1921, principally in Moscow, where he held a position at the People’s Commissariat of Education.

Kandinsky began teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922. In 1923 he was given his first solo show in New York by the Société Anonyme, of which he became vice-president. Lyonel Feininger, Alexej Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and Paul Klee made up the Blaue Vier group, formed in 1924. He moved with the Bauhaus to Dessau in 1925 and became a German citizen in 1928. The Nazi government closed the Bauhaus in 1933 and later that year Kandinsky settled in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris; he acquired French citizenship in 1939. Fifty-seven of his works were confiscated by the Nazis in the 1937 purge of “degenerate art.” Kandinsky died December 13, 1944, in Neuilly.

Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2

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Guggenheim Abu Dhabi rising to form in Saadiyat Cultural District

Museum is on track for 2025 completion.

September 02, 2024

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The Arts Edit

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81 Museum Exhibitions and Biennials to See This Fall

By Alex Greenberger

Alex Greenberger

Senior Editor, ARTnews

In a word, this fall’s offerings are electric. The word shows up in the titles of not one but two tech-minded shows—one devoted to Op art and its influence, the other to the rise of digital art, at the Buffalo AKG Art Gallery and Tate Modern, respectively. It may as well also have figured in the name of a survey of women artists who involved computers in their art at MUDAM in Luxembourg, or to an exhibition about digital effects technologies at LACMA.

But the word “electric” might also be used to characterize a number of more analog offerings as well. The Centre Pompidou’s long-awaited Surrealism blowout is finally nearly upon us, as are retrospectives for well-established figures such as Lygia Clark, Thomas Schütte, Amy Sherald, Elizabeth Catlett, Sophie Calle, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, and more.

Art history nerds will find much to geek out about: the Metropolitan Museum of Art is mounting a blockbuster about pre-Renaissance Sienese art, the Qatar Museums are putting 19th-century French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme under the microscope, and the Getty Foundation’s science-minded edition of PST ART will reintroduce many deep cuts in more than 60 shows at venues across Southern California. Other shows will add new chapters to the discipline’s annals: there are expansive surveys of Indian and Pakistani art on the horizon, as well as shows about 1970s documentary photography and lens-based art in the UK during the 1980s.

Perhaps you crave something more spectacular? For that, look no further than a long-awaited survey devoted at Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art for Anicka Yi, whose past works have involved AI and cutting-edge technology. You could probably apply the word “electric” to that show, too, in more sense than one. Below, a look at 81 museum shows and biennials to see this fall.

“Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists” at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul

In recent years, Seoul’s top modern art museum, known as the MMCA for short, has made a concerted effort to acquire more works by Asian women artists. The results of that project form the basis of this show, a wide-ranging survey that stakes a claim for the importance of these artists, many of whom are still awaiting greater recognition outside Asia. Among those artists is Hong Lee Hyun-sook, a giant of feminist art in South Korea, where she is known for artworks that emphasize collaboration and solidarity with animals as a means of liberation.

September 3, 2024–March 3, 2025

“Surrealism” at Centre Pompidou, Paris

A year of celebrations for Surrealism , the avant-garde movement launched a century ago, reaches its apex with this blockbuster, which aspires to be just as perplexing as much of the art associated with the movement. In lieu of the traditional exhibition format, this one will be shaped like a maze, with André Breton’s 1924 Surrealist manifesto at its core. Surrounding it will be 14 sections that chart how Surrealists of all kinds interpreted literary texts and symbols. Agreed-upon masterpieces abound—Salvador Dalí’s The Great Masturbator (1929) and René Magritte’s Personal Values (1952) have made their way from Madrid and San Francisco, respectively, for the show. Yet the exhibition, in keeping with other recent surveys that have globalized Surrealism, also seeks to lure in some lesser-known figures, from the British nonpareil Ithell Colquhoun to the Japanese draughtsman Tatsuo Ikeda.

September 4, 2024–January 13, 2025

“Anicka Yi: There Exists Another Evolution, But This One” at Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul

Anicka Yi has awed audiences worldwide with high-tech works that consider the increasingly thin divide between humans and nonhumans, with dried flowers, AI, bacteria, scents culled from mega-galleries and New York’s Koreatown, and more among the materials for her innovative sculptures. Part of what makes her work so fascinating is its enigmatic quality, and that may be why the artist hasn’t said much about the new works she will unveil in this show, leaving us only with a Buddhist koan for a title. The show, whose 30 works act as a survey of Yi’s oeuvre, is significant in that it will Asia’s big introduction to her art, since the region has never before seen a museum show by this Korean American artist.

September 5, 2024–December 29, 2024

Aleksandra Domanović at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna

In the late 2000s, just before post-internet art took off, Aleksandra Domanović began to make available PDFs that, when printed using specific settings, resulted in stacks with imagery on their sides. These images were sometimes unsettling: some produced pictures related to the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Her unusual blend of sleek digital art and rough post-Soviet political matter made her a key artist of the era, and in the decade and a half since, she has continued producing off-kilter, thought-provoking art, from cyborgian sculptures to prints of stills from sci-fi movies. Domanović’s first survey includes new works such as If These Walls Could Talk (2024), a piece that will combine images of Ian Donald, the physicist credited with developing ultrasounds for obstetric usage, and Slovak folk patterns.

September 5, 2024–January 26, 2025

“Scott Burton: Shape Shift” at Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis

Scott Burton once said his artworks could be considered “sculpture in love with furniture,” a reference to the way that pieces imploded the boundary between art and design. Many of his sculptures could be sat upon, though they hardly functioned like chairs; other works by him looked like tables, though not of the sort you’d want in your home. Burton’s art doubled as a sly subversion of Minimalist aesthetics and an off-kilter inquiry into how a sculpture might invite forms of engagement beyond looking. Here, for the first time since his death of AIDS-related complications in 1989, this underrated artist will receive a proper survey, this one with a specific focus on his queer identity.

September 6, 2024–February 2, 2025

Carl Cheng at the Contemporary Austin, Texas

In 1967, Carl Cheng began to take the name John Doe Co., a moniker that referred to a faux company that produced unusable emergency kits, TVs with rocks in them, and more. These objects—which were, in fact, sculptures, not products made available for sale—mocked how corporations molded the natural world to their purposes and made it available for purchase. As more and more artists turn their attention toward climate change, it is no surprise that Cheng’s work has become the source of newfound interest. At long last, this octogenarian Californian will receive his first retrospective, which opens first in Texas before traveling to Philadelphia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Los Angeles.

September 6, 2024–December 8, 2024

“Mark Bradford: Keep Walking” at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

For his 2022 piece 500 , Mark Bradford created 60 painted versions of a 1913 ad imploring Black families to move to a colony in New Mexico called Blackdom. Bradford painted the ad in uneven shades of black and orange, a color palette that made the posting appear as though it were smoldering—an effect meant to mirror the destruction that has repeatedly threatened Black communities across the nation. Similar works dealing with Black history will appear in Bradford’s latest show, the first staged by the Hamburger Bahnhof in the newly reopened Rieckenhallen, an expansive exhibition space that was nearly lost to a real estate developer several years ago.

September 6, 2024–May 18, 2025

Gwangju Biennale

The curatorial ambitions of Nicolas Bourriaud, the figure behind the term “relational aesthetics,” have rarely failed him, and that alone makes his edition of Asia’s top biennial worth attending. His focus, as usual, is broad: multiverses, climate change, and sound will all play a role in his biennial, which is titled “Pansori, a soundscape of the 21st century,” its name a reference to the Korean word for “the noise from the public place.” Providing that noise are dozens of artists from across the globe, including Gaëlle Choisne, Dora Budor, Frida Orupabo, Yein Lee, Philippe Parreno, and more.

