A Discerning List of Things to Experience This Fall

Artists assembled by Art in America describe the influence of Ed Ruscha in our fall issue with tremendous awe, envy, and respect. They describe the Pop art icon’s work as “so straightforward, and so special,” deem him “a cool dad,” and remark, with an air of resignation, “he’s Ed Ruscha, and I’m not.” This monumental retrospective features more than 250 objects, including works engaged with painting, drawing, prints, photography, artist’s books, film, and installation. After MoMA, the show goes to Ruscha’s spiritual homeland when it travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Sept. 10–Jan. 13.

Harry Smith was a polymath whose presence remains in the annals of music, painting, experimental film, and all kinds of folklore ranging from Native American dances and string figures to paper airplanes and Ukrainian Easter eggs. He’s best-known for the Anthology of American Folk Music, which he compiled from forgotten records and released in 1952—a year to which many trace back the beginning of the Greenwich Village folk scene that helped seed the countercultural ’60s to come. But he was at least as accomplished in all the other pursuits he engaged. This first comprehensive biography (by a historian who has written similar books about Miles Davis and Sun Ra) precedes a survey show of Smith’s work opening at the Whitney Museum in October.On sale Aug. 23

Hajra Waheed might not be a readily familiar name, but it’s only a matter of time. Earlier this year, she won the Sharjah Biennial Prize with her sound installation Hum, for which she played recordings of people humming various songs associated with popular uprisings around the world—from Kurdish folk songs to K-pop hits—and then played them in a conical structure to stunning immersive effect. This is the Canadian artist’s first solo exhibition in the US, and she has three European museum shows in the pipeline.Sept. 8–Feb. 11

Now in his late 70s, Beverly Glenn-Copeland is a Black transgender musical composer whose name resonates in the realms of folk music and New age—and, increasingly, within an art world that has come to embrace his intimate, ethereal, and inimitable sound. Wu Tsang paid tribute to him with a monumental video installation at the Guggenheim Museum in 2021, and his albums and self-released cassettes—including the transporting synthesizer classic Keyboard Fantasies from 1986—have been reissued. Now he’s back with his first new album in 20 years.On sale July 28

Touted as the second-oldest art biennial in the world (behind the Venice Biennale), this assembly in São Paulo counts as one of the biggest events of its kind every year it happens. This year’s edition—curated by Diane Lima, Grada Kilomba, Hélio Menezes, and Manuel Borja-Villel—will feature 120 participants under the title “choreographies of the impossible.” Artists involved include Igshaan Adams, Julien Creuzet, Torkwase Dyson, Ellen Gallagher, Duane Linklater, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Dayanita Singh, stanley brouw, and Sônia Gomes.Sept. 6-Dec. 10

Intricate looped-wire sculptures based on organic forms are Ruth Asawa’s most well-known works, but this exhibition traces the development of the American modernist sculptor’s distinctive visual vocabulary to her daily drawing practice. A selection of more than 100 works represents the breadth of her career, starting from her education at Black Mountain College in the 1940s through her later years as an educator and community leader in San Francisco.Sept. 16–January

When Helen Molesworth dramatically departed her curatorial post at MoCA Los Angeles, she made a pivot from scholar to content producer of various kinds. She’s since moved on to collaborating with mega-galleries and even started to podcast. All the while, Molesworth remains a rare breed: a curator who can actually write. It’s likely that readers of this new collection of influential essays—whether fervent followers or those who find her problematic after allegations of abusive workplace behavior followed her exit from MOCA—will be fired up with strong opinions.On sale Sept. 7

With a career spanning nearly four decades, María Magdalena Campos-Pons will see her first museum survey in more than 15 years this fall. In work spanning photography, installation, painting, and performance, Campos-Pons reflects on themes of migration and diaspora, geography and memory, and spirituality and history, often filtered through an autobiographical lens that draws on her experience as an Afro-Cuban woman of mixed ancestry. Narratives of the Middle Passage and slavery as well as the rituals of Santería are frequent themes in her powerful and evocative art.Sept. 15–Jan. 14

