As winter prepares to sweep through New York, stealing the leaves off trees and chilling the air, let these upcoming shows by living legends brighten the dreary days ahead. Many of these major artists are returning to New York after years away. From Jason Moran’s teetering pianos to Doris Salcedo’s human hair structures, their shows offer plenty to look forward to as our clocks fall back.
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“STACKS” by Jason Moran
Where: Luhring Augustine
When: Nov. 6–Dec. 19
Why It’s Worth a Look: Jason Moran’s latest exhibition sits at the intersection of jazz, improvisation, and visual art, with a centerpiece sculpture that sees two parlor pianos precariously stacked on top of each other. Elsewhere, a piano keyboard coated in powdered pigment and thin Japanese gampi paper, bearing Moran’s fingerprints, preserves a visual record of the music long after the last notes have faded.
Know Before You Go: Moran’s musical accolades speak for themselves: He was the artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy Center from 2011 to 2025 and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010 for his work as a jazz pianist and composer. His art-world resume is just as impressive. He is a curator at the Park Avenue Armory and has collaborated with a number of contemporary greats, including Adrian Piper, Joan Jonas, and Glenn Ligon.
“Zeng Fanzhi”
Where: Hauser & Wirth
When: Nov. 5–Jan. 16, 2027
Why It’s Worth a Look: This exhibition marks the Beijing-based painter’s first New York show in over a decade, featuring new works across sculpture and painting. Zeng Fanzhi’s work is defined first by the years the artist has spent researching color theory and paint-layering techniques pioneered by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, deployed in his signature landscapes, at once ethereal and unfamiliar, prehistoric and futuristic.
Know Before You Go: The process behind these works is just as studious: working wet on wet with multiple brushes at once allows Fanzhi to explore the full range of possibilities in vibrant color, and a recent foray into classical Chinese painting philosophy has also pushed his work further into abstraction.
“Yoshitomo Nara”
Where: David Zwirner
When: Nov. 5–Dec. 12
Why It’s Worth a Look: Yoshitomo Nara returns to New York for his first major solo show in nearly a decade, bringing together essential works from the ’80s in his signature style of bauble-headed, impish entities, as well as new paintings that see the artist employing a fresh method blending colored pencil with washes of acylic. It will also feature 13 bronze busts, blown up from small prototypes, that recall Olmec heads.
Know Before You Go: In addition to a steady drip of pop-cultural collaborations, including with Stella McCartney and Japanese rock star Yoshiki, Nara has been the subject of several retrospectives over the last few years, most recently in a non-chronological show at the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2024. David Zwirner began representing Nara in November 2025; this will be his first solo with the mega-gallery.
“Illumination” by Ai Weiwei
Where: Vito Schnabel
When: Through Jan. 23, 2027
Why It’s Worth a Look: The Beijing-born artist, filmmaker, collector, and activist returns this fall to the gallery that showed his Lego-brick series “Child’s Play” in 2024–25. The exhibition takes its title from Illumination, 2019, in which Ai Weiwei transformed a photo he took on his cell phone into minuscule, pointillist toy bricks.
Know Before You Go: The artist has spent his career resisting censorship, culminating in a book on the very subject, On Censorship, in 2026. And for good reason: The photo behind Illumination was taken in 2009 in Chengdu, where Weiwei had traveled to attend the trial of a civil rights activist. He captured the image moments after local police burst into his hotel room in the middle of the night and struck him on the head, causing an injury that required emergency surgery in Germany. Two years later, he was secretly detained by Chinese authorities for his work.
“Sherrie Levine”
Where: Galerie Buchholz
When: Nov. 11–Jan. 16, 2027
Why It’s Worth a Look: The earliest work in Buchholz’s second solo show with Sherrie Levine is “After Andreas Feininger,” a 1979 series of photographic collages made from images by other photographers. But the exhibition spans a range of mediums: Bronze casts of a horse skull and 19th-century Asian rice-harvesting boots, both originally bought at antique stores, demonstrate her fascination with found objects. Also on view is Plain Mirror 1–12, the latest in a series of works she has been making since 2004 that do or, interestingly, do not reflect the viewer back at themselves.
Know Before You Go: Levine is known for appropriating imagery and refashioning it into something entirely new. In the early ’80s, she was heavily influenced by the rise of Post-Structuralist criticism, as well as by historical reassessments of Surrealism and the work of Marcel Duchamp.
“Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue” by James Turrell
Where: Almine Rech
When: Nov. 12–Jan. 30, 2027
Why It’s Worth a Look: Light in all forms—modulating, flashing, or condensed in blocks—exists at the heart of James Turrell’s art. The upcoming exhibition, his 13th with Almine Rech, marks a 30-year relationship between the gallery and the artist. It will include over 15 works, involving a new “Shallow Space” environment, as well as new works in his “Glassworks” and “Cross Corner” series.
Know Before You Go: Born to a Quaker family, Turrell credits his grandmother’s urging that he “go inside and greet the light” as the beginning of his fixation on the medium, which later grew into his involvement in the Southern California Light and Space movement.
“Doris Salcedo”
Where: White Cube
When: Nov. 13, 2026–Jan. 16, 2027
Why It’s Worth a Look: The show comprises two momentous new bodies of work. At its center is House, 2023–26, the product of three labor-intensive years in which Doris Salcedo and her assistants painstakingly wove together individual strands of human hair into a monumental structure, a meditation on what happens when homes are destroyed by political violence. Also on view is “Grains of Sorrow,” 2023–26, a series of small bowls made solely of hair and rice—providing the artist’s commentary on forced starvation as a weapon of war.
Know Before You Go: This exhibition is the artist’s first major retrospective in more than a decade, following Salcedo’s critically acclaimed retrospective in 2015 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which went on to the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
“In Pursuit of Pleasure” by Eric Fischl
Where: Skarstedt
When: Nov. 12–Dec. 19
Why It’s Worth a Look: There is a lethargic quality to the 13 recent paintings by Eric Fischl on view at Skarstedt. Saturated hues evoke hot summer days as figures laze around, recline on the grass, or amble down the street. Each is a small vignette capturing a moment of daily life that together make up a gallery-sized society.
Know Before You Go: Growing up in the suburbia of Long Island, a cloistered culture where a polished veneer can conceal all uglier truths, first sparked Fischl’s fascination with the gap between appearance and reality. His 2013 memoir, Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas, details his artistic coming of age and these early inspirations.
“Recent Drawings” by Jasper Johns
Where: Matthew Marks
When: Nov. 4–Jan. 23, 2027
Why It’s Worth a Look: When Jasper Johns’s first solo exhibition opened at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958, the Museum of Modern Art immediately snapped up several of his works. Nearly seven decades later, his latest pieces are sure to draw just as much frenzy. The exhibition comprises 12 drawings made over the past two years, all featuring familiar motifs from his work, including the silhouette of a young boy, a Rubin’s vase, and the American Sign Language alphabet.
Know Before You Go: Does anyone remember Shrinky Dinks, the plastic toy that, when baked in a home oven, shrinks to a fraction of its original size? Johns, now 96, began producing etchings on the material in the 2010s are here incorporates a number of the resulting small-scale motifs more than a decade on.
“Low Key Shrines: French Paintings and German Ceramics” by Lubaina Himid
Where: Greene Naftali
When: Opens Nov. 12
Why It’s Worth a Look: “Low Key Shrines” presents a new body of work from Lubaina Himid, the acclaimed British artist representing the U.K. at this year’s Venice Biennale. The exhibition dissects the meaning of commemoration, as Himid reimagines the public landmarks and domestic altars we erect to honor the dead.
Know Before You Go: Himid is one of the founding figures of the British Black Arts Movement. From the 1980s onward, she has dedicated herself to organizing exhibitions that uplift the community’s work in institutional settings and other spaces that have long been closed to them.
“Ouattara Watts”
Where: Karma
When: Nov. 5–Dec. 19
Why It’s Worth a Look: For more than four decades, Ouattara Watts has specialized in dense paintings packed with numeral matrices, nodes and arrows, eyes, musical notes, and mathematical symbols. This exhibition continues Watts’s exploration of these recurring forms using an eclectic mixture of materials, from patterned fabric and papier-mâché reliefs, to paint-spattered floor cloths and textiles sourced from around the world.
Know Before You Go: In 1977, Watts arrived in Paris from Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, to study art and began using tarpaulin as a support, an early spark of interest in mixed materials. In Paris, he met Jean-Michel Basquiat at an art opening, and it was he who convinced Watts to move to New York in 1988, where he has spent years combining African and Western aesthetics.
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