September 7, 2024–December 1, 2024

Noah Davis at Das Minsk, Potsdam, Germany

In one of Noah Davis’s dreamy paintings, Black ballet dancers in tutus perform outdoors, seemingly unaware that they are sited among sidewalks and grass, not in a studio. There is no audience to watch them, and there are no people at all around them. The piece exemplifies Davis’s tendency to transplant Black figures into settings that have no clear meaning, causing them to appear intentionally illegible, lost in their own worlds. Works like this one are immersive—no small feat for an artist who died at 32—and some 50 of them will be include in what is being billed as a retrospective for an artist gone too soon.

September 7, 2024–January 5, 2025

“Christopher Kulendran Thomas: Safe Zone” at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels

Even before AI became the stuff of general conversation, Christopher Kulendran Thomas had been using it to create videos and paintings that braid together a wide array of topics: pop stars, viral sensations, the history of Tamil Eelam, the story of abstraction, and more. His WIELS show will continue his usage of AI, here in the form of new paintings. There will also be a never-before-shown 24-screen video installation, Peace Core (2024), which appropriates a news report aired in the US and re-edits it using the style of the TikTok trend corecore, in which unlike video clips are massed together and set to a melodramatic soundtrack.

“Emily Karaka: Ka Awatea, A New Dawn” at Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates

Emily Karaka’s raucously colored paintings bridge the gap between Abstract Expressionism and traditional Māori craft, infusing modernist styles with political import. Aptly, these works, which depict verdant forests and scrawled heads, have been termed “political landscapes” by the Māori artist, a reference to how the land imagined in the paintings should be viewed as imbued with Indigenous history—and subject to exploitation by white colonialists. A leading figure of the Aotearoa’s art scene, Karaka will here receive her first survey.

This roving biennial has historically taken place in one city or region imperiled in a debate over its very existence. This year’s locale is no different: Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia, where pro-independence parties recently lost their majority in the autonomous community’s Parliament. Against that backdrop, organizer Filipa Oliveira—formally titled the biennial’s Artistic Creative Mediator—has sprinkled works by 85 artists across 12 cities in the Barcelona metropolitan area. Emilija Škarnulytė, Judy Chicago, Larry Achiampong, Claudia Pagès, and Binta Diaw are among those lined up to participate.

September 8, 2024–November 24, 2024

“Saodat Ismailova: A Seed Under Our Tongue” at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan

Saodat Ismailova’s slow, meditative film installations tend to feature long takes of landscapes complemented often by shots of women cloistered in domestic settings. These works are intended to communicate the histories of Central Asian countries such as Uzbekistan, Ismailova’s homeland. While her art may seem culturally specific, it has had broad appeal, memorably appearing in both Documenta and the Venice Biennale in 2022 alone. Her fast ascent in the international art world continues with this survey, which includes a re-edited version of a film about a forest in Kyrgyzstan and a resin cast of a cave.

September 12, 2024–January 12, 2025

“Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies” at Brooklyn Museum, New York

In her 1968 sculpture Black Unity , Elizabeth Catlett portrays a clenched fist, its knuckles and fingers hewn from a block of softly sanded cedar. The sculpture, with its revolutionary content and its minimalist aesthetic, typifies Catlett’s legendary oeuvre, with married Black leftist politics and modernist styles. Some 150 of her works—many depicting people in Mexico, the country where she resided for much of her career—will be assembled for this hotly anticipated retrospective, which starts in New York before traveling to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (its co-organizer) and the Art Institute of Chicago.

September 13, 2024–January 19, 2025

“Erwin Wurm: A 70th-Birthday Retrospective” at Albertina, Vienna

With Erwin Wurm now moving into his seventh decade, the Albertina is giving him a full-dress retrospective. There will, of course, be the works for which this giant of the Austrian scene is best known, his “One Minute Sculptures,” which call on laypeople to enact brief performances with quotidian objects. These works, like many others by Wurm, question whether art can serve any purpose within the world—and, if the answer is no, whether that matters much at all. Consider that a winking critique of modernism’s obsession with functionalism, or think of it as joke on the pieces’ participants, who often must go through some physical labor to perform nonsense gestures.

September 13, 2024–March 9, 2025

“Neïl Beloufa: Humanities” at Renaissance Society, Chicago, and Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland

This multi-continental double-header of shows will feature two new bodies of work by an artist whose known for shrewdly taking up the ills of colonialism and capitalism, sometimes with a sci-fi edge. In Chicago, Beloufa will show what the institution describes as a “custom, interactive multimedia system” that will enable each visitor to chart their own rise in the business world. In Basel, there will be works dealing with the concept of financial tombstones, which are issued by companies to publicly advertise transactions.

Renaissance Society: September 14, 2024–November 10, 2024 Kunsthalle Basel: October 4, 2024–January 19, 2025

“Knowing the West” at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas

As new attention is paid to violence and racism weathered by Native communities, the American West has come under the microscope, viewed not as a land of possibility but as an area exemplifying the horrors of white-led colonialism. Accordingly, this show about it does not center cowboys and vast vistas but Indigenous art of roughly the past two centuries. Though not exclusively a survey of art by Native Americans, the exhibition puts the focus on figures such as Nellie Two Bear Gates (Gathering of Clouds Woman), whose beaded suitcases produced in the late 19th century testified to interactions between Native people and white cowboys.

September 14, 2024–January 27, 2025

“Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers” at National Gallery, London

There are exactly seven versions of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1889), and one of them is a destination point at the National Gallery, which owns it. Now, for a brief period, the institution will be home to a second one, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art for this exhibition. With just 60 works, this show may be on the smaller end for high-profile van Gogh surveys, but what it lacks in size, it makes up for in prestige: its checklist includes well-known still lifes and nightscapes that have made their way from across Europe.

September 14, 2024–January 19, 2025

“Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice” at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

One of the premier exhibitions of this year’s science-focused, Getty Foundation–funded initiative, PST ART (formerly Pacific Standard Time), this show surveys how 25 artists have used their art to highlight our vulnerable ecology. While its artist list is bedecked with stars (photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier and painter Yoshitomo Nara among them), the focus here is on the unclassifiable and the bizarre. Witness the case of Garnett Puett, a beekeeper by training, who enlists these insects as collaborators for his works known as “apisculptures.” Visitors will be able to interact with those sculptures, along with a garden by Ron Finley and an installation made of debris by Yangkura.

September 14, 2024–January 5, 2025

“Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue” at Museum of Modern Art, New York

Robert Frank’s 1958 photobook The Americans remains a classic because it crystallized a rot in postwar America’s collective consciousness. The book’s pictures, many showing disillusioned people across the country, are the ones most commonly associated with Frank. But he kept working for 60 years after that tome, producing a range of films and photographs that continued to develop the book’s themes. With 200 works on hand, this show seeks to expand the general public’s conception of Frank, focusing specifically on those in his artistic network—among others, his wife, the artist June Leaf, who died earlier this year; his film editor, Laura Israel; and his frequent collaborator, Danny Seymour.

September 15, 2024–January 11, 2025

Ming Smith at Various Venues, Columbus, Ohio

Though photographer Ming Smith may typically be associated with New York, a quartet of shows this season—two at the Columbus Museum of Art, as well as one a piece at Wexner Center of the Arts and the Gund—seek to reclaim her as an Ohioan, given that she was raised in Columbus. But geography can hardly contain Smith, who took significant strides for Black female artists like herself, and many of the pictures in these shows were taken far beyond Ohio. The Wexner, for example, is spotlighting some of Smith’s photographs shot in Africa, where she imaged sights seen and people encountered in an unusually high level of darkness that typifies her art.

