90 Minutes on the Upper East Side: Johanna Fateman’s Fall Art Guide For the Neighborhood

Jeffrey Gibson
Metropolitan Museum of Art | 1000 Fifth Avenue
Through June 9, 2026

Maybe this little walking tour took me closer to two hours to complete? But I saw a few extra shows (so you don’t have to) and I was waylaid (as I am, somehow, almost every year) by the German-American parade. Temporarily blocked from crossing Fifth Avenue, I joined the tourists on the steps outside the Met in their desultory half-observation of the sparse procession—marching bands with feathered caps and floats for Suffolk County sausage restaurants—and was very happy to realize Jeffrey Gibson’s commission for the museum’s façade was just behind us. I had forgotten that the New York-based Mississippi Choctaw artist’s work is now on view: Four anthropomorphized animal figures native to the Hudson Valley—a hawk, a squirrel, a coyote, and a deer—adorned with beadwork and textiles appear as monumentally scaled bronzes in the building’s niches.

More Niki de Saint Phalle than Disney in its textural interest and solemn presence; more related to the objects in the Met’s Ancient American Art Wing than the bronze-cast statuary in its collection, The Animal That Therefore I Am, as Gibson’s four sculptures are collectively called, is a family-friendly Indigenous foil to the museum’s neoclassical architecture (the New York-based artist is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, and of Cherokee descent). Students of Derrida will get the more pointed, R-rated reference of the title to the French Algerian deconstructionist’s anti-hierarchical disquisition on the animal gaze, his inspired discussion of the strange embarrassment that, as he wrote, “comes of finding oneself naked, one’s sex exposed, stark naked before a cat that looks at you without moving, just to see.”

Alix Cléo Roubaud
Galerie Buchholz | 17 E 82nd St
Through October 25

Derrida’s cat is perhaps an apt setup for the self-baring stare of writer-photographer Alix Cléo Roubaud and the moody images she produced in the bathroom darkroom of her Paris apartment. The superlative show “Correction of perspective in my bedroom” at Galerie Buchholz, just half a block from the Met, is the artist’s first solo presentation outside of France, featuring a group of intimately scaled black-and-white works that span 1979 to 1983 (the Canadian artist, who was born in Mexico, died that year at the age of 31). To make them, she layered apparitional interiors and figures—often her own—in shadowy multiple-exposure scenes, or she isolated image fragments in etheric white space. I was drawn to the almost empty composition á Jean, for which only a small triangle centered at the paper’s top margin was exposed. Through the faint three-point portal, we see the post-French New Wave filmmaker Jean Eustache in bed, nude, his back turned. As though commanded by superstition, Roubaud destroyed her negatives after she’d wrung her vision from them. Each print is unique.

The artist’s milieu makes for a fascinating backstory. So do the fateful events leading to curator Hélène Giannecchini’s deep involvement with her archive. She recounts them in the confessional exhibition text “Diary of a Haunting,” which takes the form of a short correspondence with the artist Moyra Davey. (In 2009, at a café, Giannecchini was handed two shopping bags full of writing and photos by Alix Cléo’s widower, the poet Jacques Roubaud, and the haunting began.)

Nancy Holt
Sprüth Magers | 22 East 80th Street
Through October 25

Two short blocks away, another historical exhibition, “Echoes & Evolutions: Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels” at Sprüth Magers, is differently absorbing—an elegant exposition of Holt’s legendary contribution to the Land art canon with her 1975 Sun Tunnels. Preparatory works (diagrammatic drawings, studies, and a tabletop model of the four tipped cylinders) show the painstaking planning that went into the creation of her concrete Stonehenge, while color photo grids (artworks in their own right, as well as documentation of a sort) show the tubes in their finished state. In one magnetic, large-scale print, they are forbidding vortex-like apertures that frame the sun while light enters through small holes to chart celestial constellations on their dark interior surfaces.

It’s Holt’s 16mm film from 1978 playing in the back gallery, though, that best captures the majestic scale of the tunnels—as well as their smallness against the sweeping drama of Utah’s Great Basin Desert. And, here, the cinematic treatment of both sun-drenched landscape and intrepid earthwork construction underscores American Land art’s engagement with the mythos of the Wild West, even as its pioneers dreamed of megaliths.

Two blocks south, on Madison Avenue, at White Cube, the conceptual artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden (whose past work has spanned every medium) revisits painting’s final boss, the black monochrome (Malevich’s zero-point, Reinhardt’s last word), plumbing its depths anew in search of a corporeal mode of abstraction. Or perhaps the austere wall-based works in “PURE GAZE” merely sideswipe that history on their way somewhere else. Made from black jute rope, leather, and shoe polish, the precise assemblages are clearly (also) nested in an alternate set of references.

The visual language, technique, and material of kinbaku-bi, a Japanese style of rope bondage, form the geometric structures of the stark compositions. You could say that the works’ animal-skin substrates are surrogates for the human body, that we are looking at a kind of close-cropped, radically enlarged, or otherwise decontextualized image of submission. But, in the strongest works here (all but one are from her 2025 series “NEVER LET ME GO”), it feels much more like the formal logic of the B.D.S.M. practice has been lifted from the realm of the interpersonal to illuminate the erotics of the art object itself.

P. Staff
David Zwirner | 34 East 69th Street
Through October 25

P. Staff’s latex-draped (and bound) works are a bit farther away, at David Zwirner. While thematically connected to the last stop in some sense, they represent—in contrast to McClodden’s profound sense of order—the corporeal as utter chaos. The sculptures in the London and Los Angeles-based artist’s exhibition “Possessive” are scattered throughout the rooms of the townhouse gallery, their fetish-y fabric becoming an untidy wrapping material for improvised scaffoldings that roughly mimic the surrounding architectural elements (built-in bookcases, a fireplace). Staff’s industrial materials, rather than straightforwardly analogizing skin and bones, thus also become the stuff of fixtures and containers—of inanimate as well as living things.

Meanwhile, the luridly lit building itself (an acid glow is visible from the street) becomes a body, or a mammoth exoskeleton for a spectral one: In a trio of contiguous projections, synced video of a single performer (a hot guy) spans three floors. The giant does little more than breathe as a green laser beam prods or penetrates his torso (his guts) in the dark, but that’s enough. Staff’s total takeover of the exhibition space—every crevice flooded with blue or yellow light, every detail of the site addressed in some twisted way—makes for an impressive New York solo debut, as well as an ideal grand finale and last stop for us. What better way to end a tour of the UES than in a sex club slash bad dream slash haunted house?