Fall Art Preview

A new MOMA, Amy Sherald, Rube Goldberg, “Rachel Harrison Life Hack,” and more.
Opening of new MoMA
Illustration by Max Dalton

The painter Amy Sherald, who has described herself as “an American realist, painting American people doing American things,” made headlines last year, when her official portrait of the former First Lady Michelle Obama was unveiled. The Hauser & Wirth gallery exhibits her latest luminous, color-washed figures. (Opens Sept. 10.) The Met Breuer surveys the fifty-year career of another American realist, the Latvian-born, New York-based painter Vija Celmins, whose crystalline renderings of night skies, seascapes, and spiderwebs convey the unfathomable mystery of the so-called known world. (Opens Sept. 24.)

The comic genius Rube Goldberg once wrote, “The younger generation know my name in a vague way and connect it with grotesque inventions, but don’t believe that I ever existed as a person.” The Queens Museum reintroduces visitors to the Pulitzer Prize-winning illustrator in the first major exhibition of his work since 1970, the year of his death. In addition to drawings, films, photographs, and related ephemera, there’s an interactive Rube Goldberg machine, created just for the occasion. (Opens Oct. 6.)

Those still mourning the end of “Game of Thrones” may find solace in a Brienne of Tarth-worthy show at the Met: “The Last Knight: The Art, Armor, and Ambition of Maximilian I,” a display of a hundred and eighty objects—many never before seen in the U.S.—that marks the five-hundredth anniversary of the death of the Habsburg power broker. (Opens Oct. 7.)

After a four-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar renovation and a four-month hiatus, MOMA reopens, on Oct. 21, with increased exhibition space—including admission-free galleries at street level—and a new studio for performance, dance, music, film, and “art forms not yet imagined.” The inaugural shows, all of which focus on the museum’s collection, include a deep dive into the autobiographical assemblage “Black Girl’s Window,” made, in 1969, by the incomparable Betye Saar, and a selection of works by the Chicago performer, sculptor, and category-transcender Pope.L, whose concurrent exhibition, “Choir,” opens at the Whitney on Oct. 10.

In 1971, the Guggenheim abruptly cancelled a show by Hans Haacke, after learning that one of his pieces traced art patrons’ questionable real-estate practices. In the subsequent decades, the German-born Conceptualist has only sharpened his anti-establishment critique; his political integrity, formal acuity, and trenchant wit are on view in a sixty-year retrospective at the New Museum. (Opens Oct. 24.)

Brainy, funny, eye-catching, and compellingly strange, the sculptures and installations of the New York-based mid-career artist Rachel Harrison are some of the most influential American art works of the past quarter century. The Whitney gathers a hundred pieces, including her indelible drawings and photographs, in the highly anticipated retrospective “Rachel Harrison Life Hack.” (Opens Oct. 25.) ♦