Eliana Willis

In an era when global biennials and triennials seem to appear with ever-increasing frequency, organizing a major international art event outside of traditional art world hubs has become a daunting challenge. It is not uncommon for these initiatives to fall into the trap of vague and grandiose narration. The real test lies in how a regional biennial or triennial can balance local grounding with global ambition, all while responding to the pressing urgencies of politics, environmental crises, and cultural conflict.
The 2025 edition of the Aichi Triennale, one of Japan’s leading international art festivals held every three years since 2010, manages to meet this moment with rare clarity. Titled “A Time Between Ashes and Roses,” this year’s edition is curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, who drew inspiration from a poem by modernist Syrian poet Adonis. Written in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, Adonis’s verses lament environmental devastation while also making space for regeneration and hope.
Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2025 Mulyana, Between Currents and Bloom, 2019- present ©︎ Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee
“This exhibition brings a lot of these issues to the forefront—our destruction of the planet and all living things—but also a reminder of how connected we are to this earth,” said Al Qasimi, who has also spoken publicly about the ongoing Israel-Palestine crisis. “This Triennale serves as a reminder that we all live under the same sky, and none of us are free until all of us are free.” That political resonance was felt even during the opening on September 13, when a small protest briefly took place outside one of the venues.
Her and the curatorial team’s vision for the sixth edition of the event focuses on how humans relate to their environment, in which the exhibition seeks to “unearth alternative land-based and Indigenous assemblages,” while challenging anthropocentric perspectives that frame land purely in terms of territory, nationhood, or resource extraction. Instead, the works on view encourage viewers to consider the environment not as a passive backdrop, but as a co-agent with its own timelines and memory—sometimes geological, sometimes ancestral.
This curatorial ethos is reflected not only in the artworks selected, but also in the exhibition design itself. Across multiple venues, installations echo the visual language of natural history museums. Rather than adopting a didactic or overtly activist tone, the shows favor an atmospheric, geological pace—eschewing binary oppositions in favor of slow, layered unfolding. After all, when breathing the same ocean air, it is often the subtle and specific—rather than the grand and abstract—that allows us to relate across distance, to feel the elsewhere within the here.
Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2025 Adrián Villar Rojas, Terrestrial Poems, 2025 ©︎ Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee Photo: Kido Tamotsu
This orientation is visible in the artist lineup. Among the 61 participating artists and collectives, the majority are from non-Western backgrounds, many with Indigenous heritage. Japan, as the host country, is well represented with 26 artists, but much of the remaining roster comes from the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific. Notably, there is a strong presence of Southeast Asian and Indigenous Australian voices, while East Asia is relatively underrepresented—only two artist groups (ikkibawiKrrr and Kwon Byungjun) are from Korea.
This is a Triennale worth experiencing in person—and you have until November 30 to do so. But before you go, here’s a preview of three (group) works, among all, that I encountered on site.
Ota Saburo, Mizutani Kiyoshi, Miyamoto Saburo, and Hiroshi Sugimoto atAichi Arts Center
Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2025, Sugimoto Hiroshi. Miyamoto Saburo ©︎ Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee Photo: ToLoLo studio
In a spacious room at the Nagoya City Art Museum, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s large-format photographs are displayed alongside mural works by three painters—Ota Saburo, Mizutani Kiyoshi, and Miyamoto Saburo—from the postwar era. The presentation evokes the subdued ambiance of a natural history museum, offering an understated counterpoint to the immersive videos and large-scale installations that dominate much of the Triennale.
The three murals were originally commissioned in the aftermath of World War II as part of a project to revive Nagoya’s Higashiyama Zoo, which had been devastated by the war. In 1944, as air raids intensified, large carnivores were culled at the military’s request over fears they might escape and harm civilians. Disease and starvation further decimated the zoo’s population, from over 3,000 animals across 300 species to just over 20 survivors. To compensate for the absence of these creatures, local newspapers proposed the creation of murals depicting animals from around the world—a gesture of both remembrance and imagination.
Sugimoto’s celebrated “Dioramas” series began in 1975, when he encountered the astonishingly detailed wildlife displays at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Over the next 40 years, he photographed dioramas across the United States. Many of the background paintings were created by artists who had actually visited the depicted regions during the golden age of diorama-making, spanning the 1920s to 1940s. Shot with 20-minute exposures, Sugimoto’s images could easily be mistaken for photographs of living animals.
The juxtaposition in this room is quietly poignant. These works resist spectacle, instead offering a space for reflection on extinction, memory, and the long arc of natural history.
Sasaki Rui at Seto City
For the first time, the Aichi Triennale has included Seto City as one of its three main venues. Since its second edition, the Triennale has made it a point to incorporate cities beyond Nagoya—such as Toyota City in 2019—into its programming.
