A couple of years ago, at an Amory Week dinner, an art magazine editor and a blue-chip gallery director separately confided—or bragged—to me that they skipped the fairs to see the Ed Ruscha retrospective at MoMA. The secret to enjoying September’s glut of events might be in balancing the buzzy openings with slower experiences—the stuff that made you love art in the first place. Over the past few months, the Critics’ Table has highlighted a number of New York shows that are still on view this September. Among them are EJ Hill’s silent kneeling performance at 52 Walker, Lisa Yuskavage’s drawing exhibition at the Morgan Library, the Stettheimer Dollhouse at the Museum of the City of New York, and MoMA’s presentation of Hilma af Klint’s nature notebooks. If you’re heading out of town, we suggest the excellent Stan Douglas retrospective at Bard. And time’s running out to see Cameron Rowland’s “Properties” at Dia Beacon.
This isn’t to say that we’re not diving into New York’s latest offerings. Our jaws are on the floor over the just-announced Cady Noland show at Gagosian. We’ve got the Gaza Biennial, Nancy Holt, Raúl de Nieves, Kahlil Robert Irving, and many more shows on our must-see list. We might even go to the fairs. And in the coming weeks, the Critics’ Table will publish features on Ambera Wellmann and Sophie Calle—two artists with major New York presentations this fall. In the meantime, catch up on what you may have missed below. —Johanna Fateman
CLOSING SOON
EJ Hill through September 13
52 Walker | 52 Walker
Christine Sun Kim through September 21
Whitney Museum | 99 Gansevoort Street
Hilma af Klint through September 27
Museum of Modern Art | 11 West 83rd Street
Cameron Rowland through October 20
Dia Beacon | 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, NY
UPPER EAST SIDE
Hilma af Klint
Museum of Modern Art | 11 West 83rd Street
Through September 27, 2025
The exhibition centers on af Klint’s “Nature Studies,” a portfolio of 46 works on paper, acquired by the museum in 2022. Completed from 1919 to 1920, when the Swedish artist was in her mid-50s, they feature precise renderings of the anatomies of flowers. Lest you wonder if this is the same af Klint, who is famed as one of the first practitioners of non-objective abstraction (however late she was to receive credit), look more closely: Each illustration includes a drawn diagram that looks like a miniature abstraction. Made more than a decade after her first radical paintings, the selections on view from the series are joined by more than 50 other pieces that help situate the portfolio within her life’s work… —John Vincler
Read more here.
“The Stettheimer Dollhouse in a New Light”
Museum of the City of New York | 1220 Fifth Avenue
Ongoing
Yes, I know, the Frick recently reopened. But another Upper East Side mansion with a fabulous art collection is back on public view, too, and this one boasts a tiny Duchamp. After two years off site undergoing extensive conservation, the Stettheimer Dollhouse—a transporting mini monument of the interwar avant-garde, as well as a wryly opulent representation of the domestic lives and social sphere of three legendary Manhattan salonnières (the sisters Carrie, Florine, and Ettie Stettheimer)—returned, having been cleaned, refreshed and repaired, to the Museum of the City of New York in November. It’s the centerpiece and subject of the new exhibition “The Stettheimer Dollhouse in a New Light,” curated by Lilly Tuttle… —Johanna Fateman
Read more here.
MIDTOWN
Lisa Yuskavage
Morgan Library | 225 Madison Avenue
Through January 4, 2026
It’s a perfect—maybe perfectly perverse—context for the figurative painter, famous and infamous for her virtuosic rendering of a queasily beautiful, self-consciously vulgar, and often funny world of desire and desolation. With absinthe or Kool-Aid skies, cadmium sunlight, pastel poly-satin, neon in deep shadow, and girls, girls, girls, Yuskavage tells the story of the nude in Western art like a dream excavation of haunted smut and the interior lives of model-muses—what better foil to her art than the holdings of Pierpont Morgan? (And what better way to cement her place in this centuries-long conversation?)… —Johanna Fateman
Read more here.
