Eliana Willis

For the first time possibly ever, there is not a single ad to be seen in Grand Central Terminal. “Humans of New York,” Brandon Stanton‘s popular social media art series of photographs of people he’s interviewed on the city’s streets, has taken over each and every one of the 150 video billboards in the grand concourse, as well as the subway ads below in Grand Central Station for “Dear New York.”
“This beautiful art installation transforms the terminal into a photographic display of New Yorkers telling their stories from all walks of life—serving as a powerful reminder of our shared humanity,” MTA director of commercial ventures Mary John said in a statement. “It is the first time an artist has unified digital displays in both the terminal and subway station below, and the MTA coordinated across many corners of our organization to make this happen.”
It’s New York’s largest public art installation in 20 years, since The Gates by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, a magical pathway of saffron-colored fabric in Central Park. And it’s all the more impressive in that Stanton paid for it all out of pocket, as a gift to the city.
“If it provides even the slightest amount of joy, solace, beauty, or connection to the 750,000 people who pass through Grand Central every day—we have achieved our goal,” he wrote on Facebook.
The “Humans of New York” art installation “Dear New York” in the main concourse at Grand Central Terminal. Photo: courtesy of Brandon Stanton.
The Project Was a Massive Undertaking
The original plan was to use the proceeds from his new book, Dear New York, but Stanton ended up having to dip into his life savings to cover the total cost, which included space rental and covering the station’s lost ad revenue. The artist and journalist, who wrote the best-selling book Humans of New York, declined to provide an exact figure, but told the New York Times that “I no longer have any stocks.”
Stanton has shot portraits of 10,000 people across the five boroughs and beyond since beginning “Humans of New York” in 2010, creating a kind of photographic census of the city. (He has since expanded the project’s scope internationally, to 40 countries and counting.)
The “Humans of New York” art installation “Dear New York” in the passageways of Grand Central Station. Photo: courtesy of Brandon Stanton.
“Dear New York” is projecting some of those images, enlarged to be 50 feet tall, onto the towering columns beneath the station’s famed starry ceiling. It’s all set to a soundtrack from the Juilliard School, which has provided more than 100 hours of music in various genres from live performances by students, alumni, and faculty.
Other photos have been printed on vinyl and affixed to the tile walls of the passageways down in the subway station. There’s also a photo display mounted inside the station’s Vanderbilt Hall, where Stanton has shared the stage with 10 local artists and 600 New York City public school kids.
The “Humans of New York” art installation “Dear New York” in Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Terminal. Photo: courtesy of Brandon Stanton.
To bring the project to life, Stanton tapped Broadway producer David Korins, who worked on Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, and Immersive Van Gogh, as the creative director for experience in the main concourse. Andrea Trabucco-Campos, a partner at the design firm Pentagram, was responsible for laying out the installations across the labyrinthine subway tunnels below.
Stanton, who has over 30 million followers across social media platforms, spent about six months organizing the exhibition.
The “Humans of New York” art installation “Dear New York” in the passageways of Grand Central Station. Photo: courtesy of Brandon Stanton.
The opening was timed to the release of the Dear New York. (Once he covers the exhibition’s installation costs, Stanton plans to donate the book’s profits to New York City charities; he has raised over $10 million to date through “Humans of New York.”)
“It is a love letter to the people of this city, and about the people of this city,” Stanton said of the exhibition in a statement. “Everyone who visits ‘Dear New York’ will not only see the art, they will become a part of it.”
The “Humans of New York” art installation “Dear New York” in the passageways of Grand Central Station. Photo: courtesy of Brandon Stanton.
“Dear New York” is on view at Grand Central Terminal and Grand Central Station, between East 42nd and 45th Streets and Lexington and Vanderbilt Avenues, New York, New York, October 6–19, 2025.  More