This year, 11 artists’ works are dispersed throughout Seto, a city long known as the heart of Japan’s ceramic industry. With a legacy of embracing new techniques and cultural influences, Seto provides a fitting context for site-specific installations. The trio in Seto City feels more like a hike, tucked into speakeasy-like settings—including abandoned elementary schools, ceramic factories, and ordinary residential neighborhoods—that invite visitors to engage with art through exploration.
Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2025 Sasaki Rui, Unforgettable Residues, 2025 ©︎ Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee Photo: Kido Tamotsu.
Japanese artist Sasaki Rui transformed a former family-run sento (public bathhouse) into an immersive installation that reflects Seto’s intertwined social and ecological histories. Collaborating with local residents, Sasaki collected seasonal plants tied to different eras of the city’s evolution—from species that predate the ceramics boom, to trees once felled for kiln fuel, and flora preserved or naturalized through industrial activity. Encased in reclaimed glass from old kominka (folk houses) and deadstock from a local glass factory, these specimens emit a ghostly green glow in the darkened bathhouse, like lingering spirits in the room.
Installed where hot water once filled the communal bath, the glossy, translucent glass recalls the fluidity of water, yet its material permanence stands in stark contrast to water’s transience. Sasaki wanted to preserve fading memories and embodied experiences, holding time still in a fragile yet enduring form.
Wangechi Mutu at Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum
Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2025. Wangechi Mutu, Sleeping Serpent, 2014-2025 ©︎ Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee. Photo: Ito Tetsuo
Wangechi Mutu’s striking sculpture Sleeping Serpent (2014–2025) has slithered into Japan. Measuring approximately 9.5 meters long, the black snake lies quietly coiled on the floor, its belly swollen. A blue ceramic head rests peacefully on a matching pillow, surrounded by personal objects, including four newly added small ceramic objects that respond to the site. The sculpture’s head is a self-portrait Mutu made in her youth and kept for over a decade before finally integrating it into the piece.
The exhibition offers Mutu a remarkably generous space for expression. In another gallery, her three-channel video The End of Carrying All (2015) is on view. A female figure—evoking an archetype of African womanhood—walks uphill with a basket on her head, which grows increasingly heavy with modern detritus. Eventually, she and her burden morph into a massive form that plummets off a cliff. “It connected to interests that I’ve always had,” Mutu explains, “this worry I have about the earth, the environment, and how we are implicated in that… how every gesture we participate in impacts the planet, impacts other people, impacts women.”
Right: Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2025 Wangechi Mutu, The End of Carrying All, 2015 ©︎ Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee. Photo: Ito Tetsuo; Left: Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2025 Wangechi Mutu, The End of Carrying All A site specific intervention for Aichi Triennial 2025, 2025 ©︎ Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee Photo: Ito Tetsuo
Across from the video, Mutu has handwritten a statement on the wall, paying tribute to the late Kenyan environmentalist and feminist Wangari Maathai. The show even spills into the museum’s courtyard, where two monumental bronze baskets—modeled after handmade Kikapú baskets from Kenya—house ancient symbolic creatures. One holds a large green snake evoking duality, mythic power, and wisdom. The other contains an African sea turtle representing beauty, resilience, patience, and longevity. More

He’s spent years climbing the charts—now, RM has his eye on the gallery wall. The art-loving BTS frontman is teaming up with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) to reveal his personal collection for the very first time.
Opening October 2026, “RM x SFMOMA” will be the first museum show to feature selections from the star’s trove of contemporary artworks, which will be placed in dialog with pieces from the museum’s holdings. RM’s hope is for the dual presentation to serve as a bridge across divides.
“We live in an age defined by boundaries. This exhibition at SFMOMA reflects those boundaries: between East and West, Korea and America, the modern and the contemporary, the personal and the universal,” he said in a statement. “I don’t want to prescribe how these works should be seen; whether out of curiosity or study, all perspectives are welcome.”
Philip Guston, Untitled (Red and Black Book) (1969). Collection of RM; © The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth.
RM’s love for visual art has long been writ large in his lyrics, album covers, and Instagram posts. Things began, he said, in 2018 when he decided to pop by the Art Institute of Chicago during a break in his tour schedule. The visit was transformative: “It was like: wow,” he told the New York Times in 2022. “I was looking at these art pieces, and it was an amazing experience.”
Since then, RM has documented his regular visits to art venues—from London’s Tate Modern to New York’s Skarstedt Gallery to Jeju’s Bonte Museum—across social media. His 2022 solo album, Indigo, would feature tributes to South Korean painter Yun Hyong-Keun on its sleeve and its first track, “Yun.”
Chusa Kim Jeong-hui, Orchid Paintings and Writings, 19th century, Joseon dynasty; Collection of RM.
The multihyphenate, who has been spotted at fairs including Frieze Seoul and Art Basel, has also quietly built a sizeable art collection. It’s a trove that encompasses Korean art, including the seminal likes of Park Soo Keun and Nam June Paik, as well as contemporary, red-chip pieces by KAWS and Bearbrick. In 2022, RM loaned a Kwon Jin-Kyu sculpture to the Seoul Museum of Art for the artist’s retrospective.
