New York's autumn art season brings West African modernism, Arthur Jafa and Teresa Margolles
Three of New York's biggest art venues are opening major shows within days of each other.
The Museum of Modern Art in Midtown Manhattan is presenting Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa until 2 January 2027, according to listings detailed by The Art Newspaper. The show is billed as the first major museum exhibition devoted to post-liberation architecture in West Africa. That term refers to buildings designed after independence from colonial rule.
The exhibition brings together 400 objects. They come from Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria and Cameroon, and date from the 1960s to the early 1980s. Drawings, models, photographs and archival material trace how new nations built universities, parliament buildings, housing and cultural centres.
Downtown, the New Museum on the Bowery in Manhattan opens Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony on 25 September. It runs to 5 January 2027. The show is the artist and film-maker Arthur Jafa's first museum survey in the United States. A survey is a career-spanning exhibition. It fills two floors of the museum's expanded space.
Jafa named the show after Tony Williams, the late American jazz drummer. It includes Love Is the Message, The Message is Death from 2016 and The White Album from 2019. The White Album won the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice Biennale in Italy.
Across the East River, MoMA PS1 in Queens opens Teresa Margolles: En el lugar de los hechos (At the Scene) on 24 September. It runs into February 2027. Margolles is a Mexican artist who trained as a forensic pathologist, a doctor who investigates causes of death. In the early 1990s she co-founded SEMEFO, which worked as both a death metal band and a performance art group.
A centrepiece is La promesa (The Promise, 2012). The work grew out of research into femicide, the killing of women and girls, in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. It involved an abandoned family home that was taken apart and transported. The piece addresses loss and displacement with plain, documentary materials.
PS1 is also planning a wide-ranging survey of Black abstraction for autumn 2026, as noted by The New York Times. The New Museum's programme also includes New Humans: Memories of the Future, which opened on 21 March 2026 and explores how technology has changed ideas of what it means to be human, according to the New Museum.
What makes this stand out for visitors is the range. Architecture, video and forensic-based installation rarely share the same week. All three main openings sit within easy reach by subway. Book ahead. Autumn is the city's busiest season.