The industrial halls of Berghain will soon be the site of Pierre Huyghe’s first artistic foray into quantum physics, with a new commission from the LAS Art Foundation’s Sensing Quantum program. The large-scale project, launched in partnership with Hartwig Art Foundation, opens January 23, 2026, and runs until March 8, marking Huyghe’s first solo institutional presentation in the German capital.
Though many details remain under wraps, Huyghe’s upcoming installation is said to revolve around uncertainty as both subject and method, drawing on quantum experiments and incorporating film, sound, dust, vibrations, and light. Concepts that have long fascinated Huyghe—indeterminacy, autonomy, and systems thinking, as well as the more-than-human—resonate naturally with aspects of quantum logic.
Halle am Berghain. Photo: Stefanie Loos AFP via Getty Images.
The monumental two-story halls of Halle am Berghain, a former thermal power station from the 1950s, provide a fitting backdrop. Huyghe is known for creating immersive environments that pulse with unpredictability, which are often referred to as “ecosystems.”
“Pierre is one of the leading artists of our generation,” said Bettina Kames, the director of LAS, in a video call. “He is wholly devoted to his projects—perfection, detail, and conceptual rigor guide everything he does.”
Few who saw it will forget his outdoor installation at Documenta 13, Untilled (2011–12), where he transformed a forgotten industrial site into a microcosm of autonomous life: a bee colony thrived on a statue, while a white greyhound with a pink leg wandered through the landscape. At the Pinault Collection’s Punta della Dogana in Venice last year, for his major work Liminal, visitors navigated a dark, cavernous installation of A.I.-inflected films, performances, and living marine life—an exploration of the boundary between human and nonhuman. The move toward quantum systems, with their inherent uncertainty and instability, is a logical continuation of this trajectory.
Pierre Huyghe Liminal (temporary title) (2024–ongoing). Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Marian Goodman Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Esther Schipper, and TARO NASU. © Pierre Huyghe, by SIAE 2023.
“At a moment when quantum and A.I. technologies are beginning to converge, this project not only stages their philosophical and perceptual implications, but also asks what worlds might be conceived of—impossible, unstable, or yet to come,” the institution said via email.
In a statement, Huyghe described the new work as “a hybrid creature, an infinite membrane carved by void… an observer witnessing the ambiguous nature of the entity, its monstrosity.” The accompanying film, he wrote, “portrays an inexistent being, a soulscape, a radical outside,” aiming to turn states of uncertainty into a cosmos.
Notably, the project stems from a collaboration with quantum physicist Tommaso Calarco, co-author of the Quantum Manifesto, which sets Europe’s agenda for quantum research. “Luckily, Calarco is an art lover,” Kames noted. Calarco’s discussions with the artist have informed Huyghe’s experiments with quantum systems “as raw material,” transforming quantum properties into perceptible experiences. “The project with Huyghe is at such a high level,” added Kames. “It is one of the most important projects we have ever done at LAS.”
Pierre Huyghe, 2025, video still. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and Hartwig Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist. © Pierre Huyghe, 2025.
LAS Art Foundation, a nomadic institution bridging art, science, and technology, launched the Sensing Quantum program to explore the implications of quantum computing and theory. Laure Prouvost’s inaugural project earlier this year, which examined audio and visual manifestations quantum noise, in an artistic collaboration with Google Quantum A.I. won the S+T+ARTS award from the E.U. Commission.
In addition to ambitious visual art projects, Sensing Quantum includes endeavors with composers, a learning program, and a symposium coming up this month, all of which aims to illuminate some of the most elusive principles and hard-to-grasp elements of quantum mechanics through direct experience. Huyghe’s project will certainly mark an apex of it.
After its launch in Berlin, the presentation will travel to Amsterdam in 2026, presented by the Hartwig Art Foundation, which is currently creating a brick-and-mortar museum. Beatrix Ruf, the director of the Hartwig Art Foundation, said she is “thrilled and grateful” to be involved in this new chapter in Huyghe’s work with the LAS Art Foundation, and that the “inspiring collaboration is now opening up exciting avenues into the forward-looking world of quantum.”
Pierre Huyghe’s Sensing Quantum will be on view from January 23 through March 8, 2026, at LAS Art Foundation, hosting at Halle am Berghain, Berlin. More

The pop culture feast that is New York Comic Con returns to the Javits Center from October 9 through October 12, bringing with it all manner of merchandise, collectibles, fan art, and vintage comic books. The event may have comics in the name, but it’s grown over the years to celebrate a wide range of books, toys, video games, television series, movies, and cosplay.
It’s a great place to meet original comic book artists and graphic novel authors, especially in the dedicated Artist Alley section downstairs. Most of these artists are completely independent, some traveling from across the country for the chance to sell their art and share their passion for all things superheroes, anime, science fiction, and fantasy.
This year’s edition of the con is of special interest to the art world at large, as Los Angeles’s eagerly awaited Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is hosting a special panel previewing the institution, slated to finally open next year. On Sunday, October 9, Hollywood legend Martin Scorsese will moderate a discussion between JR, the French artist famed for his photography and street art installations; Boris Vallejo, the noted science fiction and fantasy artist; and Julie Bell, illustrator and fantasy and wildlife artist.
And it’s an interesting time for the comic art world as well—even as the fine art market falters, the late fantasy artist Frank Frazetta just set a new record for the most expensive work of comic book or fantasy art with a $13.5 million sale at Heritage Auctions in Dallas.
But even if you didn’t snag tickets to the main event, there are exhibitions across the city celebrating the art of the comic book. Here’s our list of what to see during New York Comic Con.

