What to See Now: Your Fall Art Guide

Autumn always carries a shift. The air changes, the light turns, and suddenly we are asked to slow down and pay attention. In the art world, this season belongs to Black and Brown artists who are taking up space across the country with shows. From Atlanta to Portland to Brooklyn, these exhibitions and festivals are movements, mirrors, and archives for the future.

Giants (Alicia Keys & Swizz Beatz collection) photo credit: Danny Perez

In Atlanta, Shenequa Gay brings her vision to Clark Atlanta University Art Museum with Ancestral Mirrors. Her work is less exhibition than invocation. Through layered forms and ritualized imagery, she calls forward matrilineal care and the memory of ancestors whose presence is both past and living. It feels less like looking at art and more like entering a sacred space. Clark Atlanta, supported by a new Getty Foundation grant, is not only presenting Gay’s show but strengthening its role as a keeper of Black visual history. For Atlanta, and for the South, this is a moment of remembrance and reclamation.

Travel north to Portland and the conversation shifts scale. At the Portland Art Museum, Global Icons, Local Spotlight opens the doors to more than seventy five works from Jordan D. Schnitzer’s collection. Names like Tschabalala Self, Mickalene Thomas, Hank Willis Thomas, Nick Cave, and Julie Mehretu line the walls, creating a chorus of Black and Brown voices that vibrates far beyond Oregon. This is the kind of exhibition usually reserved for the coastal art capitals, but here it belongs to Portland. For many visitors, it will be a first chance to stand in front of work that reshapes the canon and refuses to be background.

Later this fall, Richmond will open its doors to something equally monumental. Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz are bringing Giants to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, a show that combines their personal collection with cultural landmarks. Expect to see Basquiat, Kehinde Wiley, Amy Sherald, Gordon Parks, and more, woven together not as a sterile history lesson but as a living conversation curated by two artists who understand the stakes of representation. The exhibition is both a love letter and a power move, positioning Black creativity at the center of a major institution.

In Brooklyn, the Gaza Biennale has taken root at Recess, a space usually known for experimental projects. More than twenty five Palestinian artists are presenting work that speaks to displacement, resilience, and the fragility of memory under siege. What was impossible to hold in Gaza has found a temporary home in New York, turning the gallery into a site of mourning, testimony, and insistence. For audiences, it is a reminder that art is not just about beauty. It is survival, resistance, and the stubborn act of imagining tomorrow.

Houston, too, will hold its own festival of imagination. The Islamic Arts Festival returns in November with thousands of works in calligraphy, painting, textiles, music, film, and spoken word. It is one of the largest celebrations of Islamic art in the United States, drawing communities together in a time when visibility and cultural exchange feel urgent. What makes the festival distinct is not only its scale but its accessibility. Families, students, elders, and artists all find a place inside its rhythm.

And in the Bay Area, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program closes out the month with Artful Harvest: Art Will Save Us! on its Woodside campus. It is part exhibition, part gathering, part declaration. Alumni artists return to perform, show, and celebrate the role of creativity in difficult times. The title may sound idealistic, but stepping onto those grounds surrounded by work that insists on life, the idea feels less like a hope and more like a truth.

We hope you get a chance to experience these shows this season. If you have an exhibition coming up or something that should be on our radar, reach out to us.