Columbus Museum: September 19, 2024–January 26, 2025 Wexner: September 22, 2024–January 5, 2025 Gund: Through December 15, 2024

“For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability” at Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California

Among the most exciting offerings of this year’s PST ART is this survey of how artists contended with illness and disability, from the 1960s through the Covid pandemic. The 80 artists included take many different approaches to the subject: a Joey Terrill painting featured here offers a visually stunning meditation on living with HIV, while Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose’s rarely seen Video Coffin (1994), an installation featuring footage of the former inside a casket, sounds a more somber note.

September 19, 2024–February 2, 2024

“Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991” at Mudam, Luxembourg

“The clitoris is a direct line to the matrix,” wrote the art collective VNS Matrix in its famed 1991 manifesto, a text that has been credited with introducing the term “cyberfeminism” to the contemporary lexicon. But even before that, women artists of all stripes—painters, sculptors, filmmakers, and more—had asserted a female claim to computing technology, which some of them believed could induce a new kind of gender parity. This enterprising exhibition surveys that bunch, with the offerings ranging from Ulla Wiggen’s paintings of computer circuitry to Tamiko Thiel’s pioneering digital artworks.

September 20, 2024–February 2, 2025

Toronto Biennial of Art

Canada is a microcosm of the world writ large in the third edition of this biennial, which considers how the nation’s dark history of colonialism mirrors that of other countries across the globe. Perhaps that sounds dour; curators Dominique Fontaine and Miguel A. López have suggested otherwise. They’ve said their biennial features art that will “conjure sparks that light a fire amidst the fragility of existence.” Works by Ahmed Umar, Cecilia Vicuña, Hangama Amiri, Morehshin Allahyari, Raven Chacon, Sonia Boyce, and others will attest to that premise.

September 21, 2024–December 1, 2024

Michael Craig-Martin at Royal Academy of Arts, London

Can a glass of water really be an oak tree? Perhaps, if an artist says so. That, at least, was the suggestion made by a 1973 conceptual art piece by Michael Craig-Martin, whose provocations went on to inspire future shockers by artists such as Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, and Sarah Lucas, all of whom were his students. As his influence continues to be highlighted in British institutions, the Irish artist is getting a proper retrospective that will include his famed conceptual artworks alongside recent paintings that mash together elements borrowed from art historical masterpieces, rendered here in neon green, pink, and red.

September 21, 2024–December 10, 2024

“Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion” at Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio

Despite his fanbase counting legions of photography historians and Black and queer artists, Rotimi Fani-Kayode has remarkably never received a proper US survey. That will change this season with this show, a 200-work presentation that explores how this Nigerian-born photographer navigated his status as a gay man living in England at a remove from his homeland. His lush portraits, many paying homage to Yoruba lore, often obscure parts of his sitters’ bared bodies or allow their forms to multiply. Fani-Kayode’s point was that the self is an unknowable, mysterious thing, only occasionally coming into focus for seconds at a time.

September 22, 2024–January 5, 2025

“Louise Bourgeois: I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful.” at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

Louise Bourgeois’s is beloved for having transmuted her complex feelings about her father and mother into uncomfortable sculptures hinting at bodily containment. Like good therapists, the curators of this show spend their time here mapping out Bourgeois’s tortured family dynamics, suggesting her career as an arc from repression to liberation. The exhibition’s selection of 100 works—from early paintings to examples of the late-career spider sculptures—peels back some of the psychological mystique that surrounds Bourgeois, whose life story continues to provide plenty of intrigue more than a decade after her passing.

September 25, 2024–January 19, 2025

“Edges of Ailey” at Whitney Museum, New York

Might we be experiencing a renaissance of dance-oriented museum shows? Following surveys devoted to the Judson Dance Theater at MoMA and Simone Forti at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, there is now this expansive show about choreography Alvin Ailey, who launched an iconic dance company in his name that is still active today. The sprawling exhibition has been afforded all 18,000 square feet of the Whitney’s fifth floor, and while there will be paintings and sculptures on offer there, by the likes of Faith Ringgold, Kevin Beasley, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and many more, the main attraction will be performances staged two floors beneath. In that space, choreographers and artists ranging from Bill T. Jones to Okwui Okpokwasili will create works that pay homage to Ailey, whose dances memorably merged the centuries-old traditions of ballet with modern dance and contemporary Black culture.

September 25, 2024–February 9, 2025

“Soledad Sevilla: Rhythms, Grids, Variables” at Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid

The last time Soledad Sevilla showed at the Reina Sofía, in 2012, she covered the glass walls of its Palacio de Cristal with polycarbonate panels, altering this famed space by causing it to appear blue. More than a decade on, this Spanish painter has returned, this time for a survey of her work more broadly, which has subjected abstraction to rigorous geometries. During the ’60s, while many of her colleagues were experimenting with irregular pours and dribbles of paint, Sevilla was using computers to produce her art; she later moved in an analog direction, though she continued to rely upon rule sets, resulting in what she has called “rational abstraction.” Alongside a selection of more than 100 of these works, Sevilla will debut a new installation made of cotton thread.

September 25, 2024–March 10, 2025

“Tao Hui: In the Land Beyond Living” at Tai Kwun Contemporary Art Centre, Hong Kong

This young Chinese artist has gained a reputation for making incisive video art about alienation and capitalism, often in ways more mystifying than outright dour. Recent works have drawn upon the fast-paced, meme-friendly styles seen on TikTok. His 2023 video Hardworking , for example, is displayed on an iPhone-shaped screen that slopes onto the floor and features a saleswoman who repeatedly tries to peddle products, all while digital effects surround her. That work, along with several new commissions, appears in this show, which is among this rising star’s most high-profile exhibitions to date in Asia.

September 26, 2024–February 2, 2025

“Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules” at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

Helen Frankenthaler did not so much paint on canvas as she did in canvas, soaking and staining her colors to create faint blooms of pink and blue. That unusual technique caused her to stand out in the (largely male) field of Abstract Expressionists, and it has continued to place her at the forefront of the movement in the years since. Perhaps owing to her nationality, Americans have seen far more sizable Frankenthaler shows than Europeans. That makes this modestly scaled sampler of her art major among the few high-quality shows staged on the continent in recent years.

September 27, 2024–January 26, 2025

“Electric Op” at Buffalo AKG Art Gallery, New York

Op art, the 1960s movement known for its warping abstractions, is generally seen as an attempt to muck with viewers’ sense of perception, demanding onlookers to see paintings and sculptures with their minds as well as their eyes. But what if Op was also about making art become like new machinery? That’s the thesis of this survey, which suggests that Op’s foremost adherents—Carlos Cruz-Diez, Bridget Riley, and Victor Vasarely, among others—may have been thinking through the rise of video and a multitude of screens in their art. To make the point, the show also lures in post-Op art, from computer-oriented pieces by Vera Molnár and Zdenek Sýkora to digital art by Leo Villareal and Casey Reas.

September 27, 2024–January 27, 2025

“Paula Rego: Power Games” at Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland

Angel (1998), one of Paula Rego’s most famous works, features the artist’s muse Lila Nunes posing as a divine being brandishing a sword and a sponge. The piece concluded a series of pastels that Rego made to protest Portugal’s oppressive laws regarding abortion, with this angel present to “punish everyone” who’d contributed to that culture. Rego has justly earned international attention for works such as these, which enlist images borrowed from fairy tales and religious scenes, then reposition them to speak to imbalanced gender dynamics and violence committed by conservative regimes. The biggest Rego show since her death in 2022 will feature Angel as well as 120 other works that show how this gimlet-eyed artist pushed back against power structures.