This exhibition in Los Angeles to fete the incomparable film director John Waters features “costumes, props, handwritten scripts, correspondence, scrapbooks, photographs, film clips, and more” from some of the weirdest, wildest movies of all time. The title alludes to a mantle bestowed by William S. Burroughs, and the offerings will pay tribute to films like Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), Hairspray (1988), and Serial Mom (1994). For context, an adjacent gallery will display works from the American avant-garde and the movement known as New Queer Cinema.Sept. 17–Aug. 4

Wherever Marina Abramović goes, controversy follows—involving everything from salacious talk of Satanism to wild gallery dancing with Jay-Z. This London show for the infamous Serbian performance artist and provocateur surveys 50 years of her bizarre and influential work, and promises that no two visits will be the same. She’s enlisted younger artists trained in the “Marina Abramović method” to reenact some of her classics, while other works, like the iconic The Artist Is Present, will be shown on film.Sept. 23–Jan. 1

AA Bronson has recalled that he and his colleagues founded the Canadian art collective General Idea in the 1960s with the hope of finding fame. Since the collective’s dissolution in the ’90s, they have indeed achieved rock-star status in the art world with works exploring mass media, virality, and the AIDS crisis of the ’80s. This retrospective in Berlin assembles a spread of their provocations, including works that reconfigure Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture to now read “AIDS.”Sept. 22–Jan. 14

Artist Camille Henrot is best known for her iconic essay film Grosse Fatigue (2013), but this new book published by Hatje Cantz features her essays in written form. With touchstones ranging “from Marcel Proust to Maggie Nelson to Hélène Cixous,” they’re concerned loosely with creation, and include meditations on ancient maternity myths as well as reflections on her own art.On sale Aug. 15

No season in the art world is complete without at least a few fairs to which throngs flock to buy, sell, and otherwise engage with art from all over. This fall’s docket includes: Frieze Seoul and KIAF (Sept. 6–9) The Armory Show in New York (Sept. 7–10) Frieze London and Freize Masters (Oct. 11–15)Paris+ par Art Basel (Oct. 18–22) Get your flight booked and your best fashion accessories ready.

The story of Land art has long been focused on the rugged (or not so rugged) men who ventured into wild climes to make their mark, but the movement developed and evolved around work by women from the very beginning. This exhibition in Dallas focuses on 12 artists to add to the annals, among them Alice Aycock, Beverly Buchanan, Agnes Denes, Nancy Holt, Ana Mendieta, and Michelle Stuart.Sept. 23–Jan. 7

Curated by artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, this survey brings together the work of nearly 50 Native American artists from across the US, with a wide range of forms—weaving, sculpture, beading, painting, performance, drawing, and video—highlighting Indigenous understandings of the North American landscape. The artists in the show include G. Peter Jemison, Cara Romero, Emmi Whitehorse, and Nicholas Galanin.Sept. 24–Jan. 15

The European phenomenon of what ArtReview recently called the “blockbuster dialogue exhibition” officially arrives stateside with this show devoted to two titans of 19th-century France. Both depicted everyday people in a naturalistic style, and both wielded paint in then-unusual ways, slathering it on thickly and in some cases nearly abstracting their figures. Despite their artistic similarities, Manet and Degas were, in fact, rivals. Who stands to come out on top here? The fact that Manet’s Olympia (1863) is traveling to the US for the first time ever for this show may offer a clue.Sept. 24–Jan. 7

British journalist Joanna Moorhead grew up hearing about a certain “black sheep” in her family, a woman who had left her debutante lifestyle behind in the UK for life as an artist in Mexico. One day, she realized that storied cousin was famed Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, whose work inspired the most recent Venice Biennale. Moorhead visited her long-lost relative every year thereafter, until the artist’s death in 2011, and then wrote this biography, which focuses on the spaces in which Carrington painted and wrote.On sale Aug. 22

This iteration of the career-making “Made in L.A.” biennial takes its title from a quote in which the late artist Noah Purifoy described creativity as “an act of living, a way of life, and a formula for doing the right thing.” Presenting the work of L.A.-based artists working in forms including painting, sculpture, craft, performance, and more, the show—organized by Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez—will exhibit the work of Teresa Baker, Melissa Cody, Young Joon Kwak, Kang Seung Lee, Guadalupe Rosales, Joey Terrill, and others.Oct. 1–Dec. 31

