Back into the Fray: Fall’s Must-See Museum Shows

Summer may have been for detours, but fall welcomes us back into the action with new thresholds a little bit closer to home. Across New England, museums and university galleries are staging encounters with shifting histories and unfamiliar worlds: textiles that expose colonial entanglements, portraits that fracture and reassemble, archives broken open and reclaimed. Roxbury-born Tourmaline returns to Boston with her first institutional show, Fred Wilson fills the Rose Art Museum with abundance, and one hundred years of contemporary Indigenous art will be on view at the ICA / Boston. Together, these fourteen shows mark the season’s most compelling—and unmissable—crossings.

“Echoes of the Heart: New England Media Art Biennial,” July 29–December 13, 2025
Emerson Contemporary
25 Avery Street, Boston, MA

Walking into Emerson College’s Media Art Gallery from the street feels like entering a dream world—a vivid adult version of a childhood bedroom bathed in the technicolor glow of a nightlight projector. This kaleidoscope of color is actually the inside of Iwalani Kaluhiokalani’s The Radiance Chasers (2025), a dynamic installation that fuses painting and paper cut-outs with video mapping and sound. Kaluhiokalani is joined by visual artists Clint Baclawski, Erik DeLuca, Justin Levesque, VHF Studio, and Karlie Zhao in “Echoes of the Heart: New England Media Art Biennial,” a juried multimedia exhibition. In Boston, a city that’s dominated by traditional and university-affiliated museums, it can sometimes be difficult for more unconventional art forms to find a place to land. But here—between Baclawski’s sculptural photographs, DeLuca’s interactive sound piece, and Zhao’s participatory poems—Emerson Contemporary proves that our city can be a place for art and technology to collide. —Ava Mancing

“Fred Wilson: Reflections,” August 20, 2025–January 4, 2025
Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum
415 South Street, Waltham, MA

Black Now! (2025) Fred Wilson’s extraordinary conceptual installation debuts at the Rose Art Museum this season. The piece comprises over 2,500 found objects—T-shirts, DVDs, CDs, posters, greeting cards, figurines, books, masks, beauty products, foods, liquors, cigarettes, and more—that are black, Black, dark, and darker in nature and all carefully placed together in an enjoyably overwhelming fashion. The exhibition also includes glass and photographic works from Wilson’s time as a representative of the US at the 50th Venice Biennale, where he studied Murano glassblowing and examined the African population in Venice that has been historically portrayed in subservient positions in painting and decorative arts. While you’re at the Rose, be sure to also see photographer-turned-painter Danielle Mckinney’s “Tell Me More” in the Lee Gallery. Thirteen richly toned and absolutely breathtaking paintings of Black women at rest await. —Alisa Prince

“Swapnaa Tamhane: Spaces That Hold,” August 28, 2025–January 4, 2026
Mead Art Museum at Amherst College
41 Quadrangle Drive, Amherst, MA

 In “Spaces That Hold,” Swapnaa Tamhane transforms the gallery at Mead Art Museum into an immersive, three-dimensional textile world. Known for the collaborative nature of her work, Tamhane often calls on traditional techniques and craftspeople in the creation of her geometrically patterned fabrics. In India, textiles are deeply entwined with histories of trade, empire, and independence. Cotton, in particular, has played a central role in shaping the economy, fueling colonial exploitation, and becoming a symbol of resistance in the struggle for liberation. Through her work, Tamhane explores these histories and confronts the legacies of colonialism by creating environments that surround and engage viewers, inviting them to move through—and be held by—her work. —Ava Mancing

“Visual Kinship,” August 30–November 29, 2025
Hood Museum of Art
6 E. Wheelock Street, Hanover, NH

The evergreen quest for belonging is amply explorable in “Visual Kinship” at the Hood. This show urges us to think about kinship as a choice. Rather than family as a neat structure into which we are all born, “Visual Kinship” takes up the acts of care, connection, and understanding that foster agentive families. Humorous, tactile, and luminous works of art are all lens-based to address how it is through the lens that interpersonal ties are legitimized or denied. Artists draw on family portraits and colonial archives to lay claim to the breadth of materials that may shape our relationships. Visitors will certainly find themselves reflective of—if not wholly empowered by—their own agency and the kinships that they maintain. —Alisa Prince

“States of Being,” September 2–October 25, 2025
University Hall Gallery at UMass Boston
University Drive North, Dorchester, MA

