Thursday, September 11–Sunday, September 14 | New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1

This year’s fair makes its long-awaited return to MoMA PS1, with over 250 local and international artists’ book publishers, alongside a full weekend of programs and performances. Hyperallergic says, “This venue partnership exemplifies a shared commitment to creating spaces where audiences can engage with new ideas and perspectives, while reaffirming Printed Matter’s core mission dedicated to the dissemination, understanding, and appreciation of artists’ books. 

"NYABF 2025 will feature a wide range of interdisciplinary artistic practices, including self-publishing artists, collectives, small presses, institutions, rare and out-of-print book dealers, and art book distributors. With each fair, Printed Matter continues to foreground programs that address the present moment, while also working to increase awareness around artists’ books by providing various access points for visitors to engage with printed material in enriching and discursive ways."

2-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens Info

Friday September 12: Robert Rauschenberg’s New York | Pictures from the Real World at MCNY

In 2025, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation will commemorate Robert Robert Rauschenberg’s artistic practice revolved around integrating “the real world” into his art. Widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of postwar New York, Rauschenberg’s irreverent approach to art-making pushed the envelope for an entire generation, reshaping the art world in New York and around the world. Gathering materials and inspiration from his surroundings, he often brought found objects and images sourced or reproduced from magazines and newspapers into his paintings and sculptures. But Rauschenberg was not merely a user of found imagery; he was also a photographer with a bold creative vision— an essential aspect of his artistic practice that is the focus of the exhibition.  Above: Photograph by Burton Berinsky / The Life Images Collection / Getty

Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World, an exhibition that explores Rauschenberg’s complex relationship with photography, particularly in the context of New York City will feature three sections: “Early Photographs,” “In + Out City Limits / New York,” and “Photography in Painting.” An interactive collage component invites visitors to engage with Rauschenberg’s innovative approach to image making. 

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation commemorates the artist’s 100th birthday with an international celebration of Rauschenberg’s expansive creativity, spirit of curiosity, and commitment to change.Continuing through 2026, Centennial activities will revisit Rauschenberg through the eyes of our time, foregrounding his prescience and enduring influence on generations of artists and advocates for social progress. 

Throughout the Centennial year and beyond, exhibitions and performances around the world will present tributes to Robert Rauschenberg. By opening up the artist’s legacy to present-day interpretation, the Centennial embraces different understandings, forges cross-disciplinary connections, and creates opportunities for critical exchange.

MCNY is hosting a series of public events, starting next week. Info

Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue at 103^rd Street, New York, NY Info

Sunday, September 14: Man Ray | When Objects Dream at The Met

In the winter of 1921, while working late in his Paris darkroom, Man Ray inadvertently produced a photogram—essentially, a camera-less photographic image—by placing some of his glass equipment on top of an unexposed sheet of photographic paper.

As he wrote in his 1963 autobiography, “Before my eyes an image began to form, not quite a simple silhouette of the objects as in a straight photograph, but distorted and refracted ... In the morning I examined the results, pinning a couple of the Rayographs—as I decided to call them—on the wall. They looked startlingly new and mysterious.” Above: S. Marine, ca 1925; below left: Le Violin d’Ingres, 1925; images courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

This supposed accident, now the stuff of legend, has obscured the fact that rayographs might be seen as the culmination of Man Ray’s work up to 1921 as well as the frame through which he would redefine his work thereafter. Featuring 160 rayographs, paintings, objects, prints, drawings, films, and photographs, When Objects Dream illuminates their connections with Man Ray’s work in other media, including assemblage, painting, photography, and film. In approaching the rayograph in this expansive way, the exhibition also offers a reappraisal of the most productive and creatively significant period of his long career, beginning in New York around 1915 with his ambitious paintings and concluding in Paris in 1929 with his fine-tuning of the solarization process with Lee Miller. A critical factor across the exhibition is the central role of objects for Man Ray’s career, both in the creation of many of the rayographs and in his work more generally. The Met is hosting a series of public events through the run of the show, ending February 1, 2026. Info

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Gallery 199, New York, NY Info

Sunday, September 14, Last Chance: The Reach of Faith Ringgold | Collection in Focus at The Guggenheim

Explore Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach (1988), one of the most important works by Faith Ringgold, a renowned artist, writer, and activist. This monumental quilt, the first in a series of five, tells the story of a young girl who dreams of flying from her Harlem rooftop to celebrate her own freedom and self-possession.

This exhibition dives into Ringgold’s artistic influences and the lasting impact she has had on later generations of artists. Alongside Tar Beach, visitors will see works from the Guggenheim New York collection by European modernists such as Marc Chagalland Pablo Picasso, who inspired Ringgold, and contemporary American artists such as Tschabalala Self and Sanford Biggers, whose work reflects her legacy.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue at 88^th Street, New York, NY Info

Cotinuing June Leaf | Shooting From The Heart at Grey

Across a career that spanned some 75 years, June Leaf (1929–2024) produced a remarkable body of work that revels in the human experience in all its banality and sublimity. Armed with indefatigable energy, an inventive mind, and a wry, closely observing eye, Leaf nimbly navigated the planes of the real and the imagined, holding a mirror up to essential truths while reminding us of our shared humanity.

Perpetually rearranging both complete and in-progress works in microcosmic configurations, Leaf created a recurring cast of characters, compositions, and stories that synthesized outside influences with symbols drawn from her own self-mythology. Her figures wobble, jostle, climb, and spin as they engage in a timeless struggle for agency within metaphysical chambers—some evocative of Leaf’s studios, and others of seedy bars, dollhouses, and theater stages.

This exhibition locates Leaf in the artistic legacies of the Chicago and New York milieus to which she contributed. Playful and dark, ecstatic and esoteric, the mythic aspects of Leaf’s artistic vision defy categorization into any particular art movement, though her works display shared preoccupations with her contemporaries—including a passion for drama and urban streets, an expansive idea of the feminine, and a fascination with kinetic movement. 

Through December 13 at Grey Art Museum, 18 Cooper Square, New York, NY Info

Continuing: David Alekhuogie | highliftime at Yancey Richarson

This exhibition brings together work from Alekhuogle’s series A Reprise— including layered, wall-mounted works that combine photographs, collage and sculpture-demonstrating the artist’s exploration of how narrative and authorship are embedded in Western presentations of African art while reflecting on how Black aesthetics are circulated, accessed, valued and interpreted today. Reflecting his understanding of the relationship between modernity and colonialism, in western institutions and subsequent documentation by photographers such as Walker Evans. 

In highlifetime, Alekhuogie investigates these images of African sculpture by remixing them into vibrant and multilayered collages which attempt to reanimate historical objects after their original capture. To make these works, Alekhuogie transposes facsimiles of masterpieces of African art onto paper structures of his own making, before then rephotographing these image-sculptures, regularly using East and West African textiles as backdrops to create dynamic juxtapositions of space and form. Through his own transmutation of these images, Alekhuogie brings what he calls the “hand-me-down nature of Pan Africanism” to the foreground and questions through whose eyes and whose agency African Americans form their cultural narrative.

Through October 18 at Yancey Richardson, 525 West 22^nd Street, New York, NY Info