New Museum fall 2026 season leans on an Arthur Jafa survey

The New Museum announced on June 8, 2026 an exhibition program for fall 2026 through winter 2027 headed by Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony, the largest museum survey of the artist's work to date and his first US museum survey. Per the announcement, the exhibition runs September 24, 2026 through January 3, 2027 across two floors of the museum's expanded building at 235 Bowery.

Organized by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari with curator Calvin Wang, the survey premieres new works alongside the films for which Jafa, born 1960, is known, among them Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) and The White Album (2019), which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. The exhibition takes its title from the jazz drummer Tony Williams, and Jafa's practice engages Black life in America through film and the moving image.

The season around it is compact. Diego Marcon's Arrivederci, Piggies!, the Italian artist's first solo museum exhibition in New York, premieres a new film supported by the museum's New Futures Production Fund and runs September 24, 2026 through January 31, 2027. The Bowery: Devil's Mile, curated by Lisa Phillips, the museum's director emerita, chronicles the street the museum has occupied since 1977, in the same dates. The fourth New Museum Triennial, The Outside Expands, opens in January 2027 under the curators Vivian Crocket and Isabella Rjeille.

For the city's art public, the program is the first full test of the doubled building that reopened on March 21, 2026: whether the New Museum can fill more galleries without diluting the single-artist focus that built its reputation. A two-floor commitment to one artist would have been impossible in the museum's former footprint. The quiet hinge is personnel — Phillips, who retired as director in April 2026 after twenty-six years, curates the Bowery history show as her parting act, and the season she helped shape will be carried out by the leadership that follows her.