As summer draws to a close, museums around the world are unveiling lineups of not-to-be-missed exhibitions. Some are righting long-standing gaps in the canon: The Denver Art Museum spotlights the resilience of Indigenous artists across Latin America, Helsinki’s Ateneum traces the overlooked role of esotericism in women artists’ work, and Tate St Ives mounts the first definitive retrospective of renowned British modernist painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.
Others speak to the present. As the U.S. celebrates 250 years of independence, Taryn Simon unveils a sprawling Guggenheim installation tracing a father’s decades in government service; at the New Museum, Arthur Jafa’s survey mines internet culture, social media, and popular music to reveal the many layers of contemporary Black life; and Hong Kong’s M+ museum explores how fantasy shapes our understanding of the world today.
This season brings both sweeping retrospectives of household names and showcases for rising artists, which take center stage from New York to Accra.
Below are 11 must-see museum shows this fall.
Taryn Simon
“Father Country I Do Love You”
The Guggenheim, New York
Sep. 18, 2026–Mar. 14, 2027
American artist Taryn Simon is known for highly researched projects that draw attention to overlooked stories from across the globe. Her photographic series “The Innocents” (2000) traced the lives of wrongfully incarcerated individuals, while her sonic and sculptural installation An Occupation of Loss (2016) highlighted professional mourners performing grief rituals.
Simon’s interactive installation for the Guggenheim, titled “Father Country I Do Love You,” features an entirely new body of 42 artworks that includes photography, text, video, and sculpture. Altogether, they chart the life of an unnamed federal agent. He bears some resemblance to her own mysterious father, who traveled the globe on assignment for the U.S. government, then settled into a second life selling arcade games. Simon developed the project over roughly a decade, and it marks the first time she’s woven personal narrative into her practice. Simon’s father received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis before he could divulge his full story to his daughter, who turns to art and invention to fill in the blanks.
Through the lens of her speculative protagonist, the artist offers a sprawling web of stories shaped by one man's life in service of a nation. This is the first solo presentation by a photography-focused artist to occupy the Guggenheim’s rotunda, and the largest debut of new work in the museum’s history.
Arthur Jafa
“I Am Tony”
New Museum, New York
Sep. 24, 2026–Jan. 3, 2027
For over three decades, Arthur Jafa has made cinematic art about the reality of being Black in America. The Mississippi-born artist has engaged with internet culture, social media, cinema, and music as he’s built a remarkable archive of images exploring themes of race and identity. Jafa often employs collage and montage to create “affective proximities” (a concept coined by his longtime collaborator, Ghanaian British artist John Akomfrah) that reveal the intersections of history, violence, culture, and entertainment.
“I Am Tony” at the New Museum is the largest exhibition of the artist’s work to date, featuring early and new pieces in photography, installation, painting, and sculpture alongside a selection of Jafa’s most acclaimed videos, including Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) and The White Album (2019), winner of the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Named after the famous jazz drummer Tony Williams, the show traces the evolution of Jafa’s cinematic creations, which echo the texture, styles, and themes of Black popular music.
“I Follow Rivers: Indigenous Worlds in Latin America”
Denver Art Museum, Denver
Nov. 8, 2026–July 27, 2027
For centuries, colonial violence has threatened the dignity and survival of Indigenous groups across modern-day Latin America. “I Follow Rivers: Indigenous Worlds in Latin America” spotlights the resilience of these communities, many of whom turn to art as a form of resistance. The largest exhibition in the United States dedicated to modern and contemporary Indigenous Latin American artists, the show will present more than 100 works by over 50 artists. They include internationally acclaimed names such as Sheroanawë Hakihiiwe, Abel Rodríguez, MAHKU (Huni Kuin Art Movement), and Denilson Baniwa.
The works on view will illustrate the cultural richness and enduring strength of Indigenous peoples throughout Latin America as they touch on themes such as land, community, history, and change. Highlights include textiles by Claudia Alarcón; a major installation by Claudia Martínez Garay; and delicate works on paper by Hakihiiwe.
