Editors’ Picks: Twelve Exhibitions Opening in Massachusetts This Fall

Fall in Boston is a transformative time. The days shorten and the earth begins to ripen and slow, just when the calendar begins to boom. Every day, there are more openings and events than one person could reasonably attend (our Weekly Happenings emails are starting to look like CVS reciepts). 

So, where to begin? Our editors picked twelve exhibitions worth making time for this fall. 

Whether it’s the madcap accumulations of Mark Dion at the Concord Museum, the unflinching observations of Faith Ringgold at Mount Holyoke, or the enigmatic investigations of the six artists at the Carpenter Center, consider this our starting point for a very busy season ahead.

Want more? Visit our digital Art Radar map to discover exhibitions and events across Greater Boston, neighborhood by neighborhood, updated in real time.

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“Jenna Gribbon: Entwined,” August 19, 2026–January 3, 2027
Rose Art Museum
415 South Street, Waltham

As a kid, Jenna Gribbon discovered a book of Mary Cassatt’s paintings on a store’s bargain table and pored over every page, trying to work out the method beneath her magic. Today she’s known for her own bravura figurative paintings, especially portraits of her son Silas and her wife, the musician Mackenzie Scott, who performs as Torres. The more than forty paintings in Gribbon’s first museum survey explore themes of voyeurism and vulnerability, intimacy and identity, as she lavishes attention on flesh with lush wet-on-wet brushstrokes. Some paintings announce themselves as performances, complete with curtains and clamp lights or winks at art history; others capture quotidian moments of domestic life and queer desire—her wife clipping toenails over the toilet bowl, watching TV together in bed, having sex on a Sunday afternoon. Limbs often entwine on Gribbon’s canvases, and the features of one face sometimes surface on another’s. We only become ourselves, she suggests, in relation to others, especially to those we love. —Jacqueline Houton

“Leilah Babirye: Embaga ya Naki ne Naki (Wedding of Naki and Naki),” August 27, 2026–January 18, 2027
Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston
25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston

While museum weddings are increasingly the rage these days, the ICA has a different kind of celebration in mind this fall. Organized by Ruth Erickson and Max Gruber, the ICA is unveiling a new installation from Ugandan artist Leilah Babirye: a sculptural queer wedding. Babirye’s sculptures are adorned with elaborate jewelry made from other people’s junk—discarded bike chains, bottle caps, and rubber inner tubes. This repurposing of debris into beautiful headdresses is a subversion of the pejorative Luganda term “abasiyazi,” which directly translates to a type of rubbish, and is used against gay people. Babirye, who had to flee Uganda after being outed as gay, wanted to imagine what a Ugandan queer wedding could look like, one where family members, friends, and ancestors could all partake in the joy of ceremony. As such, the sculptures each occupy roles as in a formal procession—bride, groom, ring bearer, flower girl, bridesmaid, or groomsman—complete with a section of ancestral witnesses. The show marks Babirye’s first solo museum exhibition on the East Coast and will be accompanied by her first book, which itself might make for a lovely wedding gift. —Christian Jones

“Between the Bylines,” September 2–December 10, 2026
Boston University Art Galleries
855 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

The fourteen artists of “Between the Bylines” attend to the question of representation through the medium of the newspaper. Each artist engages the dual tactile and visual registers so intrinsic to print media, at times reworking, recontextualizing, or otherwise reflecting the nature of the paper itself. Odette England’s photographic collages (from her series Cropping Us In) layer photographs of women farmers atop press photographs from stories about US farmlands, effectively “cropping in” those who worked the land but were excluded from the public narrative about it. Lorie Novak points to the physicality of the newspaper itself, confronting both the inflation and the meagerness of its sections to visualize a history of “newsworthiness.” Clare Strand’s The Entropy Pendulum (2015) translates the process of being misrepresented or erased over time in a selection of photographs that become physically worn down by a swinging pendulum throughout the course of the show. 

The timeliness of “Between the Bylines” lies in its undercurrent: the precarity of the newspaper itself. While reckoning with the fact that the news has never achieved a holistic representation of society, the exhibition insists that we contemplate the implications of this quintessential form of representation falling apart nonetheless. It posits that the true value of the newspaper rests not in what it represents but in the mode of critique that it sparks. —Alisa Prince

“Faith Ringgold’s America,” September 8, 2026–May 30, 2027
Mount Holyoke College Art Museum
13 Lower Lake Road, South Hadley

