The October 2026 Cherry Basket is ripe and ready for picking! This series shares noteworthy art exhibitions with an emphasis on Black artists. I hope you find something sweet ❤️ 🍒
New York
- What: “Yesterday and Today, which brings together, for the first time, her [Dindga McCannon’s] groundbreaking mixed-media quilts, paintings, and prints, spanning the 1970s to the present day…On her 18th birthday, Dindga went to see a concert in Tompkins Square Park, where she encountered Sun Ra Arkestra, an alternative band whose performance became a kind of epiphany. That encounter shaped the course of her life and artistic process, cementing music as inseparable from her visual language. Her works emerge intuitively and are in many ways improvised akin to a jazz riff.”
- Who: Dindga McCannon
- Where: Fridman Gallery (169 Bowery | New York, NY)
- When: September 9 – October 18
- What: “Eric N. Mack radically reconsiders the conventions of painting using textiles as his primary materials. For his second exhibition with the gallery, Mack presents new free-standing and wall-based paintings, along with a site-responsive installation…Using textiles rife with fashion and cultural references, Mack incorporates new and vintage materials in a range of textures, colors and weights. These richly layered pieces move between opposing conditions: movement and stillness, transparency and opacity, volume and flatness, monochrome and pattern.”
- Who: Eric N. Mack
- Where: Paula Cooper Gallery (545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor | New York, NY)
- When: September 10 – October 24
- What: “FÉRALE is a solo exhibition featuring new works by NICOLA. In her DARK CANON series, NICOLA reveals an alternate reality centered on the uncanny, shadow-selves, and a thinning boundary between this human life and an increasingly strange otherness. These new works invite the viewer into a séance, a projection, and a dance with the psyche.”
- Who: NICOLA
- Where: Warehouse41 (41 Varick Ave #216 | Brooklyn, NY)
- When: October 25 – November 15
- What: “I Am Tony is the first US museum survey exhibition of the work of Arthur Jafa to encapsulate the full breadth of his practice…Spanning two floors of the newly expanded New Museum, Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony encompasses the practice of one of the most influential artists of his generation. Alongside the premiere of new work, the exhibition will feature Jafa’s most celebrated works, including Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) and the Golden Lion-winning The White Album (2019), as well as recent paintings, large-scale video and film installations, and a range of sculptural and photographic objects.”
- Who: Arthur Jafa
- Where: The New Museum (235 Bowery | New York, NY)
- When: September 24 – January 3
- What: “Geometries centers the ancient mathematical study as a point of artistic inquiry, exploring how artists have used lines, shapes, and the spaces between to convey emotion, express identity, or work through formal concerns…Whether conjuring figures from elemental building blocks or destabilizing perception with abstract compositions, artists make use of geometry as an organizational logic for the images they create. They translate the breadth of the study—grid-like city maps, West African textiles, patterned flowerheads, and sonic vibrations—into a shared visual vocabulary.”
- Who: Loretta Pettway Bennett, Sonia Boyce, Catti, Colin Chase, Rico Gatson, Steffani Jemison, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Jennie C. Jones, Caroline Kent, Norman Lewis, James Little, Al Loving, Julie Mehretu, Odili Donald Odita, Mavis Pusey, Jorge Luis Rodriguez, Thomas Sills, Shinique Smith, Alma Thomas, Stanley Whitney, Jack Whitten, William T. Williams, and more
- Where: Studio Museum in Harlem (144 W 125th Street | New York, NY)
- When: September 10 – January 31
- What: “The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to present Clockwork, a solo exhibition featuring new and recent work by Sable Elyse Smith, the 2026 recipient of the Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize. Including sculpture, video, neon, and photography, Clockwork interrogates the fundamental systems of power that define contemporary society, as well as their cultural and psychological impacts. Through formal strategies such as seriality and repetition, disorientation, and appropriation, Smith illustrates how systems of power not only overlap, but how they intertwine and mutually reinforce one another.”
- Who: Sable Elyse Smith
- Where: The FLAG Art Foundation (545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor | New York, NY)
- When: September 24 – February 13
Los Angeles
- What: “Lisson presents its first Los Angeles exhibition with painter, sculptor, and printmaker Oliver Lee Jackson. A Bay Area resident based in Oakland, Jackson builds his compositions around the human figure, a recurring presence that underpins his work’s structure. This presentation brings together works spanning several decades of his practice from paintings to a group of marble and mixed media sculptures. His sculptural output, a lesser-known but vital aspect of his oeuvre, was last seen in a monumental commission of metal figures for New York’s High Line in 2024, while these forms are being presented publicly for the first time.”