John Baldessari
“The End of the Line”
Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami
Through May 9, 2027
Pioneering Conceptual artist John Baldessari favored ideas and linguistic play throughout his work. Drawing on text, found photography, film stills, advertising, and appropriated imagery, he undermined notions of authorship, originality, and the way images communicate meaning. Baldessari was also a beloved CalArts instructor who cemented his place as a defining figure of the Los Angeles art scene. Among his best-known works are series in which he covered his subjects’ faces with colored dots to strip away identity and celebrity. “If you can’t see their face, you’re going to look at how they’re dressed, maybe their stance, their surroundings,” he said during an NPR interview in 2013.
“John Baldessari: The End of the Line” at the Pérez Art Museum Miami will showcase nearly 40 works of painting, photography, video, and installation by the Californian artist, spanning five decades. Drawn from the Craig Robins Collection, the pieces are organized across three sections, spotlighting the artist’s earliest works, his serial and experimental photographic methods, and his boundary-breaking dialogue with mass media and popular culture.
Gala Porras-Kim
“El movimiento de un registro fluvial (The Motion of an Alluvial Record)”
Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM), Medellín, Colombia
Sep. 9, 2026–Mar. 28, 2027
In her multidisciplinary practice, Gala Porras-Kim examines how museums categorize, preserve, and interpret their collections. Born in Bogotá, now based between Los Angeles and London, the artist critiques efforts to halt natural decay and the passage of time; this mindset clashes with how other cultures understand and discuss the meaning of objects.
“El movimiento de un registro fluvial (The Motion of an Alluvial Record)” at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM) marks the artist's first institutional show in Colombia. Featuring drawings, installations, and institutional dialogues, the exhibition questions Western approaches to conserving, representing, and safeguarding cultural property.
Standout works on view include 62 Offerings for the Rain at the Palacio Cantón (2023), a graphite and colored pencil drawing from Porras-Kim’s ongoing series depicting ritual artifacts excavated from the Sacred Cenote of Chichén Itzá, and Out of an Instance of Expiration Comes a Perennial Showing (2022), a textile that features mold spores propagated from the British Museum and reflects on themes of growth and collection storage.
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham
Tate St Ives, Cornwall, England
Oct. 24, 2026–May 3, 2027
A key figure of British modernism, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham moved to St Ives, in Cornwall, in 1940 and became a crucial presence in the seaside town’s trailblazing creative community (Barbara Hepworth was an early friend). She was a painter, printmaker, and draftsman who described her practice as a sustained dialogue between inner experience and outer reality.
Yet the Tate St Ives exhibition is the first to fully trace the breadth of the Scottish artist’s oeuvre. It features 170 paintings, drawings, and prints that Barns-Graham created over the course of her eight-decade career, alongside rare archival materials. The retrospective spans landscapes, interior paintings, and abstract works, showcasing an artist endlessly attuned to humanity’s profound relationship with the natural world and the boundless possibilities of abstraction evidenced through her insistent probing of line, form, and color.
The show brings together rare pieces from private and public collections in order to present the largest survey to date of Barns-Graham’s celebrated “Glacier” series: around 100 paintings the artist began in 1949, following a visit to Switzerland’s Grindelwald Glacier, that experiment with light and geometric forms to convey her encounter with the icy landscape.
Amar Kanwar
Serpentine Galleries,
London
Sep. 23, 2026–Jan. 27, 2027
For more than 25 years, Amar Kanwar has pushed the boundaries of documentary filmmaking to meditate on the history, politics, and cultural realities of the Indian subcontinent. He’s earned such recognitions as the MacArthur fellowship (2000) for deeply personal, lyrical films that illuminate contemporary violence, power, and justice.
Conceived as a site-specific installation, this major solo exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries brings together three works by the New Delhi–based artist. It includes the feature-length film Such a Morning (2017), in which a renowned mathematician retreats to live in a dark and abandoned train carriage; the multiscreen installation The Peacock’s Graveyard (2023), which blends images and sounds to meditate on the fleeting nature of life; and the debut of a newly commissioned film installation, The Charcoal Man (2026). Three years in the making, it considers how the legacy of the bloody 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan continues to reverberate today.