If there’s any lesson to be gleaned from the flurry of cultural activity around the American Semiquincentennial—ranging from dueling federal commemoration initiatives to a 120-page roundtable in the art journal October—it’s that no one agrees on the proper tone to strike at this “deeply divided moment.” The newly reopened Mount Holyoke College Art Museum has opted to mark the occasion with an exhibition of two print portfolios by Faith Ringgold. The artist referred to one of them, six illustrations of the Declaration of Independence, as “probably the most challenging works of art I have ever created.” Each composition is ambivalently, and agonistically, divided in two: a letter from Abigail Adams is shown alongside Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, while the Boston Tea Party is juxtaposed with beaten Civil Rights protesters on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. In January, the exhibition rotates to a different set of juxtapositions: Ringgold’s works will be paired with others from the museum’s collection, offering a contrapuntal meditation on American history in the present. —Ramona Ngin

“Convergence of Horizons: Juan José Barboza-Gubo,” September 9–October 24, 2026
Praise Shadows Art Gallery
129 Kingston Street, Boston

Multidisciplinary artist Juan José Barboza-Gubo is an astute observer. The artist, whose work often centers nature, creates sculptures and paintings that highlight the environment’s color, movement, and energy, and humanity’s relationship to it. In his latest exhibition, “Convergence of Horizons,” Barboza-Gubo asks “How can one make visible that which never ceases to move?” The artist turned to nature and his practice to develop some answers, which arrived in fifteen crates from his studio in Lima, Peru. For instance, carved, acrylic, cylindrical sculptures with stone inlays call to mind swirling water carrying away a river’s rocks. A wall-bound series, Intentos de atrapar el silencio, attempts to capture the silence and seems to nod to the quiet, yet persistent climbing of the lianas, or woody vines, that make their way to the top of a forest canopy in search of sunlight. —Jacquinn Sinclair

“I’m right here with you,” September 11–November 30, 2026
Presented by Twenty Summers x Emergent Art Advisory at Stanley
494 Commercial Street, Provincetown

I recently returned to Victoria Chang’s 2020 poetry collection Obit, and in doing so, found myself lingering, as I have in the past, here: “I know now that to be loved as a child means to be watched.”

While Chang’s poems take the shape of obituaries, these lines have stayed with me as a reflection on what it means to be seen. They resurfaced while flipping through Love Pictures, Jess T. Dugan and Charlotte Cotton’s gorgeous recently published book of photographs and conversations. Now, “I’m right here with you,” a retrospective organized by Sophie Barfod and Gavin Kennedy, brings together twenty years’ worth of Dugan’s photography, drawing, video, and writing. The artist is known for creating photographs that convey a sense of vulnerability without feeling intrusive. Each person seems wholly willing to be seen. Dugan’s compositions are often simple, their subjects photographed against saturated fields of color or situated in domestic scenes or the natural landscape. Their ongoing approach to making art strikes me as a rigorous exercise in paying attention—to the ways people inhabit their bodies, their relationships, and the spaces around them. As a trans artist whose work engages questions of gender and identity, Dugan understands looking as an act of intimacy: a way of coming to know another person, and of being known in return. —Ava Mancing

“Cutouts, Mooncussers & Other Tales from the Outer Cape,” September 19–October 4, 2026
Hammock Gallery
361 Commercial Street, Provincetown

I was eight years old and living in Provincetown when I first heard tell of mooncussers—land pirates said to have lured ships toward the Cape’s dangerous shores with decoy lanterns, plundered the wrecks, and cursed the moonlight that threatened to ruin the ruse. That local legend is one of the wellsprings of inspiration for Boston-based artist Jak Ritger’s debut solo show at Hammock Gallery, a snug tangerine-and-turquoise shed that long housed a hammock store and now serves as an oceanfront home for art. Ritger aims to make full use of its unique architecture, projecting one video piece on the sand beneath the building, screening another on a monitor on the gallery’s ceiling, and rigging up lights, kinetic sculpture, and projections to build a mooncusser-worthy beacon on the structure’s second floor. Expect nods to other eldritch local lore, from a Truro tale of alien abduction to an installation invoking the most iconic headstone in Provincetown’s cemetery. But personal history plays a role too, with eerie images of the East Dennis home of Ritger’s late grandmother and an uncanny photo of Ritger’s father holding one of his own AbEx paintings on a frozen Cold Storage Beach. That painting no longer exists, and Ritger’s father has been edited out of the picture—a haunting start to a show that feels like a fitting kickoff to the spooky season. —Jacqueline Houton

“Isamu Noguchi: ‘I am not a designer,’” September 19, 2026–January 3, 2027
Peabody Essex Museum
161 Essex Street, Salem