September 28, 2024–February 2, 2025

Thomas Schütte at Museum of Modern Art, New York

A Pringle balanced on a matchbox, sculptures of grotesque men entangled with each other, a column with two cherries on top: Thomas Schütte has done it all and then some, working in no signature style along the way. That makes the MoMA retrospective for this celebrated German sculptor a prime opportunity to take stock of his diverse oeuvre. Despite having won the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion award and having received big shows of this sort abroad, his art has never been seen in such a large quantity on US soil. His MoMA show aims to fix that.

September 29, 2024–January 18, 2025

“Lygia Clark: The I and the You” at Whitechapel Gallery, London

Are we on the verge of a Lygia Clark–aissance in Europe? It certainly seems that way, given that there are two retrospectives due to open in the continent within the next year alone. The first alights at the Whitechapel Gallery, which has brought on a curatorial team that includes Golden Lion–winning artist Sonia Boyce to consider the Brazilian Neo-Concretist. During the 1950s, Clark devised a groundbreaking group of folding sculptures that encouraged viewer participation. Then, in the decade afterward, she brought her work into the public sphere, creating performances that broke art free from the elite institutions that had long held it. Rather than merely presenting those pieces via documentation, the Whitechapel Gallery will reanimate these performances regularly throughout the show, ensuring that Clark’s uncontainable energy remains present more than 30 year after her death.

October 2, 2024–January 12, 2025

“Paulo Nazareth: Luzia” at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City

In 1974, an 11,500-year-old skeleton was discovered in a Brazilian rock shelter. She was subsequently given the name Luzia, and she was discovered to have shared genetic material with Indigenous Australians. In 2020, seeking to exhume the full breadth of her lineage, Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth began charting Luzia’s history using found objects, which he assembled as a means of charting those that came before her. Part scientific inquiry and part speculative conceptual art project, this grouping of works will be the primary focus of his first exhibition in Mexico, yet another attempt by Nazareth to show how borders rarely contain people from moving beyond them.

October 3, 2024–February 9, 2025

“Lauren Halsey: emajendat” at Serpentine Galleries, London

The distant past, the immediate present, and the near future merge in Lauren Halsey’s sprawling installations, which mix styles derived from ancient Egypt with appropriated images related to South Central, the Los Angeles neighborhood the artist calls home. In the past decade, these installations featuring carved columns, clipped pictures, found ephemera, and more have won her acclaim in the US; now, her international influence is expanding, with new sculptures featured prominently at the Venice Biennale. Her Serpentine commission, one of her grandest projects to date, will see her install a faux garden within the museum’s galleries, which are also set to feature objects Halsey gained from South Central residents.

October 4, 2024–March 2, 2025

“The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography” at National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Documentary photography is commonly thought to be a truth-telling form of picture-making, but the 1970s, a decade marked by widespread distrust of power, demanded that the genre evolve. This 100-work survey explores that shift. Traditional documentary photographs abound—Helen Levitt, Larry Fink, and Anthony Hernandez will feature here—but so too do more conceptual works that present lies to viewers. Take the case of Tseng Kwong Chi, whose photographs involved the artist wearing a Mao suit and venturing out into public, allowing people to decide for themselves how to engage with his concocted persona.

October 6, 2024–April 6, 2025

“Caillebotte: Painting Men” at Musée d’Orsay, Paris

In Gustave Caillebotte’s paintings, men are pictured doing a vast number of activities: walking dogs, scraping floors, rowing boats, gazing at boulevards on balconies, looking forlornly at trains. That he so often focused on men is not a coincidence, according to this show, which theorizes that the French Impressionist took an active role in recasting masculinity for the modern age. Though the show is notable for grouping dozens of his 19th-century canvases in one space, it is also significant for examining Caillebotte’s biography through the lens of gender, paying mind to the fact that he remained single at a time when this was unusual for a wealthy Parisian male.

October 8, 2024–January 19, 2025

“Arte Povera” at Bourse de Commerce, Paris

Of all the various avant-gardes that sprung up in postwar Europe, Arte Povera must rank among the strangest. Its purveyors, who worked in Italy in the 1960s, made oddball sculptural installations that combined organic elements—branches, horses, water—with industrial materials, suggesting that nature had been profoundly reshaped following World War II. Celebrity curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, newly retired from her post as director of the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, charts the movement anew here. She is set to focus specifically on 13 artists, among them Mario and Marisa Merz, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Pino Pascali, the subject of a recent retrospective at the Fondazione Prada in Milan.

October 9, 2024–January 20, 2025

Mire Lee at Tate Modern, London

This South Korean–born phenomenon makes large sculptures that are horrifying, disgusting, and visually resplendent all in one. Those squelchy works, which are often outfitted with mechanized elements, have channeled mystifying psychological states and envisioned indefinable bodies, and they have been a hit at biennials, from Venice to Busan. Her latest work, a commission for Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall, looks to continue her international rise.

October 9, 2024–March 16, 2025

“Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy” at Modern Art Museum, Shanghai

Will crystals heal us? Marina Abramović certainly thinks so. The performance artist has said that hematite, quartz, and tourmaline have “medical property, scientific property and energy property,” and she’s determined to show it in her biggest exhibition to date, which includes sculptures known as “Transitory Objects” that collectively feature 6,600 pounds of minerals. Viewers can interact with these objects and, hopefully, gain some spiritual fulfillment from them. Perhaps, too, they’ll come away with a new understanding of Abramović’s less warm performance art, for which the artist has subjected her body to painful situations.

October 10, 2024–February 28, 2025

“Charles Atlas: About Time” at Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

This video art giant has never been one for traditional gestures—his 2018 video installation The Years , an assortment of past works about queer culture and dance arranged to look like gravestones in a cemetery, was conceived as a retrospective unto itself. Therefore, do not expect this 125-work show to be your average Charles Atlas survey. Conceived as an immersive grouping of installations, the show culminates in the debut of a new work featuring video portraits of artists such as Marina Abramović, John Waters, Lady Bunny, and Yvonne Rainer.

October 10, 2024–March 16, 2025

La Trienal at El Museo del Barrio, New York

This recurring survey of Latinx art is back for a second edition, after the first, focused specifically on the US and Puerto Rico, debuted in 2021. This time, though, the geographic purview has been expanded , so that now, artists from the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean will figure here. Alongside rising talents based in this country, from Ser Serpas to Alina Perez, there will be artists to watch from far abroad, such as Noberto Roldan, a Filipino known for his vast assemblages contending with forces of globalization.

October 10, 2024–February 9, 2025

“Nástio Mosquito: King of Klowns” at M HKA, Antwerp

“I don’t want to make this shit about irony. I don’t want to make shit about sarcasm,” Nástio Mosquito once said, referring to the fact that he was not so interested in postmodern strategies, since he didn’t have a formal art education. Perhaps fittingly, his work is characterized by an unusual directness. It is sex-positive, anti-colonial, and generally pretty uproarious, taking the form of performances, poetry, videos, and more with a comic edge. It’s a lot of art to wrangle, and in many different styles, too; the Angolan-born artist’s first major museum survey in Belgium, the country where he is now based, allows viewers to take stock of it all.

October 11, 2024–January 26, 2025

“Tacita Dean: Blind Folly” at Menil Collection, Houston

Tacita Dean may be best known for slowly paced 16mm films that contemplate landscapes and others’ artworks—decidedly analog gestures in our sped-up digital moment. But the focus in this show, the British artist’s most high-profile museum show in the US to date, will be on her drawings, prints, and sculptures, all of which further her films’ quest to visualize the passage of time. Alongside some of her moving-image works, there will also be her tree “portraits,” photographs of flowering plants, many printed at a monumental scale, that Dean augments her own drawn marks.

October 11, 2024–April 20, 2025

“Carol Rama: A Rebel of Modernity” at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt

Artists who do not fit neatly into the art historical rubric of a given moment tend to slip through the cracks, and that may explain why Carol Rama was never canonized during her day. Her paintings of crowned women, people fornicating with animals, and fecal-looking splatters did an excellent job of breaking taboos, but they certainly did not conform to Arte Povera or any dominant movements in Italy, where she was based. They have, however, found an international audience following her death in 2015, and with this show, her first big survey in Germany, her following is poised to grown even more.

