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preview

Must-see exhibitions in New York this autumn

Exhibitions honouring a Native American Modernist, a new generation of photographers and others are on the itinerary

Torey Akers and Benjamin Sutton
2 September 2025
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Transfixing: Christian Marclay’s latest cinematic supercut, Doors (2022), is opening eyes and minds in the Brooklyn Museum’s new Moving Image Gallery

© Christian Marclay, photo by Paula Abreu Pita

Transfixing: Christian Marclay’s latest cinematic supercut, Doors (2022), is opening eyes and minds in the Brooklyn Museum’s new Moving Image Gallery

© Christian Marclay, photo by Paula Abreu Pita

Christian Marclay: Doors

Brooklyn Museum, until 12 April 2026

Tucked away in the darkness of the Brooklyn Museum’s new Moving Image Gallery lies a thrilling new addition to the institution’s repertoire. Doors (2022), a recent cinematic collage by conceptual artist and film-maker Christian Marclay, was co-purchased by the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC.

Podcasts

Christian Marclay on the physical demands of making The Clock

Ben Luke

Marclay, a Swiss and Californian pioneer of time-based media, turned the art world on its axis with The Clock (2010), a 24-hour filmic opus that debuted at New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery before embarking on a global tour. Dubbed “an addictive masterpiece” by The New Yorker, The Clock earned Marclay a reputation as a singular Pop Art synthesist; the following year, the film earned him the coveted Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale.

Doors debuted in London in 2023 and builds on the visual language of The Clock with an eye on thresholds. It features hundreds of spliced moments from films found and foraged in which characters enter and exit interstitial space. Using expert editing to explore the endless permutations of discovery, Doors ruminates on the connectivity of sight and sound, leading viewers through a rhapsodic cycle of bodies, eras, dialects and experiences. Relatively concise compared to its predecessor at just 54 minutes in length, Doors includes several recurring clips, lending the work a cyclical, musical element. T.A.

Reverend Joyce McDonald, The Family That Pray, 2001 Courtesy the artist. Photo by Ryan Page

Ministry: Reverend Joyce McDonald

Bronx Museum, 5 September-11 January 2026

Reverend Joyce McDonald does not look like all she has been through. As she effervesces with charm and energy, it is difficult to envision the hardships she has endured to arrive at her first museum survey. McDonald discovered ceramics in the wake of her HIV diagnosis in 1995, deep in the throes of drug use and pursuing sex work to survive. In the late 1990s she began an art therapy programme through the Jewish Board of Family Services and was soon connected to Visual Aids, the New York-based organisation that supports HIV-positive artists and artistic production. “An art therapist gave me a bunch of clay, and said, ‘Look at this,’” McDonald says. “I went into a zone, and I’ve been in that zone ever since.” T.A.

George Morrison’s Untitled (Blue Painting) (1958), currently on view in the Met’s exhibition spotlighting the overlooked Abstract Expressionist artist from Minnesota

Smithsonian American Art Museum, purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment



The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York

Metropolitan Museum of Art, until 31 May 2026

Exhibitions

Landmark George Morrison show foregrounds Abstract Expressionism’s debt to Native art

Petala Ironcloud

An essential if historically underrecognised figure in the American Abstract Expressionist movement, George Morrison, a member of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, arrived in New York from Minnesota in 1943 and, over the following 27 years, became deeply embedded in the city’s avant-garde art scene. This exhibition, The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York, was curated by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s associate curator of Native American art in the American Wing, Patricia Marroquin Norby. It brings together 35 of Morrison’s paintings and drawings, including many from the Minnesota Museum of American Art, as well as two works in the Met’s permanent collection, plus a range of archival materials related to his time at the heart of the AbEx movement in the 1940s and 50s.

“Morrison strongly impacted the development of the American Abstract Expressionist movement as well as the work of his professional colleagues—artists who respected him as a leader and a voice for their generation,” Norby says. “This exhibition offers an important opportunity to engage deeply with Morrison’s evolving practice, supported by rarely seen archival materials that reveal the depth and complexity of his artistic journey.” B.S.

Johannesburg-based artist Sabelo Mlangeni’s Faith and Sakhi Moruping, Thembisa Township (2004), on view in MoMA’s latest New Photography show

© 2025 Sabelo Mlangeni

New Photography 2025

Museum of Modern Art, 14 September-17 January 2026

The Museum of Modern Art is celebrating the 40th anniversary of its closely watched New Photography exhibition series this year. New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging features 12 international artists and collectives from four cities (Mexico City, Johannesburg, Kathmandu and New Orleans) who are pushing the boundaries of the medium in the 21st century. Running the gamut from emerging to established artists, those featured are important additions to the roster of more than 150 photographers who have been spotlighted in the New Photography series since its launch in 1985. Whether through the vulnerable portraiture of Gabrielle Goliath, the mournful documentary images of L. Kasimu Harris or the memorial palimpsests of Sheelasha Rajbhandari, this edition of New Photography locates the human weight of personal narrative, pushing against colonialist notions of recorded history. T.A.

Raúl de Nieves will fill Pioneer Works’ windows with ornate, faux stained-glass panels

Courtesy the artist, photo by Dan Brandica


Raúl de Nieves: In Light of Innocence

Pioneer Works, 13 September-14 December

Public art

US artist transforms former Confederate monument into heartfelt symbol

Benjamin Sutton

For his first institutional exhibition in New York, Raúl de Nieves, a Mexico-born, Brooklyn-based artist, is continuing and supersizing his practice of re-imagining Catholic symbols and imagery from Mexican folklore. Here, he is transforming Pioneer Works’ main hall by filling its 50 windows with faux stained-glass panels that meld those iconographies with the tarot, creating a dazzling cathedral-like environment. The exhibition’s centrepiece, a large lightbox mural, will feature an array of portraits and arches framing the figures of a horse and a skeleton—symbols of change and strength in the tarot. B.S.

Lisa Yuskavage’s Hippies (2013) is featured in the artist’s first-ever museum exhibition of drawings, at the Morgan

© Lisa Yuskavage, courtesy the artist and David Zwirner


Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings

The Morgan Library& Museum, until 4 January 2026

Lisa Yuskavage may be best known for her colour-drenched paintings that grapple with feminist discourse, desire and art history, but her works on paper take centre stage in this exhibition at the Morgan. The first-ever museum presentation of Yuskavage’s drawings to date, it spans sketches from the early 1990s to pastel studies finished earlier this year. The show includes investigations in watercolour, monotype, acrylic, ink and gouache, tracing her creative development through depictions of imagined figures, still lifes, landscapes and portraits. It was organised by Claire Gilman, the curator and department head for Modern and contemporary drawings at the Morgan. Ensconced in the institution’s Thaw Gallery, the show asks big questions about the power dynamics of viewership, the nature of modelling and the blurry line between fiction and reality. T.A.

ExhibitionsThe Armory Show 2025Christian MarclayPioneer WorksBronx MuseumBrooklyn MuseumThe Morgan Library & MuseumMuseum of Modern Art New YorkMetropolitan Museum of Art
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