- Who: Oliver Lee Jackson
- Where: Lisson Gallery (1037 N. Sycamore Ave | Los Angeles, CA)
- When: September 17 – November 7
- What: “Gê Viana is a visual artist working in collage, sound, video, and installation to explore material culture, oral history, and syncretism within the African diaspora across Brazil. Viana’s practice moves between domestic, urban, and rural spaces and blends analog and digital forms of collage with painting and early twentieth-century photographic processes. Her work challenges the accuracies of traditional archives, filling the gaps sustained by institutional memory with evocative images and sounds that illustrate the fullness of Afro-Brazilian identity and heritage.”
- “Through her multidisciplinary practice, Viana uplifts the history, traditions, and dignity of her communities…For her Hammer Project, Viana will present an installation and new sculpture, including her short film Radiola de promessa (Radio of promise, 2025).”
- Who: Gê Viana
- Where: The Hammer Museum (10899 Wilshire Blvd. | Los Angeles, CA)
- When: September 19 – February 7
London
- What: “Across twelve paintings, Philips considers the home as an expanded portrait of the self, grappling with the discomfort of desire, visibility and voyeurism through an informed art-historical lens. Against the backdrop of Langston Hughes’ poem, Philips explores moments of self-discovery, mapping this process across domestic spaces…Philips’ work equally interrogates the construction of the gaze and historical representations of women, drawing deliberately on depictions that generate unease.”
- Who: Cece Philips
- Where: Public Gallery (89 – 91 Middlesex St | London)
- When: September 10 – October 18
- What: “Born and based in Brooklyn, Khalif Tahir Thompson invites viewers into the everyday lives of his subjects through vibrant domestic scenes, full of texture and pattern that create an expansive form of portraiture, both individual and collective, weaving through time…In these new paintings, Thompson takes direct inspiration from Y2K Black American aesthetic, creating scenarios from his own childhood growing up in Brooklyn and today. The subjects range from his older siblings to unknown characters drawn from his family archive. By layering memory with imaginative elements, Thompson extends these narratives beyond personal history to explore the passage of time and nature of introspection.”
- Who: Khalif Tahir Thompson
- Where: Victoria Miro (16 Wharf Road | London, EN)
- When: October 8 – November 7
- What: “Maximillian William is pleased to present a new collection of eight soft-pastels on paper by Somaya Critchlow. The works in this presentation show Critchlow’s ongoing exploration of the materiality of pigment, with the medium allowing for a fragmentation and softening of her characteristically alluring and at times uncanny portraits. In these small-scale images, women are shown in gentle interiors or indefinite spaces, their poses and expressions adding to a language that feels at home within the painter’s oeuvre.”
- Who: Somaya Critchlow
- Where: Maximillian William (47 Mortimer Street London, EN)
- When: September 17 – November 14
- What: “Curated by fashion industry game changer Edward Enninful OBE, whose lived experience of the decade informs the exhibition The 90s: Art and Fashion examines a defining period in which a groundswell of creativity changed the face of British culture…The exhibition explores how long-held hierarchies were dismantled, with high art and pop culture feeding into one another, and reflects both the energy and the challenges of the decade, looking at the enduring influence of key figures who emerged during this time.”
- Who: Juergen Teller, David Sims, Corinne Day, Steve McQueen, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Yinka Shonibare, Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, and more
- Where: Tate Britain (Millbank | London, EN)
- When: October 8 – February 14
PARIS
- What: “From this collection of found objects and the gleaning of images online, Ladji Diaby constructs assemblages through proximity: a pharaoh-shaped lamp beside a domestic object, Power Rangers alongside motifs drawn from family traditions. He readily compares his method to musical sampling—a principle he describes as “both a technique and a stylistic choice.”
- “Each object becomes a talisman, deriving its value through its capacity to act collectively. Sometimes moving a single piece of furniture is enough to unsettle an entire system of values: a figure once considered demonic becomes protective, an ordinary object becomes sculpture.”
- Who: Ladji Diaby
- Where: Crèvecœur (9 rue des Cascades | Paris, France)
- When: September 11 – November 28