October 11, 2024–February 2, 2025

Tamara de Lempicka at de Young Museum

During the 1920s, Tamara de Lempicka was among the artists involved in the epic project of crafting the “New Woman,” a female persona that suited the fast-changing modern times. This Polish-born painter contributed canvases featuring modish women riding in cars and posing before urban metropolises, her subjects’ skin rendered using an off-kilter sheen that sometimes mirrored the machines pictured. Though some critics have labeled her art kitsch, Lempicka’s art has earned some avid admirers, among them the pop star Madonna, who has collected the artist’s work. Finally, more than four decades after her death, Lempicka is receiving a scholarly retrospective in the United States, where she worked for a majority of her career. Lempicka , a recent Broadway musical that played up the artist’s liberated sexuality and lifestyle, was a notorious flop; this much-anticipated show is likely not to suffer the same fate.

October 12, 2024–February 9, 2025

“Fluxus and Beyond: Ursula Burghardt, Benjamin Patterson” at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

The two artists surveyed here have largely been considered secondary figures in the history of Fluxus, the 1960s movement that claimed everyday objects as the stuff of art, and unjustly so. The exhibition suggests that their identities played a role. Ursula Burghardt, who made slight alterations to trinkets and offered them as her sculptures, was a Jewish German; Benjamin Patterson, whose unconventional music sometimes invited audience participation, was a Black American. While both were well-known to Fluxus-affiliated artists (Patterson was even vocally acclaimed by Nam June Paik), neither is quite so widely recognized today. This exhibition may change that.

Tarek Atoui at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria

Much of Tarek Atoui’s art is devoted to the production of surprising sounds. Those sounds emanate not from conventional instruments but from places and objects of Atoui’s own making. These unusual artworks have all asked a perplexing question: Which peoples, and what objects, deserve to be heard, and how? The subject of his latest work is being kept under wraps, but the Kunsthaus Bregenz has tantalizingly teased the project by noting that its spaces are acoustically sensitive, meaning that visitors should keep their ears peeled.

October 12, 2024–January 12, 2025

Olga de Amaral at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris

Textile artist Olga de Amaral weaves rich abstractions that translate the look of modernist painting into fiber, with her gorgeously hued threads even sometimes allowed to hang loose, creating sculptural installations that can be seen from multiple angles. Even in a time when fiber art has become pervasive in the institutions that once shunned it, this nonagenarian’s work stands out. The Colombian artist’s first retrospective in Europe will feature decades’ worth of art paying homage to pre-Columbian traditions and centuries-old handicrafts.

October 12, 2024–March 16, 2025

“Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350” at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Just about every Art History 101 course tends to place due emphasis on the explosion of creativity that occurred in Florence and birthed the Renaissance during the 15th century. But this blockbuster exhibition suggests that none of that would have been possible were it not for 14th-century Siena, where a group of painters set painting in a new direction by shearing Christian imagery of the staid styles associated with Medieval art. Duccio, for his part, began using egg tempera and gold leaf, and started painting figures that contained greater depth, like the humans that appeared in real life. His famed Madonna and Child (ca. 1290–1300), featuring the Christ Child playfully tugging at his mother’s veil, features here alongside works by Simone Martini, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and others in this jewel-box blockbuster, which heads to London’s National Gallery following its appearance in New York.

October 13, 2024–January 26, 2025

“Figures du Fou: Du Moyen Age aux Romantiques” at Louvre, Paris

Should Todd Phillips’s Joker: Folie à Deux (out October 4) leave you wanting more, there is this sprawling survey focused on the figure of the madman in artworks dating from between the 13th and 19th centuries. The expressions of insanity that figure here are not all so dour as Joker , however: some focus on love and passion, others on religious ecstasy, and still others on madness as a logical response to a culture obsessed with reason. Craziness takes many forms here, and so too do the artworks included, which include illuminated manuscripts, oil paintings, engravings, and more.

October 16, 2024–February 3, 2025

“Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann & …” at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

This mega-exhibition may sound like yet another retrospective for Tom Wesselmann, the Pop artist known for his paintings of sprawled-out nude women and domestic interiors stuffed with consumerist goods. Wesselmann fans, fear not: there are 150 pieces by the artist on hand here. But the show is more than Wesselmann, with another 70 works by 35 other artists whose work the curators have tied to his. Some of those pieces are critical of Wesselmann’s famed and famously polarizing “Great American Nude” paintings. Derrick Adams and Mickalene Thomas, for example, similarly portray odalisques, but theirs are focused on Black models. Seen in the context of Wesselmann’s paintings, the tenderness of Adams and Thomas’s gazes will become apparent.

October 16, 2024–February 24, 2025

“Malala Andrialavidrazana: Figures” at Palais de Tokyo, Paris

Since 2015, Malala Andrialavidrazana has been working on the series “Figures,” for which the Madagascar-born French artist mashes together pieces of maps, colonial paintings, currency, scientific diagrams, and more. The results are expansive, maximal photomontages that are intended to chart the world without a colonialist perspective. The sweeping ambition of these pieces may be one reason the Palais de Tokyo chose to award Andrialavidrazana its biggest space: a gallery whose 196-foot-long walls she will cover with preexisting “Figures” works that she will enlarge to a new, epic proportions.

October 17, 2024–January 5, 2025

“Silhouettes in the Undergrowth” at Museo Jumex, Mexico City

Starting in 1973, Ana Mendieta began to visit sites in Iowa and Mexico, and scrawl an abstracted female form into the landscape. Sometimes, she set this form on fire; in other instances, she left it to disappear as it was exposed to the elements. For her, the series, known as the “Siluetas,” became a way to imply an intimate connection between the land and the body, a project taken up in the intervening decades by a range of other Latin American women artists, five of whom appear alongside the late Mendieta in this show. Among them are Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, a young Mexican-born artist whose paintings have featured women arrayed in verdant nature, where they party and have sex alongside seemingly disused car parts.

“Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture” at mumok, Vienna

The title of this exhibition stakes a bold claim for Medardo Rosso, a sculptor who made a solid contribution to 19th-century art with his lumpy sculptures of expressive faces. Perhaps these works, made using a lost-wax casting technique more often associated with classical sculpture, are nowhere so transgressive as what followed them—they seem aesthetically conservative compared to the abstract sculptures European modernists produced thereafter. But the show places dozens of Rosso’s sculptures alongside more recent pieces by Jasper Johns, Phyllida Barlow, and Eva Hesse to prove that his work had lasting power, no matter how easy it may be to toss it off today.

October 18, 2024–February 23, 2025

Everlyn Nicodemus at National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

Most self-portraits depict exactly one head—the artist’s—but Everlyn Nicodemus’s from 1982 contains five faces, all apparently belonging to the same body. Each of those faces looks a bit like Nicodemus. Her point with this work, the first by a Black woman to enter the collection of London’s National Portrait Gallery, was that the self is not always so easy to define, especially when one is diasporic like Nicodemus, a Tanzanian-born painter who has resided in Sweden, France, and Belgium. For the past 15 years, this influential artist has been tackling the aftermath of colonialism and the intricacies of Black identity from her studio in Edinburgh. At long last, she gets her first-ever retrospective; fittingly, it’s being held within the city she now calls home.