“Art is like every basic thing in life, like eating and sleeping,” he said earlier this year. “It’s a beautiful process to be an art man.”
Yun Hyong-keun, Blue-Umber ’79-C6 (1979). Collection of RM; © Yun Seong-ryeol, courtesy PKM Gallery.
At SFMOMA, RM will be surfacing key Korean artworks from his collection, some never before exhibited. Among the artists featured will be pioneering figures of Korean Modernism Park Rehyun and Chang Ucchin; abstract artist Kwon Okyon; sculptor Kim Yun Shin; master of realism To Sangbong; and of course, Yun, best known for his meditative canvases of blacks and blues. Other works in the show include canvases by Giorgio Morandi, Roni Horn, and Philip Guston.
Kim Whanki, 26-I-70 (1970). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of Mrs. Whanki Kim; © Estate of Whanki Kim. Photo: Katherine Du Tiel.
For its part, the museum is contributing highlights from its collection, such as pieces by abstract painter Kim Whanki. Elsewhere are works by Modern masters Henri Matisse and Georgia O’Keeffe as well as Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko and Agnes Martin.
“Visitors will have an unprecedented opportunity to explore RM’s beautiful and contemplative collection of paintings and sculpture in dialogue with works from SFMOMA’s holdings,” Janet Bishop, chief curator at SFMOMA, noted in a statement, “inviting us to make new discoveries and reflect on our own relationships with art.”
“RM x SFMOMA” will be on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, California, October 2026–February 2027. More

One of the city’s most unique cultural events is back for 2025, with architectural sites and cultural organizations welcoming the public for Open House New York, a weekend-long event running October 17 to 19.
Open House New York has been celebrating the city’s most beloved landmarks, as well as its forgotten corners, since 2003, offering free or low-cost access to spaces that aren’t normally open to the public. Want to check out the filtration system at the massive Astoria Pool, for instance? The Open House tour will mark the first chance in the modernist landmark’s 89-year history. Or you can go behind the scenes at the Goodwill in Downtown Brooklyn.
The offerings include a passive house in Harlem, a Department of Sanitation composting facility on Staten Island, and, if you’re willing to show up at 4 a.m., the Fulton Fish Market in the Bronx. There are also architecturally stunning landmarks, like the Beaux Arts Hall of Records designed by John Rochester Thomas and completed in 1907, or the Lever House, the groundbreaking 1952 International Style office building by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
There’s also plenty of museums to visit and art to see, such as four separate MTA Arts and Design subway tours, or a rare look at the flood mitigation system architect Renzo Piano installed at the Whitney Museum of American Art after Hurricane Sandy flooded the construction site. (There’s a reason we likened the building to Noah’s ark when it opened back in 2014.)
This year’s edition features 342 venues across all five boroughs, 164 of which are open for drop-in visits. The other 178 sites are ticketed, with timed reservations for just $7 a person which will be released on Friday, October 3, at 12 p.m. We’ve compiled a list of the most intriguing options for both ticketed and open-access venues. Enjoy!
DROP-IN VISITS
32 Avenue of the Americas Lobby
Hildreth Meière’s Continents Linked by the Telephone and Wireless ceiling mosaic for 32 Avenue of the Americas, the former AT&T Long Distance Building. Photo: courtesy of the International Hildreth Meière Association
Today, lobby art is easy to ignore, your eyes skipping past whatever bland, large-scale, painting is hanging on your way to the elevator bank. But the Art Deco muralist and mosaicist Hildreth Meière (1892–1961) was a master of incorporating artwork into public spaces, like the dazzling glass mosaic ceiling representing the connectivity of telephones she did for the former AT&T Long Distance Building. Stop by for a tour from members of the International Hildreth Meière Association, which is also offering ticketed Open House visits to see her stunning, landmarked Red Room at the new Printemps department store.
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New YorkOctober 17–19, 12 p.m.–4 p.m.
Morbid Anatomy Museum
The Morbid Anatomy Museum. Photo: courtesy of the Morbid Anatomy Museum, Brooklyn.
This quirky Brooklyn museum closed after just two-and-a-half years in business due to money issues, but it was revived at Greenwood Cemetery and most recently in Industry City. There will be free tarot readings for Open House New York, plus the opportunity to peruse the collection of all things related to death, medicine, anatomy, taxidermy, and much more.
Morbid Anatomy Museum, Industry City, 254 36th Street, Building 2, Floor 2, Suite C248, Brooklyn, New YorkOctober 17–19, 12 p.m.–4 p.m.
Materials for the Arts
Materials for the Arts. Photo: by Samantha Paradiso.
