The circus is rolling into town, though perhaps not in the way you might expect. This fall, the art world returns to cities across the United States with a lively run of exhibitions full of spectacle, performance, and, at times, mischief. Artist Karon Davis invites visitors under the big top in a Seattle Art Museum show filled with circus archetypes, while a group exhibition at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University offers a view of the circus that is American democracy. Elsewhere, the Denver Art Museum devotes a full show to the diva phenomenon, Tony Cokes slices into the codes of popular culture at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institute for Contemporary Art, and Bernhard Schobinger’s jewelry at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston transforms scraps and refuse into precious objects. Up north, the Milwaukee Art Museum pairs photography with the alchemy of extraction in a show that needs little more than a DSLR to make its point. — Phillip Pyle, associate editor
Read our 2026 fall guides for New York and Los Angeles.
Turn the volume up!
Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
Aug. 27–July 11, 2027
The title’s nod to NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s celebratory quoting of rapper KRS-One’s “Turn the Volume Up” (2020) feels especially apt for an exhibition focused on democratic participation. Featuring works by Kara Walker, Lyle Ashton Harris, Mike Kelley, and Sam Durant, the show traces the history of collective action through voting and organizing, offering a rare note of optimism during America’s 250th anniversary.
Going Underground: The Jewels of Bernhard Schobinger
Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, Texas
Sept. 3–Jan. 3, 2027
Among the materials incorporated into Schobinger’s singular jewelry are fishing lures from Lake Zurich and chunks of asphalt from a New York City street. Drawing on Concrete Art, Dada, the Situationists, Japanese culture, and punk, Schobinger upends jewelry as an elite luxury category through works built from scavenged, rebellious, and discarded matter.
Joe Feddersen: Earth, Water, Sky
Missoula Art Museum, Missoula, Montana
Sept. 4–Dec. 31
What is our responsibility to the natural world? Colville artist Joe Feddersen explores that question through decorated woven baskets, spray-painted monoprint collages, and sandblasted blown glass works marked by indigenous symbolisms. Spanning four decades of multimedia practice, the exhibition examines the delicate and complicated relationship between humans and the environment.
Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work
Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
Sept. 12–March 29, 2027
You can almost hear the village bustle in “Deep Snow” (1957), one of Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses’s many intimate scenes of rural life. Paintings of farmers knee-deep in hay, quilt-like fields, and a barnyard wedding before it became fashionable are included in this major exhibition revisiting the postwar legacy of Grandma Moses, who held her first solo show at age 80.
The Gift: Emma Amos with Friends
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
Sept. 13–Jan. 24, 2027
As a birthday present for her daughter India’s 20th birthday, Emma Amos painted 48 watercolor portraits of women artists, art historians, and critics in her circle. This exhibition reunites the full suite of paintings from The Gift (1990–94) for the first time in two decades, including portraits of Elizabeth Catlett, Lorna Simpson, bell hooks, Faith Ringgold, Howardena Pindell, Lucy Lippard, and Kay WalkingStick.
Tony Cokes: Texts, Tracks, Talks (1992–2026)
Institute for Contemporary Art, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia
Sept. 18–Feb. 21, 2027
Tony Cokes’s confrontational, text-driven, sensory practice draws from fragments, moments, and movements across culture and history to generate fresh critical connections that move beyond dominant media narratives. Marking a welcome return to his alma mater, the exhibition surveys the multimedia artist’s existing works alongside newly commissioned pieces focused on production, artistic intent, and the formation of personal identity.
From Noguchi to Asawa: Designing Postwar America
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Sept. 20–Jan. 10, 2027
Isamu Noguchi and George Nakashima are among six Japanese American artists featured in this exhibition reconsidering the look of modern America. From album covers to living room lamps, the objects on view reveal how these artists shaped galleries and homes alike, while also reflecting the traumas of World War II and Japanese-American concentration camps in the United States.
Martin Puryear: Nexus
High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia
Sept. 25–Jan. 17, 2027
This touring exhibition charts the conceptual development of Puryear’s meditative, craft-centered sculptural practice over the past 60 years. In addition to new works, it includes some of the artist’s best-known pieces, along with rarely seen drawings, prints, and sculptures that reflect his meticulous research and lifelong curiosity.
Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love
Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, Massachusetts
Sept. 26–Jan. 18, 2027
From airy acrylic washes made in the 1970s to a suspended patchwork sculpture from 2017, this retrospective spans Jackson’s career as a painter, dancer, poet, and observer of the Californian landscape. With luminous imagery and bold abstraction, Jackson presents beauty as political, surrealism as material, and Black artists’ right to create peaceful art as nonnegotiable.
Wilmer Wilson IV: SKIRL!
Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Sept. 26–Feb. 21, 2027
The clever, persistent, ubiquitous eastern gray squirrel finally takes center stage in Wilmer Wilson IV’s new body of installations, sculptures, performances, and works on paper. Developed through the museum’s inaugural research-driven residency, the project considers the social, civic, and cultural meaning of a species that shifts between pest, pet, and wildlife.
DIVA
Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado
Oct. 4–Jan. 31, 2027
What fuels star power? DIVA explores that question by tracing the onstage and offstage expectations placed on performance virtuosas across nearly 150 years of entertainment and fashion history. From opera and silent film icons to Hollywood Golden Age sex symbols, jazz and soul legends, and the many forms of the modern pop star, the exhibition examines the social value and disruptive force of celebrity.
Fighting for Freedom: Black Craftspeople and the Pursuit of Independence
Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina
Oct. 16, 2026–May 9, 2027
This exhibition surveys Black craftwork from the Revolutionary War to the present, showing how the resilience, agency, and personal expression of African American artisans were essential to the path toward freedom. The objects and design works on view demonstrate expertise in smithing, carpentry, weaving, and pottery, while also underscoring Black communities’ crucial role in shaping the material culture of the United States.
Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Oct. 23–Jan. 18, 2027
If you drive a car, own a cellphone, use a camera, or have even one piece of plastic, this exhibition is for you. Beneath the Surface links the history of American mining, drilling, and fracking with the development of photography over nearly two centuries, tracing the social, economic, material, and political history of an industry that operates beneath our feet.
Karon Davis: Not My Circus
Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington
Nov. 5–July 4, 2027
Built around the big top, this exhibition features carnivalesque tableaux made from plaster-cast sculptures modeled on people closest to Davis, including herself. As the remnants of older circuses haunt today’s often-empty or repurposed tents, the figures carry a disturbing charge, with a despairing clown and a vulnerable knife-thrower’s assistant creating an unsettling dance between the playful and the grim sides of performance.
Abbas Akhavan: Variations on a Garden
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Nov. 12–April 18, 2027
Abbas Akhavan’s fragile installations examine tensions between humans and the natural world through the lenses of privacy and preservation. As the first U.S. museum survey of the Iranian-Canadian artist who represented Canada at the 61st Venice Biennale, the exhibition highlights his use of soil, fauna, and water to emphasize humanity’s role in negotiating biology’s relentless, sometimes indifferent forces.
