Labor Day Weekend is behind us, which means the cavalcade of solo gallery shows in New York is about to begin. Across the city, galleries are launching some of their most ambitious programs of the year. Some institutions, like Gagosian, will shine a spotlight on their blue-chip stars like Jordan Wolfson. Others, like Chapter NY, will be celebrating the work of recent MFA-graduates on the rise, like CULTURED Young Artist list alum Alix Vernet. Across the shows on view, technology, and its role in American life, is a recurring theme, as is the architecture, both physical and psychological, of New York itself. Below, see our editors’ picks for the 15 most exciting gallery shows opening this month.
Detail shot of artwork by Alix Vernet. Image courtesy of Chapter NY.
“Landmarks” by Alix Vernet
Where: Chapter NY
When: Sept. 9 – Oct. 17
Why It’s Worth a Look: For her first solo exhibition with Chapter NY, CULTURED Young Artist list alum Alix Vernet pays tribute to an unlikely piece of urban infrastructure: the air conditioning unit. In “Landmarks,” the 29-year-old artist punctuates the white cube with twisted, reimagined aluminum condenser coils, a meditation on the relationship citygoers have with the artificial movement of air between indoor and outdoor spaces.
Know Before You Go: The sculptor created this body of work while finishing her MFA at Yale. She views “Landmarks” as an index to city life, with her coils a form of photograph or readymade, as she pairs them with segments of overheard conversations she collected from chance encounters around New York.
Where: Mariposa
When: Sept. 8 – Oct. 17
Why It’s Worth a Look: In a time when an impending surveillance state is evident in everything from Flock cameras to Meta glasses, Lewis Stein’s “Surveillance” exhibition feels more pertinent than ever. In one of his most prolific bodies of work, the late photographer surveyed the surveyors by capturing New York security cameras with a high speed camera of his own.
Know Before You Go: Originally shown at Postmasters Gallery in New York in 1985, Stein’s series investigated a growing system of control in American urban centers. He infused his work with humor, enlarging the images until the cameras appear as comical robots, removing them from their original context.
Melissa Joseph, 647 Evergreen Rd, 2026. Image courtesy of Charles Moffett Gallery.
Where: Charles Moffett
When: Sept. 9 – Oct. 17
Why It’s Worth a Look: In her first solo show at Charles Moffett since joining the gallery, Melissa Joseph explores the familial bonds, care, and resourcefulness that characterized her upbringing. A snapshot of a biracial woman growing up in the Midwest, the show’s title offers a holistic nod to suburban American culture and the fusion of the artist’s American, Indian, and Irish identities.
Know Before You Go: This show is one of the first in which Joseph has publicly explored art about her family after the death of her mother in 2024. She drew from old family photos and found objects, like stone-forged forks, to present a variety of small-scale sculptures alongside her expansive needle-felted works.
Where: Galerie Buchholz
When: Sept. 8 – Oct. 31
Why It’s Worth a Look: Jutta Koether’s conceptual paintings are a love letter to the city where she honed her craft in the early days of her career. The German-born, New York-based artist, musician, writer, and critic described her move to America in the 1990s as a form of “self-displacement” that propelled her forward towards the countless exhibitions, works in permanent collections, and written books she has created over the years.
Know Before You Go: The title “Songs of New York” has shown up multiple times in Koether’s body of work, from her column in the German magazine SPEX, which began in 1996, to a show at Pat Hearn Gallery in 1997. This time around, Koether brings a vibrant, feminine approach to documenting New York in large-format paintings of landmarks such as Madison Square Garden.
Artwork by Narcissister. Image courtesy of the artist and Margot Samel.
Where: Margot Samel
When: Sept. 9 – Oct. 10
Why It’s Worth a Look: In this exhibition, the Brooklyn artist has embedded her late uncle Albert’s paintings, which he sold on the Sheepshead Bay waterfront after immigrating from Morocco, into her latest series of kinetic sculptures. But, Narcissister has never been one for static gallery showings: Throughout the exhibition’s run, she will perform live within the space to bring to life the underlying tensions of familial and cultural displacement.
Know Before You Go: A lauded live performance artist, Narcisster has spent the majority of her career concealing her face with a mannequin-esque mask. Her anonymity is a key part of her work, usually sexually charged in nature.
“jpegs ny” by Thomas Ruff
Where: David Zwirner
When: Sept. 10 – Oct. 17
Why It’s Worth a Look: Coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Thomas Ruff presents 12 large-scale prints from his larger “jpegs” series, all to do with the attack on the Twin Towers. Using images from the Internet, the German artist and photographer—known for reimagining architecture, nudity, domestic interiors, and more—abstracts the attack through digital manipulation and enlargement until they are recognizable yet fragmented.
Know Before You Go: Ruff was present in New York during the attacks and captured pictures of the falling Twin Towers and the day’s aftermath. After returning to Germany, he found his camera wiped of his work, yet still wanted to grapple with the event through his work. This was the catalyst for sourcing images online for “jpegs ny,” which was also shown at this year’s Art Basel.
Thomas Hart Benton, Sugar Cane, 1945. Image courtesy of the artist and Schoelkopf Gallery.
Where: Schoelkopf Gallery
When: Sept. 9 – Oct. 16
Why It’s Worth a Look: Spanning over 50 years of the late Thomas Hart Benton’s career, Schoelkopf’s retrospective of the painter and printmaker’s work exhibits the quintessentially midcentury portrait of America he captured. His rural landscapes set the backdrop for his depictions of the changing physical and emotional labor of working Americans in the early- to mid-20th century.