You may not know it, but this city keeps 6.1 million pounds of materials out of landfills thanks to this creative reuse center, which distributes to free materials to the NYC Department of Education and upwards of 7,000 arts and cultural organizations.
Materials for the Arts, 33-00 Northern Boulevard, Floor 3, Long Island City, New YorkOctober 19, 10 a.m.–6 p.m, last tour 5 p.m.
Allison Eden Studios
Allison Eden at her mosaic studio. Photo: by Gary Goldenstein.
Allison Eden has made glass mosaics for all 50 states, as well as abroad, including for private homes as well as bars, restaurants, casinos, and even cruise ships. Now you can get a glimpse into her art factory.
Allison Eden Studios, 164 Cook Street, Brooklyn, New YorkOctober 18–19, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.
M&S Schmalberg Flowers
M&S Schmalberg Flowers. Photo: John Ng.
M&S Schmalberg opened in the Garment District in 1916. Now it’s the city’s last-remaining fabric flower factory, stocked with vintage brass molds, hand-shaped petals, and century-old pressing irons.
M&S Schmalberg Flowers, 242 West 36th Street, Floor 7. New York, New YorkOctober 19, 9 a.m.–3 p.m, last tour 2:30

TICKETED TOURS
Harlem River Bridges, Parks and Landmarks Walking Tour
Photo: Nathan Kensinger, courtesy of Open House New York.
Led by Nathan Kensinger and Duane Bailey-Castro, who have photographed the Bronx shoreline for 15 years, the tour offers an artist’s view of the Harlem River, surfacing its rich history and ecology.
Highbridge, BronxOctober 18, 12:00 p.m.—2.30 p.m.
Cathedral of St. John the Divine
The stained glass windows at St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York. Photo: by David Hogarty, courtesy of Open House New York.
If you’re not afraid of heights and want to climb 124 feet, up 12 flights of stairs, this is your chance to get up close and personal with the stained glass at St. John the Divine, the world’s largest Gothic cathedral. Tickets for the vertical tour are normally $27.50, so this is a great deal. (Note, however, that children under 12 are not allowed.) The architect Ralph Adams Cram insisted that the colorful panes be manufactured with medieval techniques, from pot-glass made of sand and metal ash. There are over 150 windows from different artists and eras—the church is still technically under construction—but the central rose window was designed by Boston’s Connick Studio, run by artist Charles Jay Connick, under Cram’s guidance.
Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Avenue, Morningside Heights, New York, New YorkOctober 18, 12 p.m.–1 p.m., 2 p.m.–3 p.m.
Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
Artwork by Robert Rauschenberg at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Photo: courtesy of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
It’s Robert Rauschenberg’s centennial year, with major exhibitions in the city at the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of the City of New York. The artist turned this former religious orphanage into his home and studio in 1965; now it is home to his foundation and the current exhibition “Autobiography and Other Stories: Robert Rauschenberg in Words and Images.”
Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, 381 Lafayette St, New York, New YorkOctober 18–19, 12 p.m.–1 p.m., 1:30 p.m.–2:30 p.m., 3 p.m.–4 p.m.
Socrates Sculpture Park and Mark di Suvero Studio
Spacetime, Mark di Suvero’s studio. Photo: courtesy of Socrates Sculpture Park.
In 1986, the great sculptor Mark di Suvero turned an illegal dumpsite on the Queens waterfront into a free sculpture park. But Open House New York is the only time you can visit Spacetime, his incredible studio next door. Richard Morales, director of public programs at Socrates; Shaun Leonardo, co-director at Socrates; and Ivana Mestrovic, director at Spacetime.
Spacetime and Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, Queens, New YorkOctober 18, 2 p.m.–3:30 p.m.
Jack Shainman Gallery
Jack Shainman Gallery. Photo: courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery.
This tour of Jack Shainman’s stunning new Tribeca space inside the landmarked New York Life Insurance Company Building includes special access to the gallery’s private spaces, including the former bank vault. The current exhibition is a massive Hank Willis Thomas show.
Jack Shainman Gallery, 46 Lafayette Street, New YorkOctober 17–19, 10:30 a.m.–12 p.m.; 1 p.m.–2:30 p.m.
Hispanic Society Museum & Library
Hispanic Society Museum & Library. Photo courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library.
Get a behind-the-scenes tour of the ongoing restoration work from Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners at the landmark Audubon Terrace cultural campus in Washington Heights.
Hispanic Society Museum & Library, Audubon Terrace, 3741 Broadway, New York, New YorkOctober 18, 11 a.m.–11:45 a.m.; 1 p.m.–1:45 p.m.
WTC Rebuilding Gallery & Artists Studios
Murals on the 79th floor of 3 World Trade Center. Photo: courtesy of Silverstein Properties.