“¡Wepa! Puerto Ricans in the World of Comics” at the New York Public LibraryOctober 4, 2025–March 8, 2026
Installation view of “¡Wepa! Puerto Ricans in the World of Comics” at the New York Public Library. Photo: courtesy of the New York Public Library.
In 2022, Manuel Martínez Nazario, a retired librarian in San Juan, Puerto Rico, made a major gift to the New York Public Library, donating the collection of some 1,600 comic books, political cartoons, and original art by or about Puerto Ricans that he had been amassing since the 1990s. The works on view in this bilingual show include comics set in Puerto Rico, as well as stories that focus on Puerto Ricans here in New York. There’s even Marvel’s first Puerto Rican superhero, White Tiger, who made his debut in 1975. Nazario and Rosa Colón Guerra, cofounder of Soda Pop Comics, whose 2014 anthology of female comic artists is featured in the exhibition, will speak in a Comic Con panel with curators Paloma Celis Carbajal and Charles Cuykendall Carter on October 9 at 3:30 p.m.
The New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Wachenheim Gallery, is located at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, New York, New York. 

“Super Duper” at the Metropolitan Opera HouseSeptember 21, 2025–2026
Art Spiegelman, Superman in the Blottosphere (2023). ©Art Spiegelman.
This fall, the Met is hosting the premiere of the new opera The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, based on Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name about a pair of Jewish cousins who create a superhero comic during World War II (through October 11). This accompanying exhibition is inspired by the American origins of the superhero, featuring new works by contemporary artists such as George Condo, Dana Schutz, Rachel Feinstein, Roz Chast, and Rashid Johnson exploring what the superhero would look like in 2025. Only one work in the exhibition, by Art Spiegelman, author and illustrator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, was not commissioned for the occasion.
The Metropolitan Opera is located at 30 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, New York.

“Nightmares in Blood” at Below GrandOctober 4–November 8, 2025
James O’Barr, The Crow (2018). Courtesy of Below Grand.
Artist Arthur Peña has curated this group show featuring important horror illustrators ranging in age from 36 to 76, celebrating artists who have pushed censorship to the limits with their gory imagery. There are well-known fixtures of the genre such as Clive Barker, who has turned his tales of horror into films like Hellraiser, which he directed, and Candyman, which he executive produced. But the show also includes underground cult figures like “The Gurch,” a mysterious British artist making his U.S. debut here. Expect plenty of blood, guts, and monsters—perfect not just for Comic Con, but for Halloween.
Below Grand is located at 53 Orchard Street, New York, New York. 

“Frank Cho” at Philippe Labaune GallerySeptember 18–October 25, 2025
Frank Cho, Broken Angel (2025). Courtesy of Philippe Labaune Gallery, New York.
Comic artist Frank Cho prides himself on melding art and storytelling, letting his expert draftsmanship help guide the narrative in his illustrations for leading Marvel and DC titles such as Wonder Woman and Savage Wolverine. He is particularly known for his work in ballpoint pen and his fine crosshatching technique, which he uses to create impossibly detailed drawings that appear to leap off the page.
Philippe Labaune Gallery is located at 534 West 24 Street, New York, New York.

“Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey, Edel Rodriguez” at the Society of IllustratorsJuly 19–October 11, 2025
Edel Rodriguez, Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey. Photo: courtesy of Metropolitan Books.
Illustrator Edel Rodriguez, who has done covers for publications such as Time and Der Spiegel—you may remember his powerful image of President Donald Trump beheading the Statue of Liberty—presents the original art from his graphic memoir Worm. It tells the story of his flight from Cuba aboard a tiny shrimping boat in 1980, one of the “worms,” as Fidel Castro derisively referred to those leaving the island nation in the boatlift. The show also includes Rodriguez’s political art, silkscreened posters, and paintings.
Society of Illustrators is located at 128 East 63rd Street, New York, New York.

