Fall Guide: 20 Art World Highlights Not to Miss

After duct-taping a banana to a wall, gifting Guggenheim-goers a golden toilet, and sculpting a repentant Hitler on his knees, shock-value art-star Maurizio Cattelan won the 2026 Preis der Nationalgalerie (Germany’s National Gallery Prize). The award comes with a show in the museum’s iconic gridded glass building in Berlin designed by Mies van der Rohe, and whatever Cattelan does with so transparent and unique a space is all but guaranteed to make headlines.
Sept. 10–March 7

Counterpublic in St. Louis thoughtfully reimagines what a triennial might be. The show bills itself as a “civic exhibition” and earns the title by asking—and answering—hard questions about art’s long-term impact and rewriting the ways recurring exhibitions might stay sustainable in every sense of the term. This year’s edition, under the title “Coyote Time,”  is helmed by star curators Jordan Carter, Raphael Fonseca, Stefanie Hessler, Nora N. Khan, and Wanda Nanibush, and promises to be a show to watch.
Sept. 12–Dec. 12

Few painters have captured corporeal complexity as fluidly and vibrantly as Juanita McNeely. This fall, the work of the Missouri native returns home for a retrospective spanning both the St. Louis Art Museum and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, surveying her bold figurative paintings that capture the full spectrum of both the human experience and the color wheel. Canvases show everything from unsafe abortions and animal-human relations to scenes of desire and disability, all swirled together in unforgettable images. 
Both Sept. 10–February

This expansive show at Columbia College Chicago is curated by the historian and Vision & Justice founder Sarah Lewis with a probing question in mind: What would Emmett Till have seen if he had lived beyond his brutal murder in 1955? Subtitled “Freedom on American Ground,” the exhibition (and accompanying book) includes photographs of the nation by Gordon Parks, Dawoud Bey, Teju Cole, Carrie Mae Weems, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, and more.
Sept. 10–Dec. 19

After a fitful incubation marked by delays and the departure of both a director and a chief curator last year, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is finally opening in Los Angeles with a range of exhibitions overseen by Star Wars creator George Lucas. Galleries will be devoted to figurative artists like Thomas Hart Benton, Norman Rockwell, and Jessie Willcox Smith, and thematic displays will explore themes including “Children’s Stories” and “Everyday Life.” A big star will be the building itself: a 300,000-square-foot marvel that looks like a spaceship ready to take off from Exposition Park.
Opens Sept. 22

Teresa Margolles is known for affecting works about the bodily cost of global supply chains, where human resources and material supplies bleed and blur. In 2009, human blood sourced from Mexican morgues stained the shoes of Venice Biennale visitors when Margolles took over Mexico’s pavilion: The haunting red was memorably mopped up by attendants whose loved ones had been murdered in the narcotics trade, a sobering reminder to jet-setting art-partiers at the opening. Her retrospective at MoMA PS1 teases a new commission that’s sure to haunt, and more of her work will be on view at MoMA’s main Midtown museum.
Sept. 24–February

The fourth edition of the Toronto Biennial is overseen by Allison Glenn, a New York–based curator with credits including the Public Art Fund, Counterpublic, Crystal Bridges, and Centro América Red de Arte (CARA), a new institution opening this fall in Guatemala City. Her theme is “Things Fall Apart,” a reference to Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel and a hip-hop album by the Roots, and the curatorial statement aligns it with “fractured moments that reverberate across time and geographies.”
Sept. 26–Dec. 20

On a remote island in the Aegean Sea, a billionaire who shares a name with a fancy mushroom is building a climate refuge for the world’s richest. There, Morel employs this novel’s protagonist, an art critic and recent widower. Borrowing from avant-garde utopian imaginaries, this community is replete with geodesic domes, and the critic is hired to prepare its inaugural exhibition starring his hero—a reclusive, semiretired artist he’d never have access to otherwise. Written by e-flux’s Ben Eastham, this novel—like the art world—makes utopia and dystopia frighteningly difficult to tell apart.
On sale Sept. 29