October 19, 2024–May 25, 2025

“Sophie Calle: Overshare” at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

The titular verb in this retrospective’s title is a reference to French artist Sophie Calle’s unique ability to leave nothing to the imagination. In her conceptual projects of the past few decades, she has regularly invaded people’s privacy—taking up a job as a hotel maid in order to rifle through people’s belongings in one famous project, and following a male stranger and documenting her travails for another. Her photographs, installations, and more will be assembled for her most comprehensive US museum show to date. It’s a homecoming of sorts for Calle, who, working on commission for a Minneapolis bank, once clandestinely photographed people withdrawing from an ATM for a project called Cash Machine (1991–2003).

October 26, 2024–January 26, 2025

“Steina: Playback” at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Steina’s name may hardly be a household one, but to video-art enthusiasts, she is an icon, having produced key tapes that explore the flow of time and the landscapes of Iceland and New Mexico, her birth country and her current home state, respectively. To properly encapsulate the octogenarian’s output is just about impossible, given the many forms it has taken. She cofounded the Kitchen, the New York art center that has fostered generations of media and performance artists, and she often worked collaboratively with her husband, the late Woody Vasulka. But this retrospective endeavors to try—and is likely to bring Steina wider recognition.

October 26, 2024–January 15, 2025

René Magritte at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Walk into any of the biggest modern art museums of Western Europe and the US, and you won’t have to go far to find a painting by René Magritte, the Belgian Surrealist known for depicting floating boulders, pipes that aren’t pipes, and canvases that shatter as though they were made of glass. Many of these famed works are located thousands of miles away from Australia, which is why this show, billed as his first retrospective ever on the continent, is being treated as such an event. One of the works making the trek for the occasion is the Museum of Modern Art’s The False Mirror (1929), in which the iris of an eye is replaced with a cloudy sky.

October 26, 2024–February 9, 2025

“Ei Arakawa-Nash: Paintings Are Popstars” at National Art Center, Tokyo

While Ei Arakawa-Nash is best known for performance art, much of his work has involved painting, a medium that has historically been largely about the final product, not the process of making it. The beauty of Arakawa-Nash’s art is that it shows that painting can be similar to performance art for those willing to view it that way: he has had people dance around paintings and even flung a person through a canvas. He is set to feature live performance art alongside painting once more with this show, which will include works by Oscar Murillo, Leidy Churchman, Trevor Shimizu, and more alongside events of Arakawa-Nash’s making. “This exhibition will definitely come only once in my life,” the artist said in a statement. “Please let me deliver it to you with a playful attitude.”

October 30, 2024–December 16, 2024

“Salvo: Arrivare in tempo” at Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin

Salvo’s colorful paintings of landscapes lined with bulbous trees and squat houses made him an outlier during his day, but this Italian artist has received a surge of interest in recent years, with his one of his canvases selling for over $1 million last year at Christie’s. Here comes the biggest exhibition ever afforded to him—in Turin, the city he called home, no less—to prove that he is more than just a market phenomenon. The show seeks to prove that even though Salvo may have had a light touch, he had big ideas on the brain, with a special interest in how a contemporary artist could reinvent historical genres for new eras.

October 31, 2024–May 24, 2025

“Meriem Bennani: For My Best Family” at Fondazione Prada, Milan

During the first lockdown, in 2020, Meriem Bennani and her collaborator Orian Barki charmed audiences worldwide with 2 Lizards , a grouping of videos posted to Instagram that featured computer-generated animals navigating a Covid-altered New York. Bennani and Barki are set to enchant once more with a new film, titled For Aicha , whose protagonist is a 35-year-old jackal named Bouchra who has acquired the ability to make movies. That work will be complemented by a fresh installation by Bennani composed of hundreds of flip flops; the shoes will be moved about by a machine, causing them to hit objects around them and produce a symphony of sound.

October 31, 2024–February 24, 2025

“MANZAR: Art and Architecture from Pakistan 1940s to Today” at National Museum of Qatar

With around 200 works included, this epic exhibition charts Pakistan’s art scene roughly from the time of Partition onward, attesting to a wealth of experimentation conducted along the way. Some artists, like Imran Qureshi and Shahzia Sikander, have remixed traditional styles like miniature painting and made them new—something made literal by Amin Gulgee, who will here recreate a Mughal garden with a contemporary twist. Others, like Lala Rukh and Salima Hashmi, have dealt with Pakistan’s present, taking up issues like women’s rights and nuclear disarmament. Across all these pieces, these artists attempt to envision the future of Pakistan, a nation that has experienced tumult since gaining independence in 1947.

November 1, 2024–January 31, 2025

Prospect New Orleans

All biennial-style exhibitions are saddled with the possibility of becoming parachute-in shows: curators and artists spend a brief period engaging with a specific locale, then depart once they’re done and never look back. Curator Miranda Lash and artist Ebony G. Patterson, the organizers of this year’s Prospect New Orleans triennial, have actively sought to avoid that quagmire with a show that they say asks: “What does it mean to ‘hold’ a city, a gesture that suggests care and reverence?” Works by Teresa Baker, Bethany Collins, Cathy Lu, Karyn Olivier, Stephanie Syjuco, Joiri Minaya, and more may offer some answers.

November 2, 2024–February 2, 2025

“Seeing Is Believing: the art and influence of Gérôme” at Mathaf, Qatar

Of all the 19th-century French painters credited with doing something new, Jean-Léon Gérôme may not have the greatest name recognition, even though his paintings have influenced the way many white Westerners conceive of North Africa and the Middle East. His canvases showing snake charmers, encampments in Egypt, and enslaved people seduced Europeans of his day with alluring, eroticized, and casually racist visions of lands largely unknown to them. In recent decades, this has all made these works ripe for critique, with Edward Said even famously plastering one such Gérôme painting across the cover of his 1978 book Orientalism . Gérôme was born 200 years ago, but he is not exactly getting a birthday celebration with this mega-exhibition, whose 400 works—some by him, some not—show how the artist crafted negative stereotypes that continue to pervade Western culture.

November 2, 2024–February 22, 2025

“Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930” at Guggenheim Museum, New York

Of all the – isms of the early 20th century known to the general public, Orphism is not likely to rank highly for name recognition. The Guggenheim aspires to change that with this big survey devoted to the movement, which upheld color as a primary means of experimentation, even as contemporaneous movements like Cubism opted largely for blacks, whites, and grays. The twinkling compositions that resulted—the whirling abstractions of František Kupka, the prismatic orbs painted by Sonia Delaunay—charm the eye with their bold palettes, which will provide plenty of excitement in this museum’s predominantly white interior.

November 8, 2024–March 9, 2025

Renata Lucas at Pinacoteca de São Paulo

In 2010, Renata Lucas tilted the sidewalk of a Berlin street exactly 7.5 degrees, forcing a circular swatch of the walkway to lead into a wall. The project typified this Brazilian artist’s practice, which has sought to create interruptions in the way people view and move through spaces. By turns humorous and slightly menacing, her interventions break down the reigning sense of order that guides daily life. For that reason, her biggest survey to date in her home country ought to provide a disorienting experience.

November 9, 2024–April 6, 2025

“The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970–2020” at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

The notion that painting is a fundamentally analog medium has come to seem passé as artists have begun to enlist video and software alongside their brushes and canvases. In this survey, the focus is artists who have lured technology into the painterly process, at times barely even touching the works that result with their own hands. Take the case of Avery Singer’s paintings made using Google SketchUp, for which the artist created the underdrawings of her canvases on a computer and then filled in her digital figures by hand using acrylic, effectively marrying brushstroke and keystroke.