“Comics in the City: Sequential Art Is” at Flushing Town HallSeptember 25–October 20, 2025
A comic by Chris Gomez. Courtesy of Flushing Town Hall.
Comics writer Regine L. Sawyer, the founder of Women in Comics NYC Collective International, has curated this showcase of New York City comic book artists such as Will Heydecker, Bryan Angrand, and MARICAMA. It focuses on the narrative power of sequential art and how comics use panels to to tell a story image by image.
Flushing Town Hall is located at 137-35 Northern Blvd, Flushing, New York. More

Frieze Week approaches in London, and with it, a veritable buffet of incredible museum shows to see around the city. A bumper crop of summer exhibitions remains on view in the U.K.’s capital city that are worth seeing before they close, including Tate Modern’s historic survey of Australian First Nations artist Emily Kam Kngwarray and a sweeping Do Ho Suh show. There is also a major mounting of works by pioneering 19th-century Realist Jean-François Millet at the National Gallery, and Grayson Perry’s irreverent “Delusions of Grandeur” at the Wallace Collection.
But plenty more exhibitions are fresh to the scene. From the long-awaited Kerry James Marshall survey at the Royal Academy to a rare outing of Wayne Thiebaud’s dessert-themed paintings at the Courtauld, here are 10 must-see shows to hit during the busy fair week.

Gilbert and George: 21st Century Pictures
Hayward Gallery, October 7–January 11, 2026
Installation view of “Gilbert & George: 21st Century Pictures” at the Hayward Gallery in London. Photo: Mark Blower, courtesy of the Gilbert and George and the Hayward Gallery.
Are there many artists more London than Gilbert and George, the duo of “living sculptures” who have been stalwarts of Spitalfields for decades? Though in their smart, suited presentations they may seem like relics of a bygone age, it turns out the artists’ practice has long been evolving alongside new technologies.
This exhibition traces these changes over 25 years, but at their core, these some 60 floor-to-ceiling installations evince Gilbert and George’s enduring preoccupation with societal taboos and anxieties around sexuality, class, and nationalism. Their work excavates the everyday artifacts of modern life, from road signs to newspaper headlines, to reflect our world back at us but, always, with their characteristic wit.
Dedicated fans of the duo will be excited to see the debut of two new works from this year’s “Screw Pictures” series. With Gilbert and George behind the scenes, you just know the word “screw” is going to have all manner of meanings.
—Jo Lawson-Tancred

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories
Royal Academy of Arts, through January 18, 2026
Kerry James Marshall, School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012). Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Museum purchase with funds provided by Elizabeth (Bibby) Smith, the Collectors Circle for Contemporary Art, Jane Comer, the Sankofa Society, and general acquisition funds, 2012.57. © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Sean Pathasema.
Marshall’s largest exhibition in Europe to date stages an audacious conversation with art history’s giants. Again and again, the artist takes up a different mode of painting and retools it to express a worldview that reflects Black experience, everyday life, and history from the inside out.
Past Times (1997), Marshall’s riff on Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (famously bought by Diddy in 2018) recasts the protagonists of a leisurely Sunday afternoon in a Chicago park. The nearly monochrome Black Painting (2003/2006), among the show’s most powerful works, nods to a long lineage of “black paintings”—from Ad Reinhardt to Norman Lewis—while reclaiming the notion on Marshall’s own terms: Within the darkness emerges the faint image of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, asleep in bed moments before his life was taken by Chicago police in 1969. There’s more, and more.
If postcolonial literary criticism “writes back” by rewriting the master narrative—the overarching cultural story imposed by power—Marshall “paints back,” reworking the master image from within. The show’s scale feels perfectly suited to the Royal Academy’s grand galleries: intellectually satisfying, visually forceful, and deeply layered. Make enough time for it.
—Naomi Rea