TRIBECA
EJ Hill
52 Walker | 52 Walker Street
Through September 13, 2025
I remove my straw hat when entering the gallery to see EJ Hill’s newest endurance project, his first in seven years, for which he kneels every day—all day—during the run of his show “Low-Slung Promises on the Tongues of the Devout” at 52 Walker. The mise en scène works immediately: a red velvet curtain, the red leather kneelers, silence. Twelve years of Catholic school come back like muscle memory, the red marks on my knees—white when I press my fingers into the flesh. I wanted to be a nun, marry God, bride at nine… —Kate Zambreno
Read more here.
MEATPACKING DISTRICT
Christine Sun Kim
Whitney Museum | 99 Gansevoort Street
On view through September 25, 2025
Christine Sun Kim’s mid-career retrospective “All Day All Night” at the Whitney isn’t one of those exhibitions that reactionaries can use to claim identity’s role as some dour bogeyman in the art world. Thanks to Kim’s witty, piercing, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny pieces across video, ceramics, and drawing (which span the early 2010s to the present), such a reductionist reading would be impossible. For Kim, a native user of American Sign Language, Deaf identity is an open door, and musical notation is a universalizing motif. The works, installed throughout the museum and on the entire eighth floor, include black, blue, and red charcoal-and-pastel drawings—ranging in scale from roughly poster-size to A6 paper—that are like better, smarter David Shrigleys, or akin to Cy Twombly’s work in their use of rhythmic mark-making. How To Measure Quietness, 2014, quantifies, in descending order, quiet things—“the silent treatment” is a ppppppp cold ultra-pianissimo. Ouch. A shrug? Only pp… —A.V. Marraccini
Read more here.
BROOKLYN
Torkwase Dyson
Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 1, Bridge View Lawn
Through March 8, 2026
Like much of Dyson’s work, Akua, 2025, adheres to a minimal and meticulously conceived geometric configuration: The powder-coated steel-and-aluminum structure is elliptical, its rectangular planks are arranged at an oblique angle, and the entrances at both ends are triangular. Dyson’s attention to shape recruits the formal schemas of abstraction to forge a compositional language of black survival within a spatial, architectural, and geographic order that works against this aim. The artist brings us to this knife edge between loss and life, submerging us in water’s sound, and then summoning us up to breathe through Akua’s openings… —Zoë Hopkins
Read more here.
HUDSON VALLEY
Stan Douglas
Hessel Museum of Art | 33 Garden Road, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Through November 30, 2025
For more than 30 years, the Vancouver-based artist has mined primary documents, archival photographs, and eyewitness accounts to create meticulously staged historical scenes and imagined scenarios, often indexed to the coordinates of a specific time and place–the 18th-century coastlines of Nootka Island, British Columbia; pre- and post-Cold War Germany as witnessed by a young Black protagonist; or New York in the throes of a fictional 2018 blackout. Spanning still and moving-image work from the 1990s to 2025, and organized by Lauren Cornell, this precise and taut retrospective assembles several bodies of work that collectively posit history as a haunted and unfinished enterprise… —Gee Wesley
Read more here.
Cameron Rowland
Dia Beacon | 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, NY
Through October 25, 2025
Rowland, who is in their 30s, has been exhibiting for only a decade or so, but they have, since the outset of their career, gained attention for their exacting conceptualism, its balance of cryptic gestures and distilled exposition, as well as for the subject matter of their art: racial capitalism. In using contractual relations to unveil institutional histories and complicities—and perhaps especially in making their work unavailable to purchase (the artist negotiates rental and loan arrangements)—Rowland sails against the headwinds. They are something of an anomaly in this era of frictionless transactions, in an art system that rewards thinking small. With “Properties,” they further develop the most ambitious element of their largely dematerialized practice. They engage with notions of monumentality and permanence, advancing an expansive vision of reparations—and challenging the very category of real estate—through Land art… —Johanna Fateman
Read more here.
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