Wednesday, September 17: Coco Fusco | Tomorrow I Will Become an Island at el Museo

The first U.S. survey of the influential Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco covers more than three decades of her groundbreaking career. The exhibition explores central concerns that Fusco has addressed across her practice, including immigration, military power and surveillance, post-revolutionary Cuban history, and the lasting legacies of colonialism.

Fusco’s interdisciplinary practice spans video, performance, installation, photography, and writing. Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island traces her extensive practice through a selection of more than twenty of her works, created since the 1990s and extending to a new photographic series on view for the first time in New York. 

Organized thematically, the exhibition offers an expansive view of her multidisciplinary approach through key bodies of work, including a room dedicated to Fusco’s projects created in counterpoint to the 500th anniversary of the so-called “discovery” of the Americas. This includes a reproduction of her iconic Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992/2025), originally performed in collaboration with Guillermo Gomez-Pena. Also on view is a focused selection of video, featuring several works that reflect on the history of artists’ challenges to the Cuban government—a central subject in Fusco’s oeuvre. Together, this selection illuminates the breadth and depth of Fusco’s artistic vision—one that remains acutely relevant in today’s national political and cultural climate. 

El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue at 104th Street, New York, NY Info

Wednesday September 17-Sunday September 21: Affordable Art Fair at Starret Lehigh

When you visit Affordable Art Fair New York Fall you’ll find an inspiring and friendly atmosphere where you can browse thousands of original contemporary paintings, sculptures, photographs and prints showcased by a myriad of local, national and international exhibitors. With contemporary artwork by over 400 established and emerging artists, and price points ranging from $100 to $12,000 – there is something to suit every taste and wallet.

601 West 26^th Street, FL4, New York, NY Info

Thursday, September 18, 1:30-3:30pm: Liz Curtin | Reception and Talk at Covello Center

Liz Curtin is a multimedia artist drawn to found objects, rust, and the odd vintage item. She explores the world through her love of materials and techniques working mostly on paper or canvas and sometimes merging them with textiles and other media. 

Primarily a Mixed Media/Collage Artist, for the past 40 plus years she combines many elements, both found and repurposed from her stash, often evoking the place where she’s lived for more than 40 years: A river, a park, the beauty of the four seasons, vintage brownstone buildings and nature’s glory were inspiration. In her Instagram, Liz says, if you can’t get to the opening, DM @lizcurtinartist

Covello Older Adult Center, 312 East 109^th Street, FL3, New York, NY Info

Continuing: Body Vessel Clay at Ford Foundation 

Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art brings together three generations of groundbreaking Black women artists whose work with clay explores the medium’s multilayered cultural and political significance. Featuring over fifty works across ceramics, film, photography, and archives, the exhibition draws connections between the legacy of renowned Nigerian potter Ladi Dosei Kwali (1925-1984) and contemporary artistic practice. Through these lines of influence and innovation, the show traces how Black women artists have transformed the field of ceramics over the past seventy years—disrupting conventions, challenging hierarchies, and expanding the possibilities of clay as a medium.

The artists in Body Vessel Clay share a deep fascination with testing the medium’s properties to create new, personal, political, collective, and visionary aesthetics across geographies and temporalities. By tracing lines of continuity between past and present, Body Vessel Clay repositions clay not as peripheral but as central to global art histories and as a vessel for memory, defiance, and transformation. This presentation will immerse visitors in a contemplative space for reflecting on the layered histories of ceramics and the radical potentials of form, gesture, and the material memory of clay.

Ford Foundation Gallery, 320 E 43rd St, New York, NY Info

Continuing: Sana Musasama | Raised Earth at Firestone

This solo  exhibition presents Sana Musasama’s formative House series: vertically stacked ceramic sculptures, like abstracted small-scale temples, exploring multicultural connections to her home and community. The work is inspired by the artist’s time living in adobe houses in West Africa in the mid-1970s, her recurrent travel to Cambodia, and time spent in the American West. Above: Works by Musasame seen last year in Syracuse, NY

The slab-formed ceramics are etched with intricate sgraffito marks suggesting body adornment, weavings, flora, and fauna. Elements extend from the planes: rings suggesting jewelry and grids like open baskets or seed pods. In her House series, Musasama uses both earthenware and stoneware and accomplishes her vivid colors through various ceramic glazes, often finishing her works with salt or soda firing to create exquisite surfaces that contrast with the red-brown clay she prefers. Musasama first began her House series in the late 1970s; over the past two years, the artist has worked across the globe to create about twenty significant new House sculptures. This will be the first time work from the two periods are joined into a major survey exhibition.

Eric Firestone Gallery, 40 Great Jones Street, New York, NY Info

Continuing through September 24: Salt Water Remembers at Textile Art Center

This exhibition featuring works by TAC artists in residence unfolds as a meditation on memory, inheritance, and the unseen systems that shape and hold us: Stitched constellations, sculpted roots, and ephemeral installations that illuminate the cycles of decay/renewal, displacement/belonging, concealment/presence. The artists: Quinci Baker, Fay Ku, Josué Morales Urbina, Leo Pontius, Malaika Temba, Mark Fleuridor, Faviola Lopez-Romani, Rose Malenfant.

“Our work,” they say, “is shaped by what the world casts off: fruit skins, dyed scraps, artifacts of daily use. These materials trace lineage, loss, and possibility.  From corn husks to mycelial threads, each piece resists erasure. What has been overlooked is honored. What has been detached is re-stitched into form. We gather our work into a living vessel, a constellation of materials and gestures that trace what remains. Salt Water Remembers invites us to see through obscurity, to feel in the dark, to move through the silence where history slips away.”

Textile Arts Center, 505 Carroll Street, Brooklyn NY Info