9 Art Shows You Need to See During Armory Week 2026

End-of-August escapes are officially behind us, and the arty pour of out-of-towners means one thing, New York: the fall season is in session. Buzz around the 2026 Armory Show is well underway, and galleries cued up to shake off the summer slowdown and bring their A-game to the fairs and beyond.

The fall fair circuit arrived a little later than years prior, pushed to the end of the month to avoid the usual overlap with Fashion Week and the U.S. Open, and a breather from Frieze Seoul. But September has been far from sleepy.

A stellar run of gallery openings and major museum shows has already taken root in the run-up to the five main events — The Armory, Independent 20th Century, SPRING/BREAK, U-Haul Art Fair, and the Printed Matter Book Fair — with a few more heavy-hitters waiting in the wings. We toured around the city to round up nine can’t-miss exhibitions, and unlike the fairs, they’ll be on well into next month. Walk, don’t run.

Lynda Benglis’ KNOTTING, TYING, FOLDING at Pace Gallery

With Fashion Week on the mind, a visit to Lynda Benglis’ wall hangs is a must. After all, it was works like “Toyopet Crown” (1989) and “Vega” (1982) that inspired Jonathan Anderson’s Dior couture debut in January, where we saw sartorial interpretations of the artist’s metal pleats sent straight down the runway.

Benglis has been wielding this playful, fearless spirit since the 1960s, emerging alongside Postminimalism, when her wax paintings put her on the scene. She traded muted palettes for vivid colors and visceral surfaces. The ongoing exhibition at Pace Gallery in Chelsea hosts a constellation of sculptures created over the last five decades, spotlighting her ceaseless curiosity when it comes to material experimentation. From her early “Sparkle Knot IV” (1972) to her more recent “Elephant Necklace” (2017), it’s a masterclass in what she calls the “extremes of coloration and texturing.”

On view until October 24.

Pace Gallery
540 W 25th St,
New York, NY 10001

Joseph Yaeger’s Agita at Gladstone Gallery

Looking at a Joseph Yaeger painting feels like walking into a movie halfway through. The subjects, anonymized and cropped, are distant from where they emerged. Yet sympathy for their startled, often muffled, affliction nonetheless persists. It keeps you there.

Agita debuts a new suite of works from the acclaimed painter, known for filtering his pieces through ideas of privacy and desire. Watercolors atop gessoed linen luminously reveal themselves, albeit in velvety, muted tones. The tension doesn’t come from what is quiet, but what is silenced, like memory so successfully repressed it becomes just barely out of reach.

On view until October 31.

Gladstone Gallery
515 W 24th St,
New York, NY 10011

Alix Vernet’s Landmarks at Chapter NY

An archive of language — stripped from signs, overheard encounters, and monuments — is treated as a purifying force in Alix Vernet’s condenser coil sculptures. Taken from air conditioners, aluminum fins brushed into luxuriantly lettered words, the artist turns a critical eye towards unassuming aspects of industrial infrastructure, like these authorities of air and comfort.

The works grew out of the artist’s time casting façades and letterforms, while perched on fire escapes. She became drawn to the backs of AC units, where dust, moisture, oxidation, maintenance, and years of exposure collected, and thus recorded the life of the city.

Machine parts, not just overlooked, but not meant to be seen, are finished in words as tender as “baby” or “boy.” Foundational units of urban ecosystems take on a more fragile character. Damage, intentional or accidental, becomes difficult to discern. The sculptures carry the tension of rising temperatures and climate politics without needing to spell it out so literally.

On view until October 17.

Chapter NY
60 Walker St,
New York, NY 10013

Arthur Jafa’s I Am Tony at New Museum

One of our most highly anticipated museum shows, Arthur Jafa’s New Museum takeover did not disappoint. It’s the first to “encapsulate the full breadth of his practice,” per the museum, featuring over three decades of painting, large-scale video and film installations, sculptures, and archival objects on view, anchored by Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) and The White Album (2018), his most celebrated works, of course.

Jafa has spent his career tracing the many facets of Black American life. Be it through music, classic films, and comic book characters, even TikToks, his work aims an unflinching eye toward both a nation’s unsettling history and our contemporary obsession with “content,” urging you to confront it, metabolize it, long after you leave the museum doors.

On view until January 3, 2027.

New Museum
235 Bowery,
New York, NY 10002

Asher Liftin’s Recent Works at 125 Newbury

Peering into 125 Newbury from the corner of Canal and Walk, Asher Liftin’s works appear as pointillized photographs. Grainy snapshots of passersby in window reflections, a bouquet of flowers, and a herd of moving trains. Up close, dots and lines drip and tremble, near bursting at times, revealing a painstaking touch of hand.