The real estate firm Silverstein Properties has long given artists space at the World Trade Center, where it holds a 99-year lease. Artists can apply for a free-year-long residency on the 28th floor of 4 World Trade Center with Silver Art Projects, but the views are even better at 3 World Trade Center, where there’s an on-site resident artist program and mural collection on the 79th floor. The company is offering tours of the artist studios there, as well as its private art collection galleries up on 80.
3 World Trade Center, New York, New YorkOctober 17, 10 a.m.–10:45 a.m., 11 a.m.–11:45 a.m., 12 p.m.–12:45 p.m.
Colossal Media
The headquarters of hand-painted outdoor advertising company Colossal Media. Photo: courtesy of Colossal Media.
Hand-painted outdoor advertising company Colossal Media paints murals around the world. A tour of its Brooklyn warehouse—part paint store, part art studio, and part painted signage museum—will show what goes into the pre-production process, before the artists go on site and work their magic.
Colossal Media, exact address TBA, East Williamsburg, BrooklynFriday, 10 a.m.–11 a.m., 11 a.m.–12 p.m. More

Time has been kind to New York’s Guggenheim. Today, it’s considered Frank Lloyd Wright’s crowning statement and an unequivocal masterpiece of modern architecture, but upon opening in 1959, its revolutionary form drew comparisons to a washing machine, marshmallow, and a giant corkscrew.
The chairs Wright designed for the museum’s café were no less futuristic. Sleek and minimalist with a spun aluminum tulip base and an eye-shaped backrest, they seem to belong on the flight deck of a ship gliding through the solar system. They were never realized. Now, nearly seven decades later, the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) has commissioned a pair as part of a new exhibition that reframes Wright’s furniture within the Wisconsinite’s practice and American modernism more broadly.
Frank Lloyd Wright Café Chairs for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: courtesy MOWA/the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ.
To produce the café chairs, curators worked with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation to uncover his drawings, before sharing them with a multigenerational metal-spinning company in Milwaukee. It’s an approach organizers have taken a further 10 times working with master artisans (including Wright’s great-grandson, S. Lloyd Natof) for “Frank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design.” Across 40 pieces, the show highlights five distinct periods between 1911 and 1959, years in which Wright drifted from the horizontal lines and design strictures of his Prairie School.
If there’s one thing a person with even a passing interest in Wright knows, it’s his concept of organic architecture, a vision in which every element, from the carpet to the planters to, yes, the chairs, forms part of a harmonious whole. And yet, Wright’s furniture has received little attention, with few scholarly books and even fewer exhibitions on the subject.
Frank Lloyd Wright in his studio at Taliesin, Wisconsin, 1957. Photo: Tony Vaccaro / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.
This absence caught the attention of Eric Vogel, scholar-in-residence at the Taliesin Institute, who began digging into the archives and networking, a journey that led him to MOWA, which was showing a collection of Wright chairs. In Thomas Szolwinski, the museum’s curator of architecture and design, Vogel found a partner.
“I’d long been interested in curating a chair exhibition,” Szolwinski said over email. “The central premise is that Wright’s homes and studios, Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and later Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, functioned as laboratories of creative experiment.”
Frank Lloyd Wright chair and table for the Tree Room. Photo: courtesy MOWA/the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ.
Wright would design around 200 chairs and enjoyed a fraught relationship with them—at once considering them key to a room’s integrity, while also calling sitting “an unfortunate necessity.”Here, the story begins with Wright rebuilding Taliesin East following major fires in 1914 and 1925. There, he combined a new architecture with unprecedented furniture forms (ones whose originality would, in time, be rejected by clients). MOWA has recreated Wright’s armchair, which is made from sandy cypress wood that matches the building’s color and horizontal gold leaf joints that echo the exterior’s window slats. Elsewhere, there’s the triangular chair and table for the complex’s tree room that chimes with elements of the ceiling and a chair for the Hillside dining room chair.
Frank Lloyd Wright “Mori” chair for the S. Mori Oriental Art Studio and Japanese Print Shop, Chicago. Photo: courtesy MOWA/the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ.
Out west, a highlight is the origami armchair Wright designed in 1946. It sees the designer looking back to his frequent visits to Japan in the 1910s with sides like well-creased paper and arms that unfold before the sitter. Its seat takes on the copper-red tone (known as Cherokee Red) that traced throughout the property. It’s a far heftier proposition than the slender oak chair he designed for a Chicago gallery of Japanese art in 1914, which arrives at MOWA on loan from the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust in Oak Park.
At a time when the lines between architecture, interior spaces, and product design are well and truly blurred, “Modern Chair Design” is a reminder of Wright’s prescience. “Time and again, Wright was ahead of what later became standardized or popularized techniques,” Szolwinski said. “We highlight these parallels and make comparisons to global trends, showing how Wright’s furniture fits into a larger narrative of modern design.”