The defiant title of Peabody Essex Museum’s latest exhibition may come as a surprise given that Isamu Noguchi is perhaps most widely renowned for his furniture designs. The visionary Japanese American artist’s akari light fixtures have been replicated ad infinitum, and his minimalist, biomorphic tables are now emblematic of early modern interior design. Though Noguchi was not opposed to mass production, he was certainly opposed to being pigeonholed as a designer of art-turned-products. Taking Noguchi’s declaration in a 1949 interview as the basis for the retrospective, PEM promises to offer unique insight into the artist’s practice, philosophy, and contemporaries—including his friends Martha Graham, R. Buckminster Fuller, and Constantin Brâncuși. There is furniture here; but there are also archival photographs, abstract sculptures, architectural models, even playground prototypes. This retrospective provides a look at how Noguchi’s genre-blurring style was as playful as it was meticulous, as decorative as it was functional. It may even help make sense of another quote he famously made in reference to Slide Mantra, his debut piece at the 1986 Venice Biennale, “Art is something to be felt through a child’s buttocks.” —Christian Jones

“Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love,” September 26, 2026–January 18, 2027
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
465 Huntington Avenue, Boston

In her formative book South of Pico, scholar and curator Dr. Kellie Jones describes artist Suzanne Jackon’s 1970s paintings as “…dreamy, colorful landscapes, lyrical and surreal, with no clear agenda that could be labeled ‘political’ beyond the use of the black figure itself.” This, she notes, was initially unexpected; through her Gallery 32, Jackson made waves by exhibiting the work of Black Panther leaders. But Jackson’s work in both art and advocacy had always been more nuanced than the delivery of a single message. Much like her LA compatriots Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger, her first love was dance, and that preoccupation with performance—strengthened by a Yale MFA in theater design—has informed the fluidity, movement, and conceptual richness of the more than sixty paintings and drawings to be exhibited in the artist’s first full retrospective, “Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love,” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Long overdue, the show will chart six decades of work—from early compositions to later “anti-canvases,” free-standing (or rather free-hung) dried and peeled paint bolstered by netting and other objects—presenting a creative force who has always remained free from the constraints of expectation. —Jessica Shearer

“Knowledge Is Myth: Chimeric Continuities,” October 1–December 13, 2026
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge

I come back often to Joan Didion’s axiom: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It is, assuredly, the only way I know how to live my own life, and it has been (since before recorded history) the way humans relate to ourselves, each other, and other living things. Opening next month, “Knowledge Is Myth: Chimeric Continuities,” curated by Danni Shen, features six artists who explore systems shaped across time, and even across species, to unearth stories rooted in the fibers of ancestry and instinct. Through wide-ranging multimedia work, including a new site-specific installation by Cole Lu, these artists construct narratives that shape the contours of our understanding and inform the stories we create, tell, and use to survive. —Jessica Shearer

“Douglas Weathersby Environmental Services: Chopped,” October 3–31, 2026
Gallery VERY
59 Wareham Street, Boston

For nearly two decades, Douglas Weathersby has meticulously catalogued the labor and mundane necessities that make up his days through Environmental Services, his working business and conceptual art practice. An art preparator and installation manager who works across many of Boston’s art spaces, Weathersby records the granular details of work and life (you can see an example of one in our own Issue 15 artist project.) The form is basic and idiosyncratic: date, billable hours, mileage, and lists of tasks, thoughts, and things that may or may not have gotten “done.” For his show at Gallery VERY, Weathersby documents the process of sanding and painting the floors of the Wareham Street studio gallery, where layers of paint reveal their own accumulated history of the space. Labor becomes both the activity being recorded and the means through which another kind of record is revealed. —Jameson Johnson

“Mark Dion: Eccentric Collectors Like Us,” October 9, 2026–March 7, 2027
The Concord Museum
53 Cambridge Turnpike, Concord

The Concord Museum may not be the first place you’d expect to encounter contemporary art, but it’s particularly well suited to Mark Dion—the New Bedford-born artist whose work has long examined the systems humans create to catalogue the world around us (readers might recall his thirty-year retrospective at the ICA / Boston in 2017). “Eccentric Collectors Like Us” grew out of an invitation to Dion to dig into a museum that itself began with an eccentric small-town collector. In the mid-1800s, Cummings E. Davis amassed thousands of local artifacts and curiosities—from Revolutionary War objects to possessions of his neighbor Henry David Thoreau—that would become the foundation of the Concord Museum’s collection. Dion mined the collection, selecting rarely seen objects to be presented alongside a field guide in lieu of wall labels. Here, the museum becomes the terrain and Davis a primary specimen. His habits may reflect something more universal: our compulsion to collect, classify, and preserve a material world. —Jameson Johnson