Wayne Thiebaud, American Still Life
The Courtauld Gallery, October 10, 2025–January 18, 2026
Wayne Thiebaud, Cakes (1963). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. © Wayne Thiebaud VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. Image Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.
It’s shocking that Wayne Thiebaud, one of the greatest American painters of the last century—of confectionery, at the very least—is only receiving his first U.K. museum show now, four years after his death at the age of 101. The “laureate of lunch counters,” as critic Lawrence Alloway once called him, Thiebaud rendered humble cakes, pies, sweets, coffee cups, and hot dogs in vivid hues and brushy strokes, bestowing upon these cheap eats a historical if not philosophical gravitas in much the same way Chaïm Soutine did with meat.
The Courtauld’s exhibition, featuring works from the 1960s hailing from numerous American collections—including the iconic Cakes (1963), on loan for the first time outside the U.S. from the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.—is a sweet treat indeed, as very few of this Modern master’s paintings are held by museums on this side of the Atlantic.
—Margaret Carrigan

Nigerian Modernism
Tate Modern, October 8, 2025–May 10, 2026
Uzo Egonu, Stateless People an artist with beret 1981. ©The estate of Uzo Egonu. Private Collection.
Just about a week after Nigeria celebrated the 65th anniversary of its independence from the U.K., Tate Modern opens “Nigerian Modernism,” the first exhibition in the country that traces the footprint and evolution of Modern art in the African country against its transformative socio-political backdrop. Featuring more than 250 works of various disciplines by more than 50 artists across five decades, the exhibition links the development of Modern art in Nigeria with the cultural and artistic influences resulting from British colonial rule and the growing emphasis on the country’s own cultural identities and rich heritage amid the calls for decolonization.
Curated by senior curator Osei Bonsu and assistant curator Bilal Akkouche, the exhibition starts from the 1940s, showcasing works by pioneers such as painter and sculptor Ben Enwonwu and ceramist Ladi Kwali, who fused their British training with Nigerian art traditions. The show then explores the legacy of the Zaria Arts Society following the country’s independence in 1960 and artists’ struggle amid the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War in 1967. The show concludes with a focus on Uzo Egonu, the Nigerian-born British artist whose work reflects the identity of the Nigerian diaspora.
—Vivienne Chow

Peter Doig: House of Music
Serpentine South Gallery, October 10, 2025–February 8, 2026
Peter Doig, Painting for Wall Painters (Prosperity P.o.S.) (2010–2012) © Peter Doig. All Rights Reserved.
Peter Doig is known for his paintings of landscapes drawn from his personal experiences and surroundings. But how would these paintings sound?
In “House of Music,” the British painter takes the opportunity to present what could be understood as a soundtrack for his art for the first time. Music selected by Doig will be played from a set of high fidelity wooden Klangfilm Euronor speakers from the 1950s to accompany the viewing of his recent works on show, primarily created during the artist’s years in Trinidad with his family between 2002 and 2021. The music comes from the artist’s vast collection of vinyl records and cassette tapes accumulated throughout the decades.
Installed alongside the paintings created during the artist’s years in Trinidad with his family between 2002 and 2021 is a restored Western Electric/Bell Labs sound system. Originally from the late 1920s to 1930s, the sound system was created to meet the growing demands for talking movies at the time. The sound system was recovered by Laurence Passera, an expert in the field and a collaborator with Doig on this project.
Want to tune in? Live listening sessions will take place on Sundays under the banner of Sound Service, where musicians, artists, and collectors will share their collections of music.
—V.C.

Karimah Ashadu: Tendered
Camden Art Centre, October 10, 2025–March 22, 2026
Karimah Ashadu, MUSCLE (still), 2025. Courtesy of the artist, Camden Art Centre, Fondazione In Between Art Film, Sadie Coles HQ and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago
Karimah Ashadu burst onto the international stage after her nine-minute video of modish male motorcyclists in Nigeria premiered to acclaim at the Venice Biennale last year. Titled Machine Boys, it earned her the prestigious Silver Lion for Promising Young Artist.
Ashadu, who was born in Nigeria and is now based in Hamburg, continues her probe into performative masculinity and patriarchy in West African culture with her show at the Camden Art Centre, “Tendered.” It features the newly created body of work, MUSCLE (2025), a moving-image installation and series of sculptures sensually depicting bodybuilders in Lagos’ slums.
“I was drawn to the dedication to getting and maintaining that muscle,” the artist told the New York Times, while wanting to expose the “softness” that existed below the surface.
Co-commissioned by the Fondazione In Between Art Film, the exhibition will travel to the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago next year.
—M.C.