“States of Being” confronts the sites at which our bodily awareness is intensified. While using a framework of intersectionality, the exhibition challenges viewers of all identities to follow that awareness and to allow the body to be the guide. Centering the femme body, the exhibition brings together contemporary artworks in installation, video, sculpture, and painting to explore the human experience. Multimedia artist Amy Bravo’s Trojan Rooster (Day Stalker) (2024) enlists a classic Greek stratagem to tell her own story of the body within. “States of Being” asks and answers where diverse experiences of embodiment converge and diverge across femme identities. —Alisa Prince

“How do you throw a brick through the window…,” September 2–November 9, 2025
Tufts University Art Galleries
SMFA at Tufts, 230 Fenway, Boston, MA

“How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?” That question from Johanna Hedva’s essay “Sick Woman Theory” supplies the title and an animating question for this show, which spotlights new and recent works by seven artists exploring how people with disabilities, chronic illnesses, and neurodivergence enact possibilities for resistance in an ableist culture. Organized by Tufts curator Laurel V. McLaughlin and John Michael Kohler Arts Center associate curator Tanya Gayer, it promises everything from Nat Decker’s visions of fantastic, futuristic mobility devices and Jeffrey Meris’s starbursts assembled from syringes and crutches to Libby Paloma’s incredibly intricate soft-sculpture mobile of a brain and a brand-new interactive audio work by Jeff Kasper. —Jacqueline Houton

“Hayes Prize 2025: Tommy Kha, Other Things Uttered,” September 2, 2025–January 26, 2026
Addison Gallery of American Art
3 Chapel Avenue, Andover, MA

Of all the shows opening this fall, I’m perhaps most excited for Tommy Kha’s “Other Things Uttered.” In his first solo museum exhibition, the Addison Gallery’s 2025 Hayes Prize winner pairs landscapes with domestic scenes—often featuring the artist’s mother—that appear ordinary, if not for the frequent appearance of Kha’s floating body parts. Kha refers to many of his works as “half-portraits”—new and old family photographs that he’s juxtaposed with cut-outs of his face and frame. These collages offer the artist a way of placing himself within an intergenerational history he once felt far removed from, growing up queer in an immigrant household. Across his body of work, you’ll find Kha’s expressionless face drifting freely: lying on its side atop the coils of an idle stove; just released from a hand, midair as if a ball in play; sandwiched into the joint of a dentist’s chair. Quirky, slightly unsettling, and unexpectedly comical, Kha’s half-portraits create a strangely unified vision of his world. —Ava Mancing

“Eric-Paul Riege: ojo|-|ólǫ́,” September 3–December 7, 2025
The Bell Gallery at Brown University
64 College Street, Providence, RI

Institutional archives are tricky things. Ostensibly created to house important and informative material for posterity and future study, they often can’t escape their inherent issues—ranging from provenance and ethical collecting concerns to the ways in which materials are positioned and presented to difficulties with access—whether literally or through the specters of elitism so intrinsic to institutions in general. These issues are exponentially present when considering Indigenous art and artifacts. For “ojo|-|ólǫ́,” at the Bell Gallery, Diné artist Eric-Paul Riege engaged with the Navajo collections held within the archives at Brown University and University of Washington, the co-presenter of the show and where it will travel in 2026. The result is a new body of work expressed across the wide range of disciplines Reige employs. Large weavings and woven sculptures are exhibited alongside the artist’s sketches and collages, as well as objects from the Navajo collection at Brown’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. Throughout the run of the show, Riege and others will activate the work through a series of performances—reminders that archives are never static but are enlivened through reclamation and reimagination, and that new forms of expression are what is needed to carry us forward into greater healing and understanding. —Jessica Shearer

“Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá (Not From Here, Not From There),” September 5–December 10, 2025
Boston University Art Galleries
855 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA

At Boston University’s Stone Gallery, “Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá” is an exhibition that is immersive, bright, layered, and fully alive. Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez blends graffiti, hip-hop, Chicanx aesthetics, and pop culture in ways that feel both muralistic and intimate, but also a bit rebellious. There are works whose graffiti lines spill out past the canvas boundaries and onto the white walls of the gallery. The I.C.E cream truck hits with humor and urgency, while the pop-up botánica quietly holds memory and ritual in candles, flowers, and devotional objects. The work makes presence and displacement tangible, celebrating resilience and identity in ways that are immediate, messy, and unforgettable, without ever feeling like it’s trying too hard. It’s cheeky but not rushed, and it’s this level of care that Marka27 clearly infuses into his work that shines the brightest. —Emmy Liu