“Frank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design” is on view at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, 205 Veterans Ave, West Bend, Wisconsin, October 4, 2025–January 25, 2026. More

History’s great women artists have, in recent years, received glimmers of the institutional attention they’ve long deserved. While Hilma af Klint and Artemisia Gentileschi have broken through to the mainstream with major museum exhibitions, still many more influential and daring talents are waiting to be rediscovered by the wider public. Enthusiasm and momentum continue to grow for these stories, thankfully, and this year, a number of museums big and small have turned their attention to their work. Below, we’ve selected just a few of the solo exhibitions highlighting historic women artists worth seeking out this fall.

1. “Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch” at Spelman College, AtlantaThrough December 6, 2025
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet,​ Discontent (1929).​  Gift of Miss Eleanor Green and Miss Ellen D. Sharpe. Courtesy of Spelman College.
Born to a Narragansett father and a Black mother, sculptor Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890–1960) was the first woman of color to graduate from the acclaimed Rhode Island School of Design. Her career would take her to New York and Paris. Still, throughout her lifetime, the Afro-Indigenous artist navigated an often-hostile art world and struggled, at times, with extreme poverty. She nevertheless continued to produce sculptures of intense poignancy and precise technical skill. “I Will Not Bend an Inch,” co-curated by the RISD Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, now makes its third stop in Atlanta; the exhibition is the first museum presentation of Prophet’s works, many of which have, unfortunately, been lost or destroyed over the decades. Twenty rare works make up the exhibition, including nine portrait heads carved in hardwood, as well as marble carvings, reliefs, and works on paper. These works are a testament to a remarkable and unyielding artistic vision and one deserving of much wider scholarly attention.
2. “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within” at Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WIThrough December 23, 2025
Toshiko Takaezu with works later combined in the “Star Series” (ca. 1994–2001), including (from left to right) Sahu, Nommo, Emme Ya, Unas, and Po Tolo (Dark Companion), 1998. Photo: Tom Grotta, © Family of Toshiko Takaezu, Courtesy browngrotta arts
Interest in American artist Toshiko Takaezu has ignited over the past few years, driven in part by this very exhibition, which originated at the Noguchi Museum in New York last spring. Takaezu, who was born in Hawai‘i of Okinawan heritage, is best known for her glazed “closed form” ceramic sculptures. These forms ranged in scale from the handheld to the monumental; she approached these vessels as her three-dimensional canvases painting onto their surfaces. Takaezu was known for arranging her works to create unique environments. Her practice also incorporated weaving and bronze-cast sculpture, also highlighted in the exhibition.  In some ways, this exhibition is a homecoming for Takaezu; the artist taught at UW-Madison from 1954 to 1955.
3. “Edmonia Lewis: Indelible Impressions” at the Cantor Arts Center, StanfordThrough January 4, 2026
Edmonia Lewis, Asleep, (1871). Photo: John Janca.
Sculptor Edmonia Lewis, a 19th-century woman of Black and Native American (Ojibwe) heritage, was internationally famous in her own time, celebrated for her stirring Neoclassical marble sculptures. Visitors to her studio included President Ulysses S. Grant, Pope Pius IX, and Frederick Douglass.
Born in upstate New York in 1844, Lewis briefly enrolled in Oberlin College (one of the few schools to accept Black women), before moving to Boston in 1863, where she began her career. By 1866, Lewis had set sail for Rome, where she studied alongside the most celebrated sculptors of her time.
In 1873, she visited the Bay Area, where she presented her sculptures, Asleep (1871),  Awake (1872), and Bust of Abraham Lincoln (1871), to great acclaim. These three sculptures are presented reunited for the first time in three decades in an intimate exhibition. The show marks an important moment of renewed interest in Lewis. Early next year, the Peabody Essex Museum will present “Said in Stone” which positions Lewis’s works alongside those of her contemporaries in an expansive 100-object exhibition.
4. “Lee Miller” at Tate Britain, LondonThrough February 15, 2026
Lee Miller, Model with lightbulb, Vogue Studio, London, England (ca.1943). © Lee Miller Archives, England 2024. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk
The mania for all things Lee Miller reaches its zenith. The surrealist photographer and war journalist has been everywhere in culture over the last few years, from the release of Lee, a biopic of her life starring Kate Winslet, an exhibition of her works at Gagosian New York, and the publication of a book of her correspondence with her husband, Arthur Penrose.
Now, Tate Britain has opened the most extensive retrospective of her photography in the U.K. to date. The exhibition includes approximately 250 vintage and modern prints, from her years in Paris’s Surrealist scene to her unflinching bravery as a war photographer documenting World War II. The exhibition also includes rarely seen works, such as a series of Egyptian landscapes taken in the 1930s. The highlights are her tender and unusual portraits of fellow artists.
5. “Michaelina Wautier, Painter,” at Kunsthistorisches Museum, ViennaThrough February 22, 2026
Michaelina Wautier, Der Triumph des Bacchus. Image Courtesy of © KHM-Museumsverband.