“Arcana Borealis – Northern Women and Esotericism”
Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki
Oct. 23, 2026–Feb. 28, 2027
“Arcana Borealis – Northern Women and Esotericism” at the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki spotlights the work of women artists from Northern Europe, working from the 19th century to today, who were influenced by unorthodox spiritual currents. The role of esotericism on male artists is better known, and the show seeks to expand the public understanding of how these lines of thought shaped their female counterparts. It brings together works by celebrated names such as Hilma af Klint, Ellen Thesleff, and Anna-Eva Bergman alongside lesser-known figures like Ilona Harima, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, and Maja Fjaestad.
Co-curated by Nina Kokkinen, a researcher of art and religion, and Marja Lahelma, chief curator at the Ateneum, the exhibition features artists working across a range of media, including textiles, ceramics, painting, and metal engraving. Highlights include Hilma af Klint’s The Dove No. 1, Series UW, Group 9 (1915), part of the Swedish artist’s widely celebrated project “Paintings for the Temple,” and Oasis (1935) by Danish artist Rita Kernn-Larsen, one of the few renowned female artists to take part in the Surrealist movement during the 1930s.
Alvaro Barrington
Limbo Museum, Accra
Oct. 29, 2026–Feb. 1, 2027
Multidisciplinary artist Alvaro Barrington works with materials like burlap and tarpaulin, which evoke his Caribbean upbringing and the migrant experience. Born in Venezuela and raised between Grenada, Brooklyn, and London, the artist draws on this layered upbringing to create paintings, installations, and embroideries that celebrate community, explore migration and belonging, and defy categorization.
Following a residency at Accra’s Limbo Museum, Barrington will present his first solo show on the African continent. The artist has responded to the museum’s raw, permanently incomplete state to realize his institutional commission, which comprises paintings, sculptures, and site-specific installations. He’s developed them with local materials, fabricators, artisans, structures, and modes of production. The exhibition allows the city itself to become an active participant in his process.
“Myths and Monsters: the Art of Fantasy in Asia”
M +, Hong Kong
Oct. 17, 2026–Apr. 4, 2027
“Myths and Monsters: the Art of Fantasy in Asia” reveals how Asian artists have constructed imaginary worlds amid difficult social and political realities. The show unites more than 400 works spanning contemporary art, architecture, fashion, video games, and film; Surrealist dreamscapes, Tibetan Buddhist scrolls, and anime trace the myriad forms fantasy has taken across the region’s visual traditions. Considering the increasingly prominent role of avatars and other digital imagery in Asian daily life, the show also asks why fantasy still matters to how we see the world today.
Highlights include Golden Fighter’s Despair (2004), from Cao Fei’s acclaimed “Cosplayers” series, which explores Chinese youth subcultures cosplaying as anime characters against the backdrop of an increasingly urban and isolating country; Landscape of Self Portrait (1962) by Korean artist Kim Younghwan, a rare exponent of Surrealism who favored dreamlike worlds in defiance of the traditional art trends that prevailed during Korea’s post-liberation era; and Night March of Hundred Monsters (2021–25), a multichannel video and animation installation by Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen that connects Japanese folkloric monsters and the lived horrors of Japanese imperialism in World War II–era Southeast Asia.
Giuseppe Penone
“The Inner Flow of Life”
National Museum of Qatar, Qatar
Oct. 26, 2026–Feb. 13, 2027
Giuseppe Penone's belief that everything is connected undergirds his multidisciplinary practice. A key exponent of Arte Povera, the radical Italian movement that sought to reconsider the value of humble materials, Penone has worked for more than 50 years. His media have included paper, photography, and performance, with a particular focus on sculpture. Frequent themes include aging, growth, and respiration.
Co-produced by Qatar Museums and the Serpentine Galleries in London, “Giuseppe Penone: The Inner Flow of Life” will transform the National Museum of Qatar’s Baraha and Old Palace through a series of pavilions, sculptures, and immersive installations. The artist will install two massive bronze tree sculptures from his “Idee di Pietra (Ideas of Stones)” series at Doha’s Old Port. The exhibition will include work spanning 1969 through today as it highlights Penone’s enduring interest in the synergy between organic and artistic processes. Pieces in wood, iron, water, bronze, clay, and marble will be on view.
