5 NYC Art Shows Making Sparks This Fall 2026

Big names, striking work and a major photography auction — five reasons to head into the city for art this fall.

New York’s fall art season is hitting its stride, with major museum exhibitions, photography, fashion and design offering plenty of reasons to make an art run into the city.

For East End art lovers, there are some particularly strong connections. Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, whose lives and work are forever linked to Springs, are the subject of a landmark exhibition at The Met, while longtime Southampton resident Roy Lichtenstein gets his first New York retrospective in more than three decades at the Whitney – plus Montauk resident and famed interior designer Vincente Wolf is auctioning his notable photo collection at Christie’s.

Here are five NYC art shows and events making sparks this fall.

Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous

Through: Jan. 31, 2027
Museum: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Address: 1000 Fifth Ave., New York

This one starts close to home. Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock moved to Springs in 1945, where their lives and artistic practices became intertwined with the East End. Now The Metropolitan Museum of Art is putting their work side by side in an exhibition examining the full arc of both careers.

More than 120 works from over 80 U.S. and international lenders trace the artists’ distinct paths as well as their influence on one another. It is the first major New York presentation devoted to either Krasner or Pollock in more than 20 years — and, remarkably, the first for either artist at The Met.

Rather than positioning Krasner in Pollock’s shadow, the exhibition considers two artists whose individual approaches helped reshape postwar American art.

Roy Lichtenstein: Like New

Opens: Oct. 11, 2026
Through: May 10, 2027
Museum: Whitney Museum of American Art
Address: 99 Gansevoort St., New York

Those Ben-Day dots are back in a big way. The Whitney brings together Lichtenstein’s iconic paintings alongside lesser-known works and four re-created murals for his first New York retrospective since 1993.

The exhibition moves across six decades of painting, drawing, sculpture, film and prints, looking beyond the comic-book imagery that made Lichtenstein one of Pop Art’s most recognizable figures to his fascination with the way images are borrowed, copied, altered and transformed.

There is an East End connection here, too. Lichtenstein spent much of his life in New York and Southampton, where he continued to work until his death in 1997.

Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses

Through: Jan. 3, 2027
Museum: Brooklyn Museum
Address: 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn

Is it fashion, sculpture, science — or all three? Dutch designer Iris van Herpen has spent her career making those distinctions increasingly irrelevant.

Her first major New York exhibition brings together more than 140 haute couture creations alongside contemporary art, design and scientific objects. Van Herpen combines traditional couture craftsmanship with technologies and materials more readily associated with architecture, engineering and science, creating clothes that can look closer to organisms, kinetic sculpture or futuristic architecture than conventional fashion.

There’s another reason Van Herpen is on our radar this month: She sits down with Fern Mallis at 92NY on Oct. 29 as part of Mallis’ “Fashion Icons” series.

The Vicente Wolf Photography Collection

Online auction: Oct. 8–22, 2026
Public exhibition: Oct. 16–21
Live auction: Oct. 22
Where: Christie’s New York
Address: 20 Rockefeller Plaza, New York

For nearly 50 years, celebrated interior designer and longtime Montauk homeowner Vicente Wolf has been building another kind of body of work: an extraordinary personal collection of photography.

Now nearly 200 photographs are heading to Christie’s in a two-part live and online auction, with names including Man Ray, Lee Miller, Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange, Richard Avedon, Edward Weston, Francesca Woodman, Constantin Brâncuși and Alexander Rodchenko.

Wolf began collecting photography in the late 1970s after Richard Avedon suggested he take an interest in the medium. What followed was decades of collecting guided by Wolf’s own eye, including an unusual early print of Lange’s iconic “Migrant Mother” in which the mother’s thumb — removed from later versions — remains visible.

Before the collection is dispersed, Christie’s will put it on public view in New York from Oct. 16 through 21. The online auction opens Oct. 8, with both the online sale and live auction concluding Oct. 22.

Anthea Hamilton + Gaetano Pesce at Salon 94

Through: Oct. 24, 2026
Gallery: Salon 94
Address: 3 E. 89th St., New York

This one rewards exploring all three floors.

At Salon 94, London-based artist Anthea Hamilton and the late Italian artist and designer Gaetano Pesce are brought into an unusually personal conversation about influence, objects and ideas.

On the first floor, Hamilton curates “A Chair Is A Nest, Is A Foot, Is A…,” selecting works from Pesce’s archive that have influenced her thinking for more than 15 years, including “UP7” (1969), “Tramonto a New York” (1980) and the “Golgotha” table (1972), along with drawings, prototypes and proposals.

The second floor belongs to Hamilton’s “Comfort Zones,” while upstairs, “Gaetano Pesce Studio: Continued” presents newly fabricated works from Pesce’s studio following his death in 2024.

The setting is part of the experience. Salon 94 occupies an extraordinary early-20th-century townhouse just off Fifth Avenue, creating a setting where art, design and architecture meet under one roof. Hamilton’s connection to Pesce makes it more than three exhibitions sharing a building: She first encountered his work while studying at the Royal College of Art in 2009, later met him and received his permission to reinterpret one of his designs at monumental scale.

Angela LaGreca

Editor, Co-Founder/Publisher

Angela LaGreca, Editor-in-chief and co-Founder/Publisher of Spark Hamptons, is a four-time Emmy Award-winning journalist, producer, writer and comedian/host. Her TV credits include NBC’s “Today,” ABC’s “The View,” and, most recently, the primetime cable news program “Cuomo” on NewsNation. On the East End, she was the Creative Director at LTV, VP Features/Events/Photo Editor at Dan’s Papers, and has performed at Guild Hall, Bay Street Theater and the WHBPAC. Her publishing career began at Modern Photography, where she was managing editor. LaGreca lives in Manhattan and East Hampton and can be reached at angelatvmedia@gmail.com and angela@sparkhamptons.com .