Ghost Objects: Summoning Leighton’s Lost Collection
Leighton House Museum, October 11, 2025–March 1, 2026
Annemarieke Kloosterhof, Ghost Objects (2025) for Leighton House. Image: Jaron James.
The west London house of leading Victorian artist Frederic Leighton became a museum in 1926. It is beloved by those in the know for its ornate interiors, most famously the Arab Hall—replete with Islamic tiles, a golden dome, and a fountain—that the artist designed after several trips to the Middle East. The opulent rooms are also home to plenty of artworks, including a painting by the studio of Tintoretto and a trove of Leighton’s drawings.
This year, Leighton House is celebrating its 100th anniversary with a special exhibition, “Ghost Objects: Summoning Leighton’s Lost Collection,” by contemporary paper artist Annemarieke Kloosterhof. Her work recreates four legendary treasures that have been lost from the artist’s original collection, including a 15th-century carved and gilt Italian tabernacle shrine acquired by Leighton for his studio in 1886. Another object, a mysterious brass jardiniere, was very much a product of its time, appearing to blend influences from both Indian art and the Arts and Crafts movement. Kloosterhof’s paper art brings to light the efforts of the museum’s curators to search high and low for many more of these missing pieces, some of which have been successfully recovered and returned to the house.
—J.L-T.

We Sinful Women: The Library Project
The SOAS Library, SOAS University of London, September 18–December 7, 2025
Naiza Khan, New Clothes for The Emperor II (2009), Taimur Hassan Collection. Photography by Justin Piperger.
The beauty of London is its cultural diversity; and as such, among all the blockbuster institutional shows happening this month, the independently organized “We Sinful Women” at the SOAS Library is worth paying attention to.
Following the well-received exhibition “(Un)Layering the Future Past of South Asia: Young artists’ voices” at SOAS Gallery earlier this year, curators Salima Hashimi and Manmeet K. Walia return to the premises of the famed academic institution to stage this exhibition platforming voices of women artists from South Asia and the Middle East, regions that have been gaining momentum on the global art stage in recent years.
Drawing from the private collection of Pakistani collector Taimur Hassan, the show explores how women artists of various disciplines from the region, from Modernists to contemporary, have continuously  been redefining themselves individually against a backdrop of shared histories and resilience. Featured artists include Shilpa Gupta, Bani Abidi, and Arpita Singh.
—V.C.

Maxwell Alexandre: Sanctuary and the Shadow of its Walls
Delfina Foundation, October 10–November 23, 2025
Maxwell Alexandre, detail of Pátio do Clube do Flamengo na Gávea (Flamengo Club Courtyard in Gávea) (2025). Photo: Julia Thompson.
Maxwell Alexandre, a former pro in-line skater who hails from Rio de Janeiros’ Rocinha favela, has had a meteoric rise in the art world since 2020, buoyed by solo shows in quick succession at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, David Zwirner in London, and New York’s The Shed. Part of a new wave of Black Brazilian artists reshaping representation and race narratives through figurative painting, his large-scale portraits on kraft paper (pardo) are infused with street culture and nods to his Evangelical upbringing.
For his debut institutional show in the U.K., at the Delfina Foundation near Buckingham Palace, he shifts his focus from people to places. Newly commissioned paintings take as their inspiration the Clube de Regatas, an elite sports club in Rio and transforms the foundation’s basement gallery into an immersive space exploring themes of privilege, leisure, and sanctuary.
—M.C.

Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey
Whitechapel Gallery, October 8–March 1, 2026
Joy Gregory, Stockwell Siren performance from the series “CelebrityBlonde” (2003). Photo: © Joy Gregory.
After the success of Hamad Butt earlier this year, Whitechapel Gallery appears to be on a roll when it comes to bringing our attention to important British artists who have been overlooked. The spotlight is now on Joy Gregory, courtesy of the Freelands Award, a £110,000 ($148,000) prize that she and Whitechapel Gallery won in 2023 to stage an exhibition dedicated to a mid-career female artist. Those not yet acquainted with Gregory’s work will encounter her through no less than 250 works, including film, textile, performance, and, most predominantly, photography. She has explored this latter medium in many of its manifestations, from Victorian cyanotypes to digital.
Early self-portraits and private domestic scenes, both from the early 1990s, offer a highly personal take on Black womanhood. Later works, like Memory and Skin (1998) and Seeds of Empire (2021), are ambitious, research-led explorations of colonial history. A deep sensitivity and humanity is at the core of Gregory’s work, shining through in her newly commissioned film, the result of a two-decade collaboration with the San People of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa.
–J.L-T. More

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