“Herstory” surveys 60 years of feminist icon Judy Chicago’s wide-ranging work, taking visitors beyond her famous Dinner Party (1974–79) and through her work addressing everything from pyrotechnics to Minimalism to environmentalism. A related “exhibition-within-the-exhibition” will accompany the show, featuring materials from more than 80 artists, writers, and thinkers, including the likes of Artemisia Gentileschi, Hilma af Klint, Zora Neale Hurston, Frida Kahlo, and Virginia Woolf.Oct. 12–Jan. 14

Organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, this traveling retrospective surveys the work of an artist who mixed pre-Columbian art with Pop art, among other things. She often crafted life-size figures in the form of blocky assemblages, and she was a scuba diver, a media darling, and a Warhol collaborator to boot. The show travels to the Buffalo AKG, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art.Oct. 7–Jan. 21

The multihyphenate musician Arca has created a vast array of sounds on her kinetic, electronically inclined solo albums and as a producer for the likes of Björk, Lady Gaga, and Frank Ocean, among many others. She’s also a visual artist with a theatrical streak, having put together multimedia performances that feature far more than just music. At the enormous Park Avenue Armory in New York, Arca will direct an ambitious new event “steeped in electronic music sound design to induce various states of embodied physicality and synthesize new ways to mediate both the ego and identity at large.” Oct. 11–15

When Piet Mondrian started making his geometric abstractions in primary colors, he was going for something accessible: breaking down images into their purest and simplest forms. But they didn’t refer to reality in recognizable ways, and, to some, their harsh lines came off as cold and uninviting. After his death, however, in a posthumous collaboration with fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent in 1965, Mondrian’s work was finally able to reach the mass audience he always wanted. This glamorous yet scholarly book from MIT Press tells the story in the context of that era’s Pop art. On sale Oct. 24

If you’ve ever waited in line to eat a homecooked meal at an art exhibition, you might be familiar with Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who foregrounds interactions between people and their surroundings. The artist’s first US survey features a selection of more than 100 early experimentations with installation and film, drawings, works on paper, sculptures, demonstrations of seminal participatory works, and related ephemera. Highlights include rarely seen early works from the late 1980s and ’90s.Oct. 12–March

Part of MASP’s acclaimed “Historias” series, this exhibition will look at various global Indigenous histories, highlighting the specific contexts of Indigenous art-making from Brazil to New Zealand, Mexico to Scandinavia, and elsewhere. In addition to regional points of focus, which will be organized together with Indigenous curators and artists, the show’s eighth section will focus on Indigenous activism. Instead of a comprehensive telling of these diverse histories, the exhibition aims to provide cross-sections and connections between disparate but related experiences.Oct. 20–Feb. 24

More than 40 years of poems and drawings by Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña have been translated into English by Daniel Borzutzky for this volume to be published by the formidable Radius Books. Centered around the myth of the deer, Vicuña offers meditations on the nature of the animal as well as surrounding sacrificial ceremonies and rituals. Vicuña is known for addressing themes of language, memory, loss, and exile throughout her oeuvre.On sale Oct. 24

Visibility and representation—and an eye for work showing the lives of people who are historically marginalized—have been major concerns in art of late, with figurative painting at the fore. But some artists seek to veil or protect their subjects rather than put them on clear display. This show, in the Guggenheim’s spiraling rotunda, will explore that latter impulse, with works by icons like Kerry James Marshall and Chris Ofili alongside next generation forerunners like Tiona Nekkia McClodden and American Artist.Oct. 20–Apr. 7

Every other year, this landmark New York biennial commissions unforgettable live works to be staged all around the city, in venues both familiar and new. Often, they enlist visual artists to work in the context of performance for the first time, so you never know what exactly to expect. This year’s festival, with a focus on the legacy of Conceptual art, features headliners including Nikita Gale, Nora Turato, and Haegue Yang.Nov. 1–19

In the hands of German conceptualist Hanne Darboven, grids and other tools of order and reason are toyed with so incessantly that they start to feel obsessive, compulsive, and absurd. This show at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston focuses on the ways that Darboven combined writing and drawing, with works including Inventions that Have Changed Our World (1996), a set of more than 1,300 individually framed sheets of paper.Oct. 27–Feb. 1