Seven Sculpture Shows to See During Art Week NYC

To coincide with her inclusion in the 61st Venice Biennale (on view through November 22), Andrew Edlin is showing works by Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015), whose art has recently attracted renewed attention. Curated by Aurélie Bernard Wortsman, the exhibition will include Buchanan’s 1970s abstract paintings, made during a brief but successful career in New York, as well as sculptures produced after her move to Georgia in 1976. These include her handcrafted “shack sculptures” based on the vernacular architecture of the American South, as well as abstract cast-concrete works placed in galleries, her garden, and most famously at the marshland site of an 1803 slave rebellion (Marsh Ruins [Marshes of Glynn, Brunswick, GA], 1981). Often known only through photographs, memorials like this one “resist the idea of monument as something fixed or permanent,” Wortsman told ARTnews, “instead engaging with the passage of time, displacement, and transformation.”

November 6–December 19, 392 Broadway, 2nd floor

Following a well-received solo exhibition last year at Château Shatto in Los Angeles, Charlie Engelman is showing a new group of sculptures at Pietro Alexander. Like the works he presented in LA, these pieces are made from Engelman’s go-to materials—flocked high-density foam, cast aluminum, and 500-year-old redwood—all related to California’s natural and industrial past. Also as before, they derive from the artist’s research into biology, design, and art history while conjuring such quintessentially West Coast products as Arts and Crafts furniture, California Deco buildings, and Hollywood Regency decor. The two redwood sculptures here are said to be homages to Louise Bourgeois’s worktable and ceramic sculptor Ken Price’s banding wheels, respectively, while a winding string of forked polyurethane forms, titled Vene Cava, refers to the large veins that, like miniature biological freeways, carry deoxygenated blood from the body back to the heart.

November 5—January 7, 2027, 59 Wooster Street, 2nd floor

At Paula Cooper, an exhibition of sculptures, drawings, and prints by Pop artist Claes Oldenburg (1929—2022) revisits “Six Themes,” a traveling survey show organized in 1975 that explored a half dozen of the artist’s recurring subjects: a geometric Mickey Mouse head based on the shape of a movie projector seen in profile, a three-way electric plug, a cigarette butt, a clothespin, a typewriter eraser, and a baseball mitt. The most notable of the artists who translated Pop art into sculpture, Oldenburg made versions of each of these subjects in a wide variety of scales and materials over the course of his career. Shown here are works ranging from a four-foot-high stuffed and painted canvas clothespin to an 18-inch-long, cast aluminum cigarette butt.

November 5—December 19, 534 West 21st Street

Born into a family with a ceramics workshop in Cairo, Egyptian-American sculptor Ibrahim Said creates intricately hand-carved clay vessels that bow to multiple religious and craft traditions of the Middle East. References to ancient Egyptian, Coptic, and Islamic art come together in works that combine centuries-old, and even millennia-old, patterns and symbols with contemporary forms. Said’s show at Yossi Milo coincides with the conclusion of his time as one of the three inaugural artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Vacheron Constantin Artisan Residency. A program “recognizing artisanal practices that revive, reimagine, or reinterpret traditional knowledge and technical skill,” the 18-month residency granted Said sustained access to the Met’s collection, resulting in the development of the body of work shown here.

Through January 9, 2027, 245 Tenth Avenue

The blockbuster exhibition “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300—1350,” presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery, London, in 2024—25, explored Siena’s palmy days, when the Italian city was famed as a center of religious paintings by such masters as Duccio, Simone Martini, and Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Its run as a hub of painterly innovation ended with the coming of the Black Death in 1348, which wiped out two-thirds of Siena’s population (including the Lorenzettis) and brought artistic activity there to a standstill. A new show at the Frick picks up Siena’s story 100 years later, after the radically transformed city had reestablished itself as a locus of high art, this time for its bronze figurative sculpture. The exhibition features some 40 artworks—virtually all of the surviving bronzes of the period able to travel—by the likes of Vecchietta, Francesco di Giorgio, and Donatello.

Through January 18, 2027, 1 East 70th Street

Less than a decade ago, Pittsburgh-based sculptor Thaddeus Mosley’s graceful wooden abstractions were relatively unknown beyond his hometown, but his inclusion in the 2018 Carnegie International gained him a wider following. On the heels of its spring show of recent glass pieces by Mosley, who died in March at the age of 99, Karma is presenting a group of his wood sculptures made between 1954 and 1968, along with paintings and collages from the same period. Smaller than the monumental sculptures he is known for, the three-dimensional works here show the artist shifting away from representation while, at the same time, communicating Mosley’s early and abiding interest in African art and how it inspired European modernists such as Picasso and Constantin Brancusi. “Without West Africa,” he once said, “there would be no Cubism.”

Opening November 13, 38 White Street

From the unlikeliest of materials—used automobile tires, initially scavenged, now gifted to her by companies like Michelin—Chakaia Booker wrests sculptures of baroque elegance. Grounded in the lineage of 20th-century Black abstraction (Al Loving was an early mentor), Booker’s tire works, which range in scale from intimate to room-size, tumble down walls in cascades of ringlets, curl into self-contained tangles, and mount upward in dust devil—like spirals. While her works have been variously read as tapping into African American traditions of reuse, as a commentary on environmental degradation—generally affecting Black communities more than white—or even as a reference to the exploitative rubber trade, Booker herself offers few clues, preferring to leave interpretations to the viewer. A new exhibition of her work at David Nolan showcases Booker’s skills in other mediums as well, combining her signature rubber works with collages, photographs, and a tapestry.

November 6—December 19, 74 Leonard St

Widely credited with liberating sculpture from a single physical spot, Romanian-born artist Constantin Brancusi (1976–1957) did so by dissolving the boundary between sculpture and base, thus creating a work, in Krauss’s words, both “functionally placeless and largely self-referential.” Likewise trailblazing were the stripped-down forms of the sculptures themselves and—perhaps most radically—Brancusi’s attempts to transform his works into mutable objects, using reflective surfaces that mirrored the space around them; switching out pedestals, bases, and sculptures; creating different groupings of works in the studio; and making blurry photographs in which they appear as light-struck, ghostly protagonists.

This fall, MoMA puts its collection of Brancusi works on view along with sculptures from the Centre Pompidou’s Atelier Brancusi, the museum’s reconstruction of the sculptor’s studio-as-artwork, whose contents he bequeathed to France upon his death. More than 150 sculptures—along with works on paper, photographs, and extensive archival material—will be on view.

Through February 27, 2027, at 11 West 53rd Street, 6th floor