“Overbody: New Works by Sreshta Rit Premnath,” September 16–December 6, 2025
Usdan Gallery at Bennington College
One College Drive, Bennington, VT

Whether through writing, bookmaking, sculpture, or drawing, Sreshta Rit Premnath’s practice consistently questions the borders and barriers—whether physical or systemic—that exert control over human bodies. For years, Premnath has created “slumps” that resemble bodies, but are rendered in such a way that they are contorted or affected by precarious sculptural forms. At Bennington’s Usdan Gallery, these invisible forces are the “overbody”—a metaphor for political power’s coercive weight. The still “slumps” can appear hauntingly lifeless or full of potential and resilience, depending on how you approach them. Premnath suggests the latter through a collaboration with Butoh dancers Mina Nishimura and Kota Yamazaki who have extended the sculptures into radical movement scores. —Jameson Johnson

“Tourmaline: Lives of a Pollinator,” October 1–December 21, 2025
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA

This fall, Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts will serve as a site of homecoming for Tourmaline—the Roxbury native’s “Lives of a Pollinator” will be the artist’s first exhibition in Boston, as well as her first US institutional solo show. Centered on the film Pollinator (2022), the show will employ archival outtakes and a film stills to offer a radial view of its subject—much like Tourmaline herself, who is forever expanding her multi-hyphenate abilities (artist, filmmaker, writer, activist) to excavate and celebrate Black trans experiences. This particular work is set in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, and, much like Tourmaline’s recently penned biography, trains the lens on renowned trans activist Marsha P. Johnson. It is an act of an embodied witness that we’ll have the privilege of witnessing ourselves, a rippled blossoming of beholding. —Jessica Shearer

“An Indigenous Present,” October 9, 2025–March 8, 2026
Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston
25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA

Published in 2023, the landmark book An Indigenous Present gathered the work of more than sixty Native North American artists, musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, writers, and other creators. Now its editors, artist Jeffrey Gibson and curator Jenelle Porter, have organized this companion exhibition, which homes in on fifteen artists working across many mediums and modes of abstraction. The art spans a century, starting with Mary Sully’s “personality prints”—intricately patterned colored-pencil triptychs inspired by headline makers of her time, from Amelia Earhart and Thomas Edison to civil rights activist Annie Stein—and moving to George Morrison’s vibrant paintings anchored by Lake Superior’s horizon line, Dakota Mace’s chemigram photographs translating traditional Diné designs, and Teresa Baker’s mixed-media works combining natural and artificial materials (think buckskin and willow with artificial sinew and AstroTurf), plus new site-specific commissions from Raven Chacon and Caroline Monnet. And that’s naming but a few of the works that will fill ten galleries at the ICA before the show hits the road to travel to Nashville and Seattle. —Jacqueline Houton

“Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory,” October 23, 2025–January 19, 2026
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
25 Evans Way, Boston, MA

What a thrill to see such life-filled paintings of the neighborhoods I know and love most! Allan Rohan Crite is legendary among Black Bostonians, and it will be wonderful to see the painter become more of a household name as a result of this show. Crite, a beloved Boston artist who made a home of the South End, has a peerless aptitude for capturing the feeling of this city’s unique parts and the essence of being Black within them. His penchant for storytelling uses painting to affirm the unity of the local and the divine and incites viewers to delight in the magic of the mundane. It is a particularly felicitous time to ruminate on Crite’s legacy in Boston: The ISGM artist-in-residence Robert T. Freeman’s tribute to the senior painter fills the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade with color and concurrently on view is “Allan Rohan Crite: Griot of Boston” at the Boston Athenaeum, expanding insight into the artist’s works on paper. —Alisa Prince

“American Artist: To Acorn,” October 24, 2025–March 15, 2026
MIT List Visual Arts Center
20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA

At the MIT List, “American Artist: To Acorn” feels monumental, at least for me anyway. It’s an exhibition where material and reference melt into one another, folding Octavia Butler’s worlds—both imaginary and real—into the gallery. The bus stop signs she once passed on her way to write are replicated in steel, each grounded with agave plants that recall the protective communities in Parable of the Sower (1993). American Artist’s practice has always been powerful (I’ve seen bits and pieces of his work in scattered galleries), but this show is a love letter to Butler, whose visionary worlds carry an oracular charge, and imagines futures that are both urgent and tender. It’s a rare chance to experience speculative fiction made material, and that in and of itself is more than enough to compel me to drop by. As Artist’s first solo exhibition in New England, it marks a moment not just for the artist, but for others who crave art that expands how we think, connect, and imagine. —Emmy Liu