November 9, 2024–April 13, 2025

“Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon” at MoMA PS1, New York

Starting in 2002, choreographer Ralph Lemon began to visit Yazoo, Mississippi, to spend time Walter Carter, a former sharecropped whom Lemon engaged as his collaborator. Together, the two would reenact portions of Solaris and Alphaville , and use the language of those famed arthouse films to speak to alienation resulting from years and years of racism. Photographs and videos related to that ongoing project, formally titled 1856 Cessna Road , is among the 60 works in this survey, which highlights this influential artist’s sprawling network. Accordingly, though its title makes it appear like a one-person show, its participants are many: Kevin Beasley is set to debut a new video and sound installation with Lemon here, and Okwui Okpokpwasili, Darrell Jones, and more are on tap to perform live in the museum’s galleries.

November 14, 2024–2025

“Cassils: Movements” at SITE Sante Fe, New Mexico

In 2022, for a Cassils performance called Human Measure , six trans and nonbinary performers moved around on stage in low light on a muslin canvas treated with cyanotype solution. That canvas ended up recording their bodies, acting as a “visual language that denies [the] kind of invisibility” typically afforded to trans and nonbinary people, as the artist as put it. Cassils will continue honing that visual language with sound and video installations that rework Human Measure for a gallery space, effectively ensuring that the artist’s temporary performances are made permanent.

November 15, 2024–February 3, 2025

“Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream…” at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas

Two years before Philip Guston’s paintings of Klansmen initiated widespread controversy, Vincent Valdez faced similar scandal for showing his own 30-foot-long painting of these hooded white supremacists. With its grand scale and its piercing detail, the piece exemplified Valdez’s unique ability to stare back at forces of evil and present them to the public, whether it is ready to look at these images or not. Valdez’s first-ever museum survey marshals his drawings, paintings, prints, and more, taking up subjects such as violence inflicted upon immigrants and the strength of the Latinx community in the face of it along the way.

November 15, 2024–March 23, 2025

“Luc Tuymans: The Past” at UCCA Contemporary Art Center, Beijing

Well before the current craze for figurative painting, Luc Tuymans made a name for himself during the ’90s with canvases featuring imagery appropriated from the media, then largely drained of color. His subjects would go on to include Condoleezza Rice, stills from Singin’ in the Rain and Mulholland Drive , and alienated-looking people; though not always political, the paintings seemed to allude to the loss of history and the pervasiveness of evil. Eighty of Tuymans’s pictures will figure in this show, which places a specific focus on his work about China, a country whose globalized economy has long fascinated the Belgian artist.

November 16, 2024–February 16, 2025

“Amy Sherald: American Sublime” at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Amy Sherald made a splash when, in 2018, she unveiled her official portrait of Michelle Obama, who was pictured wearing a Michelle Smith–designed dress that flowed beautifully across her legs, cutting through Sherald’s eggshell blue background. This sharp painting looked like few other official portraits before it, and it cemented Sherald’s reputation as a painter of note. This show, her first mid-career survey, seals the deal, bringing together 50 paintings of Black men, women, and children, all pictured against monochromatic backgrounds. Expect the exhibition to attest to how Sherald altered the trajectory of figurative painting.

November 16, 2024–March 9, 2025

“Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature” at the Broad, Los Angeles

Around the same time as this exhibition, a reforestation project called Social Forest: Oaks of Tovaangar , organized by archaeologist Desireé Reneé Martinez and artist Lazaro Arvizu Jr., will see 100 California oak trees planted in Elysian Park. It’s a gesture that blurs the line between conceptual art and ecological renewal, and one that’s meant to recall Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, 1982), for which the German artist planted thousands of trees in Kassel, Germany. Did that work make Beuys an accidental eco-art pioneer? This 400-work survey suggests that when Beuys manipulated the landscape around him, he thought deeply about humanity’s shifting relationship to the environment, whose tenuousness he understood well before climate change became a public concern.

November 16, 2024–April 6, 2025

“Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now” at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

This ambitious show proves that for many Black artists of the past century and a half, the Egypt of millennia ago remains a force in the present. Expected artists figure in the show’s 150-person list: Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, a Harlem Renaissance sculptor who recycled pharaonic imagery for a new age; Kara Walker, who sexualized sphinx sculptures have provoked controversy and admiration; Awol Erizku, whose photographs have featured miniature recreations of Egyptian statues. But the participants also include multihyphenates such as Sun Ra and Solange, whose works in various fields have ensured that ancient Egyptian styles continue to infiltrate pop culture.

November 17, 2024–February 17, 2025

“The 80s: Photographing Britain” at Tate Britain, London

A miners’ strike, the AIDS pandemic, a conservative crackdown on the queer community: all this and more happened in England during the 1980s, a decade whose tumult gave way to a photographic revolution. Rather than making overarching pronouncements about all the pictures that resulted, this 350-work show opts for variety, spotlighting both documentary and conceptual modes alike while also featuring works that sometimes do not look much like traditional photography at all. Many artists here blend multiple modes of working; the Scottish photographer Maud Sulter, for example, often pictured Black women playing semi-fictional characters as a means of questioning how race is performed.

November 21, 2024–May 5, 2025

“Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet” at Tate Modern, London

Many technologically minded art exhibitions in the past decade have used the birth of the World Wide Web, in 1989, as a starting point. Here, however, it is the endpoint, with nearly all this show’s contents focusing on artworks made in the pre-internet age. Staples of postwar art history will figure here, among them Atsuko Tanaka’s Electric Dress (1957), a wearable sculpture formed from multicolored light bulbs. But generally, the focus is on art awaiting canonization, from experiments done by the Yugoslavian New Tendencies artists of the 1960s to Samia Halaby’s abstractions done on an Amiga 1000 computer during the 1980s.

November 28, 2024–June 1, 2025

“Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film” at Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Not quite an art exhibition yet not quite a design show either, this cross-disciplinary survey sets out to explore how digital technologies have reshaped artists’ ability to portray reality since the 1980s. It’s a wide-ranging inquiry, and so the offerings are unusually expansive, with a clip from Jurassic Park placed within the same galleries as work by Petra Cortright, whose webcam-shot videos, often augmented with chintzy digital effects, made her a closely watched artist during the post-internet era. Then again, tools like Photoshop can be used to many different ends, from digital design to conceptual photography, and the show is meant to be open-ended as a means of reflecting that.

November 24, 2024–July 13, 2025

“Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968” at Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles

The paintings of Photorealist artists such as Audrey Flack and Robert Bechtle look like camera-made images, even though they were produced by hand using oil and acrylic. That, of course, was the point: these artists sought to question whether painting could function like photography in its quest to portray life itself. Often derided as kitsch (even though these artists were sometimes trying for just that, “good” taste be damned), Photorealism gets proper consideration with this survey. The show charts the movement’s evolution during the 1970s and then expands it to the current moment, offering up figurative painters such as Gina Beavers and Sayre Gomez as modern-day inheritors to artists like Flack and Bechtle.

November 23, 2024–May 4, 2025

An NFL Legend’s Custom Vacation Retreat in Montana Is Heading to Auction This Month

Ciara Goes Maximalist in Plaid on Plaid Ensemble at Willy Chavarria Spring 2025 Show During New York Fashion Week

This AI video shows us what the Avengers would have looked like in the ’90s

Alex Morgan to Leave NWSL Much Better Than She Found It

The Best Yoga Mats for Any Practice, According to Instructors

ARTnews is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Art Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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Ukraine’s Kursk incursion already has its own museum exhibit in Kyiv

A monument, the Motherland, stands above Ukraine’s war museum in Kyiv on Sept. 1. An exhibition of artifacts collected in Russia’s Kursk region after Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia in August is due to open at the museum. (Ed Ram/The Washington Post)

KYIV — What’s left of a concrete copy of Vladimir Lenin’s nose — which, until recently, was part of a statue of the Soviet leader in Sudzha, Russia — is now on display in the capital of Ukraine.

The broken nose, collected by the director of Ukraine’s war museum on a cross-border trip after Ukrainian troops seized Sudzha last month, was unveiled Friday in a new exhibit in Kyiv that documents Ukraine’s surprise Aug. 6 military incursion into Russia’s western Kursk region.