For centuries, Michaelina Wautier’s paintings were attributed to men, particularly her brother, the artist Carl Wautier. The Flemish Baroque painter, who lived from 1604 to 1689, worked across a dazzling range of genres, from portraits and history scenes to flower still lifes and religious tableaux. Historians doubted a woman would have had that ability. Wautier could have been lost to history if art historian Katlijne Van der Stighelen hadn’t found a painting by Wautier in a storage area of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum back in 1993. The discovery set Van der Stighelen on a decades-long mission to discover Wauter’s story. Now, in a fitting moment, the Kunsthistorisches Museum is hosting the largest exhibition of Wautier’s works to date, with 29 paintings, a drawing, and a print—the near entirety of her known work—on view.  The star of the exhibition is arguably her monumental Triumph of Bacchus (1655–59), which some historians believe includes a goddess-like (and provocative) depiction of the artist herself.
6. “Grace Hartigan: The Gift of Attention” at the Portland Museum of Art, OregonOctober 10, 2025–January 11, 2026
Grace Hartigan, Barbara Guest Archaics (1968) Grace Hartigan Estate © Grace Hartigan Estate Photo: Courtesy of the Estate of Grace Hartigan/ACA Galleries, New York
During the 1950s, Grace Hartigan was an artistic sensation who mingled with poets and writers, including Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Daisy Aldan, and James Merrill. Hartigan was critically acclaimed for her works that freely danced between abstraction and figuration.  This major exhibition, which was organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art, brings together 40 of her works created between 1952 and 1968, which show her at the pinnacle of her powers, and the deep influence of poetry on her art-making, particularly her deep and at times fraught friendship with O’Hara.
7. “Ruth Asawa” at the Museum of Modern Art, New YorkOctober 19, 2025–February 7, 2026
Ruth Asawa at Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective View, San Francisco Museum of Art, 1973. Photograph by Laurence Cuneo. © 2024 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner.
California artist and educator Ruth Asawa devoted her over six-decade-long career to abstract explorations of form. Having studied at Black Mountain College, she developed a practice committed to making art every single day. Asawa is most celebrated for her undulating looped-wire sculptures that mirror organic shapes. “Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective,” co-organized by SFMoMA and MoMA, is now making its long-anticipated East Coast debut. The sweeping exhibition brings together over 300 artworks. And while her famed wire sculptures are here in all their graceful glory, so are lesser-known works in bronze casts, drawings, paintings, and prints that offer new dimensions to Asawa’s practice.
8. “Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.October 24, 2025–July 12, 2026
Grandma Moses, We Are Resting, 1951 2019.55, © Grandma Moses Properties Co., NY.
The artist Anna Mary Robertson Moses, or Grandma Moses (1860–1961), didn’t start painting in earnest until her late 70s.   Then, in 1940, at the age of 80, she was given her first gallery exhibition by the dealer Otto Kallir. She became an overnight popular sensation whose fame outstripped many other women artists of her time. Her folkloric paintings—often of rural landscapes—combined direct observation of nature with memories in idiosyncratic, distinctly American visions. Thirty-three artworks from the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s own collection, including many of her most beloved paintings, make up the core of this exhibition. More

Authenticity reigns supreme in the art world. It’s what separates million-dollar, museum-worthy masterpieces from clever fakes. And it’s what moves viewers to tears. But what if, theater artist Łukasz Twarkowski asks, a forgery could kindle in you the same emotions?
“Does it mean that the tears were fake because the painting was fake?” he asked me. “Or does it mean the fake artwork can reveal real emotions and real tears?”
This is one of the provocations at the heart of the Polish director’s new production ROHTKO, which is opening at London’s Barbican Centre on October 2. The multimedia extravaganza unfolds across four hours with onstage performances, two video screens, and a soundtrack of techno beats to interrogate the value—and increasingly blurred outlines—of authenticity in art.
ROHTKO, directed by Łukasz Twarkowski, text and dramaturgy by Anka Herbut, produced by Dailes Theatre. Photo: Artūrs Pavlovs.
As indicated by its title, Mark Rothko serves as a throughline—or more specifically, the fake Rothkos that were sold by New York art gallery Knoedler & Co. from 1994 to 2011. In those years, the dealer moved dozens of paintings forged in the style of Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Rothko. The scandal, later recounted in the 2020 Netflix documentary Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art, sparked an FBI investigation and the closure of the century-old gallery.
Twarkowski’s take on the fraud, however, is far more oblique. He takes as his starting point Shanzhai, a Chinese term meaning “mountain fort” that now stands for the phenomenon of clever counterfeit goods. It’s the world that’s given us Dolce & Banana and Samsing, among other bootlegs. A subculture and aesthetic, Shanzhai invests artistic merit in these knockoffs, seeing them as playful riffs on the real thing and deconstructions of established brands.