A sort of biography in the unconventional form of poems and prose, Primary tells the story of Alma Thomas, whose vividly colored abstract paintings made her one of the most distinguished Black artists of the 1960s and ’70s. But it tells her story through lessons learned from her work by the author Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who wrote a vaunted biography on Audre Lorde as well as other books on subjects surrounding Black feminist ideals. (See: Undrowned, a 2020 treatise on prospects for social justice as divined from the lives of marine mammals.)
On sale Sept. 29

This comprehensive look at Abstract Expressionism’s most tempestuous couple will at last consider how their respective lives and work intersected. The subtitle of the vast show—with more than 120 works from 80 lenders—is a nod to Krasner’s 1976 painting Past Continuous, subtly placing her in the foreground of the collaboration rather than in her famous husband’s shadow.
Oct. 4–Jan. 31

This retrospective will look beyond the Ben-Day dots of Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings to see how Pop art continues to resonate after the artist’s death in 1997. It includes work by Lichtenstein as well as contemporaries like Louise Lawler, Richard Pettibone, and Sturtevant. And highlights include every work from a formative 1962 Leo Castelli Gallery show and a re-creation of a 96-foot-long Lichtenstein mural from the ’80s by Alex Da Corte, who worked with the Whitney’s team as a guest curator.
Oct. 14–May 10

Le Large Museum, opening in time for Art Basel Paris, is large indeed. Occupying its own island—the Île Seguin, sitting in the Seine and accessible from the western suburbs of the French capital—the new building is over 50,000 square feet and 10 years in the making. Its inaugural show, curated by Cecilia Alemani, considers odd relationships between humans and machines.
Opens Oct. 17

Marfa, Marfa: Rasquachismo and Minimalism in Far West Texas contextualizes the remote town that Donald Judd turned into an artistic pilgrimage site, paying special attention to Marfa’s rasquache sensibilities born of the town’s Chicanx, Mexican American, and Catholic communities. Where the rasquache ethos was marked by resourcefulness—making the most from the least—Minimalism is something of its obverse. In West Texas, where the author Josh T Franco grew up, the two worlds refract and collide. 
On sale Oct. 20

The Austrian artist who dissolved boundaries between art and life gets a hometown retrospective at the Albertina Modern. Coming of age under the aegis of Viennese Actionism, West made sculptures you could sit on and saw objects as opportunities, all with a signature combination of humor and humility. Alongside the retrospective, the Wien Museum will mount a show situating the artist in his city—including a sculpture he made using his childhood bed from the iconic Karl-Marx-Hof—and the Atelier Franz West, in the city’s third district, will open its doors to the public.
Nov. 6–March 29

This memoir by the peerless theater/opera artist Robert Wilson reminisces on productions like Einstein on the Beach and the unrealized 12-hour CIVIL warS, while taking time for poetic incursions and brief interludes devoted to such subjects as drawing, contradictions, Samuel Beckett, and the Air France flight he once shared with George H. W. Bush.
On sale Nov. 3

Leonora Carrington is a gift that keeps on giving. A new volume from New York Review Books collects, for the first time in English, the recently rediscovered Surrealist’s plays, many of them concerning relationships between humans and animals. One story imagines a girl falling in love with her rocking horse—a tale adapted by filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky—and another stars the last woman standing, her kind ravaged by a virus that kills only women. She must battle the patriarchy in order to save, of all things, the last ostrich egg in the world.
On sale Dec. 1

Carroll Dunham gets the retrospective treatment, right in time for Art Basel Miami Beach. His paintings scramble figure and form in ways both playful and sophisticated. With bold colors and ordinary objects and bodies, his scenes feel familiar while also making you ask, “What am I looking at?” An accomplished artist who’s spent decades on the New York scene, Dunham is also known as one of the most thoughtful artist-writers of our time—as well as the loyal, loving dad in Famesick, the bestselling memoir by his daughter, Lena Dunham.
Dec. 1–March 14