“There is a phrase among film and television artists that ‘the picture can disappear,’” museum director Yuriy Savchuk, 59, said in an interview as museum staff rushed about preparing the space for the new exhibit. “We may lose this first picture of the war. And so, we needed to see it, to feel these emotions, to witness it with our own eyes in order to reproduce it in the public space.”

“Thanks to our defense forces,” he added, “we managed to make this short, urgent tour.”

Savchuk crossed into Ukrainian-controlled Russia four times last month, returning with a diverse haul of items: local newspapers, movie posters, a handwritten sign from a civilian bomb shelter, a hammer-and-sickle flag from a fire station and, perhaps most symbolically, a blue, bullet-ridden sign showing where the roads to Ukraine and Russia diverge.

A a blue, bullet-ridden sign showing where the roads to Ukraine and Russia diverge was collected from Ukrainian-controlled Russia by Savchuk. (Ed Ram/The Washington Post)

The museum’s display of some of those items, along with archival Ukrainian maps of Russia’s border regions and recent photos from Kursk, chronicles how Kyiv turned the tables on Moscow last month, seizing some 500 square miles of Russian territory and hundreds of Russian prisoners of war. The exhibit and the haste with which it was opened reflect how Kyiv sees its seizure of Russian territory in the first such assault on Russian soil since World War II.

The fork in the road sign, Savchuk said, “very symbolically and figuratively demonstrates not just that we have gone in different directions … [but] how far we have already moved away.”

Some of the territory seized inside Russia was long ago considered part of Ukraine, and Savchuk said he hopes the archival display, which describes the region’s history, drives home that “even if territorial claims existed in the past, it does not justify resorting to war in the present day.”

Ukraine has insisted that it brought the war to Kursk to create a buffer zone, push Russian forces from the border and demoralize Russian troops — and has not claimed it plans to try to permanently expand Ukraine’s own modern borders, set in 1991, which Russia has tried to redraw.

When asked how he would respond to any criticism that he had looted the items he brought over the border, Savchuk said he would profoundly disagree. “This is property that has been smashed, destroyed,” he said. The Lenin monument, for example, was damaged in a suspected Russian drone attack, he said — not intentionally destroyed as an act of revenge.

“I absolutely believe that we cannot even use the term ‘artifacts’ or ‘cultural property’ to refer to these objects when they are in Russia,” he said. They only become “mementos and testimonies of this war in our collection, in our museum, where we will keep them for life.”

Russia, he added, is meanwhile “deliberately destroying cultural objects” in Ukraine.

Savchuk unrolls a movie poster from inside Russia as he packs items into a van in Yunakivka village near the Ukraine-Russia border in the Sumy region of Ukraine on Aug. 15, during the second week of Ukraine’s incursion. (Ed Ram/The Washington Post)

For its part, Russia exhibits items taken from Ukraine during the war, including in a display this summer at Moscow’s State Historical Museum, just off Red Square. Visitors were shown bullet-riddled street signs from the now-occupied eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, Azov Brigade T-shirts and paraphernalia — and a cello that curators claimed had been taken from the destroyed Mariupol Drama Theatre. One wall of the exhibition described Russia’s justifications for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, describing how the war was “forced upon” Russia.

Yuriy Horpynych, an exhibition manager at Kyiv’s state-funded war museum, said his boss did not tell the staff that he was embarking on a trip to Sudzha until after he had gone. The collected items are “not for our own use. It’s a museum collection … It’s not like an exhibition of trophies,” he said. “We don’t take it from people who need it.”

In Ukraine, he added, “Russians looted everything they can find.”

Pat Griffiths, International Committee of the Red Cross spokesperson in Ukraine, said that he could not speak to the legality of any specific case because his organization maintains neutrality. “What I can say is that in any armed conflict, anywhere, at any time, private, public and cultural property is protected,” he said, referring to the Geneva Conventions and other laws of war.

Savchuk took his job at Ukraine’s World War II museum in late 2021. Within months, his role changed as he shifted his focus from historical research on a century-old war to documenting the new war as it took place in his own home.

In April 2022, days after Russian troops retreated from the Kyiv region, Savchuk requested permission from the Ukrainian military to travel through just-liberated territories to collect evidence to display in the museum.

Much like in Sudzha, his task was urgent. To make his collection historically accurate, he had to arrive first, before others had sifted through the destruction. Over 12 days that month, he collected abandoned Russian soldiers’ boots, ID cards and rations, now on display in the museum previously dedicated to the Soviet-Afghan War.

His team then installed a recreation of a civilian bomb shelter they visited in the Kyiv suburb of Hostomel. In the museum basement, visitors feel their way through an immersive exhibit and experience the dark, cramped, degrading experience of wartime life. Across Ukraine, some civilians still live full-time in similar shelters. Many others take still cover in them during regular Russian airstrikes.

When Ukraine liberated other territory later in 2022, Savchuk again rushed to visit the areas — still mined and vulnerable to Russian assault — to add to his collection.

But the visit to Sudzha was more complicated, he said. The week he visited, the city remained extremely dangerous, with regular Russian drone, missile and glide bomb attacks. Some Russian soldiers were still hiding in the surrounding forests or inside civilian homes.

For his first trip, he crossed with the Ukrainian military, wearing a flak jacket and helmet, he recounted. But the next three days, he and a young photographer working for the museum traveled around Sudzha in their civilian van with Kyiv plates.

When crossing through a checkpoint in the last Ukrainian village near the border, troops raised their eyebrows when he said he worked for a museum. But then one soldier recognized the car. By chance, he was the same soldier who had accompanied Savchuk’s team on their first excursions outside of Kyiv in 2022.

Once inside the Kursk region, they rushed through the town searching for items that would help explain the significance of the incursion. At one point, they watched Ukrainian soldiers shoot a flagpole to help take down a Russian flag.

“You don’t know if you’ll be back on this street later. You don’t know your route. You don’t know how long you will be there,” he said. “And it is extremely difficult. You need to instantly navigate, instantly think about what things you need.”

Racing from street to street, Savchuk said he and the photographer were so excited imagining the future exhibit that they were “high on adrenaline and happiness hormones.” Savchuk even tried to take a cat he found at the border crossing, he said, promising her that she could live in his museum — but she jumped out of his car window and ran back to Russia.

In the civilian shelter in the basement of a former school in central Sudzha, he saw elderly people huddled on mattresses in a basement, using a bucket for a bathroom. The basement, he said, looked exactly like the one from Hostomel that he recreated in Kyiv.

“It’s absolutely the same,” he said. “It’s amazing.” He asked the civilians if he could take the handwritten poster written outside that warned that only civilians — not soldiers — were inside. It looked identical, he said, to signs Ukrainians had installed outside their own homes or shelters.

Bedding and household items in a recreation of the type of basement bomb shelter in which people took refuge following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the war museum in Kyiv on Aug. 26. (Ed Ram/The Washington Post)

A sign indicating civilians are inside on the door of a recreation of a basement bomb shelter, like those in which people took refuge during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in Ukraine’s war museum in Kyiv on Aug. 26. (Ed Ram/The Washington Post)

“It is a great tragedy, a great disaster, a great misfortune for civilians,” he said. “And everyone finds themselves in similar situations.”

Once they had what they needed — and after narrowly avoiding a Russian drone attack — they decided to leave. The museum was waiting for its new collection. And if they were going to install it in time for the one-month anniversary of the incursion, he said, “we had to save our lives.”

Video: A new exhibit at Ukraine’s War Museum displays artifacts collected by the museum director from Ukraine’s August incursion of Russia’s Kursk region.

Francesca Ebel contributed to this report.

(c) 2024, The Washington Post.

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