Know Before You Go: A pioneer of the American Regionalism movement, Benton unabashedly chronicled how war, segregation, systemic racism, and politics affected Americans in small towns nationwide. This is the first major solo exhibition of the artist’s work in New York in over a decade.
Where: Galerie Lelong
When: Sept. 10 – Oct. 24
Why It’s Worth a Look: Originally envisioned for the Public Art Fund, Chilean artist and architect Alfredo Jaar’s iconic 1987 Times Square “This Is Not America” billboard was a public denouncement of the term “America” being used only to describe the United States. Almost 40 years later, Galerie Lelong’s “A Logo for America” examines the endurance of Jaar’s imagery and challenges the notion of what it means to be American amidst a crackdown on immigration.
Know Before You Go: Although the exhibition’s original iconography has remained a prevalent image in activism and politics, this exhibition will detail the work’s never-before-seen process, story-boards, and the drafts that went into creating it.
Rita Ackermann, Boy Let Dog Out, 2026. Image courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.
Where: Hauser & Wirth
When: Sept. 9 – Oct. 17
Why It’s Worth a Look: Rita Ackermann’s bold swaths of color and fine line figures have defined her work since she decamped to New York’s art scene from Budapest in the early ’90s. In “The Chemical Alphabet,” a collection of new paintings, the artist combines the abstraction with vocabulary, layering paints and silkscreen prints on top of letters from the Semitic alphabet.
Know Before You Go: In this exhibition, Ackermann uses her signature chalkboard technique—priming the canvas with chalkboard paint, then smearing a scene on top—to create abstract forms.
Where: Pace Gallery
When: Sept. 11 – Oct. 24
Why It’s Worth a Look: Lynda Benglis is no stranger to unconventional sculptural mediums and techniques. This showing unites works from throughout her career, from her early Sparkle Knot IV, 1972, made with wire mesh and glitter, to her 2016 series “Elephant Necklace” of glazed, monochrome ceramics. The prolific ceramic and paper work on view spans over five decades of Benglis’s career and includes a collection of rarely-seen glass sculptures.
Know Before You Go: Using a sand casting technique, Benglis, who began in the Postminimal movement, molded her small collection of colorful, organic glasswork by bending and tying knots with molten glass atop sand and glass fragments.
Lee Bul, Untitled (Willing to be Vulnerable—Velvet #29), 2026. Image courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Where: Hauser & Wirth
When: Sept. 10 – Oct. 24
Why It’s Worth a Look: Long before resource-draining data centers took over the U.S., artist Lee Bul documented the thin line between a technological utopia and dystopia. In her newest exhibition, the Korean multimedia and performance artist combines never-before-seen, large-scale sculptures with previous works to interrogate the modern drive to dominate nature through technological advancement.
Know Before You Go: Guest curated by language and literacy scholar Dr. Jiyoon Lee, “The Anatomy of the Setting Sun” is the mega-gallery’s first solo exhibition with the Korean artist, who’s been active since late ’80s.
Where: Jeffrey Deitch
When: Sept. 12 – Oct. 26
Why It’s Worth a Look: After establishing a career documenting the chasm between America’s political right and left, including an intricate portrait of the Jan. 6 insurrection, the late Celeste Dupuy-Spencer turned toward religious and mythological imagery in her later body of work. Her use of ancient imagery dug into the lasting impulse of human nature to embrace a higher power.
Know Before You Go: Originally presented in the gallery’s Los Angeles outpost this spring, Dupuy-Spencer’s “Burning in the Eyes of the Maker,” and book of the same name, debuted shortly after the painter’s unexpected death at the age of 46 in April. This exhibition covers the past four years of her paintings, establishing the hyperpolitical presence of Dupuy-Spencer’s paintings.
Maren Hassinger, Blanket of Branches, 1986. Image courtesy of the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery.
Where: Susan Inglett Gallery
When: Sept. 12 – Oct. 17
Why It’s Worth a Look: Through her collection and arrangement of twigs, classically-trained-dancer-turned-visual-artist Maren Hassinger brings the woodlands to the white walls of the gallery. In this solo exhibition, Hassinger pulls from her archival work and engages with fellow artists, like Meg Webster, who also blend organic and inorganic spaces.
Know Before You Go: “Blanket of Branches” runs concurrently with the 79-year-old artist’s comprehensive career retrospective, “Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing,” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Where: Jack Shainman
When: Sept. 18 – Nov. 6
Why It’s Worth a Look: This exhibition celebrates the enduring legacy of the late photojournalist and his documentation of Black life during the Civil Rights era. The exhibition’s title is in reference to the artist’s 1990 memoir of the same name, and examines not only the images he captured but the stories of resiliency behind his portraits.
Know Before You Go: Reflections on Parks and his works will be included alongside his portraits. Contributors include activist and former Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver, Muhammed Ali’s widow Lonnie Ali, actor Isabella Rossellini, director Ava DuVernay, and artist Hank Willis Thomas.
Where: 125 Newbury
When: Sept. 18 – Oct. 3
Why It’s Worth a Look: The 28-year-old, Brooklyn-based artist is somewhat of a wunderkind. Despite his work being featured in a Wes Anderson film at the age of 12, CULTURED Young Artist list alum Asher Liftin is no fleeting child-star. His new solo exhibition of meticulous pointillist renderings of urban photographs is an intricate deconstruction of the line between manual and mechanical creation.
Know Before You Go: The variety of colors in Liftin’s works are realized in the same style as an at-home computer printer. Using only the four main hues (cyan, yellow, magenta, and black), Liftin produces a pixelated image up-close, yet a fluid, technicolor painting from afar.
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