Łukasz Twarkowski. Photo: Beatrice Borgers.
For Twarkowski, who had boned up on the 2017 book Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, this shadow economy doubled as a philosophical prism through which to view authenticity. “We are seeing these two visions of the world: one which is never-ending and changing and the another, which is marked by the beginning and the end. If you don’t have the beginning, you don’t have the originality,” he explained, alluding to the Western art world’s prized provenance.
Bringing ROHTKO to the Stage
Now, Shanzhai has given us ROHTKO, the Shanzhai-esque twist on the painter’s name wholly deliberate. The work was in gestation for more than a year, Twarkowski told me, during which he and his longtime collaborator Anka Herbut researched areas from Rothko’s biography to the Knoedler trial. They then worked with actors over a period of improvisation to develop scenes: “We inspire them, they inspire us,” he said. Staging took up another six weeks.
ROHTKO had its premiere at the Dailes Theatre in Riga, Latvia, in 2022. Its Barbican run is happening as part of U.K./Poland Season 2025, a collaborative program between the British Council, the Polish Cultural Institute, and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
ROHTKO, directed by Łukasz Twarkowski, text and dramaturgy by Anka Herbut, produced by Dailes Theatre. Photo: Artūrs Pavlovs.
The work is centered at a Chinese restaurant—a knockoff of Mr. Chow, a hub for the New York art world—at which various characters from sleek gallerists to destitute actors gather, interact, and converse. The narrative takes us from the 1960s, during the final years of Rothko’s life, to the era of digital art, when the idea of value has only grown woolier with the rise of NFTs. While the performance transpires onstage, camera operators film the action and players, with a live feed projected on two screens.
What subtly unfolds are layers upon layers of shifting reality. The Chinese restaurant itself represents what Twarkowski called a “no-man’s land,” the concept having been so widely replicated across Western cities as to almost seem hollow (the Knoedler forger, notably, was a Chinese man living in Queens, New York). The video feed offers a whole other frame of reference: “The truth of the screen becomes another reality, which is stronger than the reality of the stage,” the director said.
ROHTKO, directed by Łukasz Twarkowski, text and dramaturgy by Anka Herbut, produced by Dailes Theatre. Photo: Artūrs Pavlovs.
Even theater as a medium, being performative and illusory, loosens the grip of authenticity—Twarkowski deemed it a “strange form of art, which has repetition inscribed in its DNA.”
“Is it really happening anew every day, or is it the same thing that is happening?” he said. “We were asking ourselves: when you do international co-productions, what does it mean when there is a second premiere in another country? How many premieres can you have? Is the second premiere a fake premiere, because the first one was the original one?”
Beyond the Myth
This multimedia approach to exploring the hazy lines between reality and illusion has been a hallmark of Twarkowski’s innovative performances. Where 2023’s The Employees examined the nature of human consciousness, his most recent work, Oracle, probed artificial intelligence through the lens of Alan Turing’s life story. However heady these brews, Twarkowski has not lost sight of the humans and human feeling at the center of these performances.
ROHTKO, directed by Łukasz Twarkowski, text and dramaturgy by Anka Herbut, produced by Dailes Theatre. Photo: Artūrs Pavlovs.
In ROHTKO, for instance, a performer recounts the tale of a Latvian artist who had planned to sit in front of Rothko’s work, cry, and collect her tears for a video sculpture. She killed herself before realizing the project. The performer reflects that were she to collect such tears from a viewing of Rothko’s paintings, she would save them for a possible future where people might feel nothing looking at an artwork.
It’s a moment that captures Twarkowski and Herbut’s deeper aim to stir something in the viewer that exists beyond the performance. What is happening on stage is not the most important thing, he explained, “but what it evokes in the spectator. It is the same with the artwork. Is it about the art, or it is the relation between the art and the viewer?”
The heart of the piece, of course, belongs to Rothko. The artist is regarded as a hero in his native Latvia, and Twarkowski has been captivated by the guy since he laid eyes on Rothko’s Seagram Murals at the Tate Modern. He recalled “the silence that appears once you get in and how speechless you are being there between these paintings”—a reverence he also felt at the 2023 Rothko retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.
ROHTKO, directed by Łukasz Twarkowski, text and dramaturgy by Anka Herbut, produced by Dailes Theatre. Photo: Artūrs Pavlovs.
But digging into Rothko’s life, Twarkowski admitted, left him disillusioned. He received a distinct view of the painter’s strained relationships with his wives and children, as well as his suicide, which the director described as “more an act of cowardice than any romanticized heroism.” ROHTKO brings forth these demons, but not before, it seems, its director glimpsed the real man behind the constructed myth.
“More often, with such big figures of art, when you start digging into their personal life, you’re usually more disappointed than appreciative of them,” he conceded. “Knowing him more as a person really took off some of the magic.”
ROHTKO is on view at the Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London, October 2–5.  More