A Liftin work is always unmistakably his. Having graduated from Yale University with degrees in Art and Cognitive Science, a shared commitment to image-making and image-processing — a trick of the eye — is present in every drawing and painting. This body of titularly recent works not only highlights everyday moments, but finds a way to care for them dearly. Each garners a good 10 minutes just to marvel over.

On view until October 31.

125 Newbury
395 Broadway,
New York, NY 10013

Taryn Simon’s Father Country, I Do Love You at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

In the words of Taryn Simon’s father: “America is the best story on earth, if you could find someone to tell it.” And amid a rather messy semiquincentennial, what better timing for Father Country, I Do Love You?

Simon traces the life of an unnamed federal agent. Divided into 42 chapters, with 42 distinct colors, she uses photography, installation, sculpture, and video to wake up conspiracies and dive head-first into the strange corners of American life, following the agent through devotion, violence, and loss. While highly conceptual, her work is not abstract, each emerging from a very specific person, testament, or moment in history, elaborated in the wall texts.

Save for the “Kleroterion” (2024), all of the work is new. It’s also deeply personal. The show is dedicated to her father, an ex-government worker turned pinball machine seller, structured to resemble his grapple with Alzheimer’s. The largest piece, in fact, is a billiards run that snakes down the entirety of the rotunda.

On view until March 14, 2027.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Ave,
New York, NY 10128

Gordon Parks’ Voices in the Mirror at Jack Shainman Gallery

Gordon Parks is one of the most important American photographers. His art continues to shape the way we talk about history by prioritizing the inner worlds of the people who lived it. “I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs,” he once said. “I knew at that point I had to have a camera.”

The artist’s namesake foundation celebrates its 20th anniversary with a monumental show at Jack Shainman’s Tribeca outpost, showcasing 65 of his most iconic images. Setting the tone with Parks’ searing portraits of Muhammad Ali, published in Life as a series called “The Redemption of the Champion,” the exhibition captures the enduring struggle for equality and beauty of Black American life, namely in the South, interspersed with contributions from his subjects, Ava DuVernay, Thelma Golden, and more all throughout.

On view until November 6.

Jack Shainman
46 Lafayette St,
New York, NY 10013

Eddie R. Aparicio’s Rubberneckers at Jeffrey Deitch

Rubberneck is the freeway slowdown when a car crashes on the opposite side. Eddie R. Aparicio, an Angeleno, sees it as a metaphor for our relationship to disaster, more often than not, fed through the safety of the glass window.

Aparicio’s new show at Jeffrey Deitch brings a slice of Los Angeles to New York; a light on its infrastructural injustice in particular. Featuring new hand-sewn works, rubber tree casts, amber sculptures, and paintings, all of which emerged in the aftermath of the city’s fires, the artist looks to trees, urban systems, personal keepsakes, and totemic forms to carry traces of who came before.

In the center ascends “Muñecas de transmisión,” his 2024 commission for Prospect.6. Dolls dressed in family garments make up electrical transmission towers. Initially they were arranged after North Hollywood, but now, they can’t help but bring the decommissioned towers that first sparked the Eaton fires to mind.

On view until October 31.

Jeffrey Deitch
18 Wooster St,
New York, NY 10013

Lee Bul’s The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun at Hauser & Wirth

We’ll end on Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea, which doubles as a launch pad into Lee Bul’s science fiction universe. The massive silver zeppelin, “Willing To Be Vulnerable—Metalized Balloon” (2015–2016/2020), is the steed. The South Korean artist first made her name in the 90s with her cyborgs and has spent decades committed to the tensions between utopia and dystopia, technology and the fragility of human ambition.

Her first go-around with the mega-gallery since coming on as a signee last year, the exhibition premieres new work from three of her ongoing series: Untitled (Willing To Be Vulnerable – Velvet), Perdu, and CTCS. Scenes of escape from explosive apocalyptic landscapes are laid down in mother-of-pearl on rich velvets. Seven-foot stainless steel cyborg sculptures take up space in the front gallery, their wings (or broken paneled limbs) outstretched. Exploring decay and control, her latest show gives us a vision of humanity trying to outsmart nature. Suddenly her once-distant future feels unsettlingly close to home.

On view until October 24.

Hauser & Wirth
542 W 22nd St,
New York, NY 10011