While New York Fashion Week has come to an end, for anyone whose eyes are still starved for beauty, there is a formidable list of ongoing women-led art happenings to fill your calendar.
Here, we recommend some long, leisurely art strolling in lieu of that perpetual scrolling.
The waterside Victorian cottage (now a museum), in a landmarked park on Staten Island that once belonged to photographer Alice Austen (1866–1952) and her partner, Gertrude Tate, inspired this group exhibition, plumbing the depths of lesbian artists’ connection to the water. Among the artists included by curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley are Jenna Gribbon, Meryl Meisler, Joan E. Biren, and, of course, Austen.
Through February 21.
There’s always something slightly amiss in Sasha Gordon’s work, where hyperrealistic self-portraits are dropped into surreal, absurd settings. Take, say, the image of a calm figure, her sneakers off and headphones on, methodically clipping her toenails in the park as a volcano explodes in the background. That they are painted with a distinctly luminous beauty only makes them that much more disquieting. Sitting in that discomfort is an essential part of the experience of enjoying Gordon’s work.
September 25 through November 1.
The language of L.A.-based artist June Edmonds is vibrant color and repetitive pattern and rich texture, creating a singular, sacred geometry guided by her personal reflections on Black history. “The Sky Remains the Same,” Edmonds’s first major solo New York exhibition, draws inspiration from the ebe-amẹn, a powerful symbol of protection from the Kingdom of Benin.
Through October 25.
The late artist—whose freewheeling, expressionistic sculptures and frenetic drawings incorporating the female form inspired generations of feminist artists—is the subject of an excellent exhibition that first opened in March at Phillips Academy Andover’s Addison Gallery and is now at NYU’s Grey Art Museum. Though Leaf’s husband, Robert Frank, would get much of the art world fanfare in their lifetime, her extraordinary work deserves the same attention. As Leaf once told Hyperallergic: “You can make something and you see it. But then you have to spend your life to get the world to see it.”
Through December 13.
The title of the Bay Area painter’s solo show is “Brainwaves and Wavestorms”—fitting, since there is a rhythmic repetition that has an almost hypnotic effect on the eye in fantastical works like Superlunary Landscape With Orbiting Flowers and Repeat Stroke (2025) and Atomized Illumination (2025). The experience of them up close and at a distance is entirely different but equally engaging.
Through October 2.
Myth, magical realism, and memory have all long found their way into the transportive work of Colombia-born, New York-based artist María Berrío. In her debut solo show, “Soliloquy of the Wounded Earth,” Berrío’s fantastical visual meanderings are large scale (which really allows the viewer to feel enveloped by them) and fuse watercolor with Japanese paper collage, giving them new dimension.
Through October 18.
In Vienna-based artist Sissi Farassat’s latest body of work, “Revelation,” it’s not what you see, but what you don’t that is the most revealing. Using glamorous Old Hollywood–style found portraits of anonymous women, Farassat meticulously covers portions of their images with overmat, putting certain features into focus and obscuring others. Here, absence makes the eye grow stronger.
Through October 18.
For the last 50-plus years that she’s focused her lens on Mexico’s many Indigenous communities, photographer Graciela Iturbide’s perspective has never felt like that of a mere observer. The connection to and reverence for her subjects and the natural environment they call home—Iturbide was born in Mexico City—has lent her work a signature intimacy.
October 16 through January 12.
The lively, enchanted little worlds that Danielle Kosann creates with spirited brushstrokes feel like an evolution of Florine Stettheimer’s output, evoking a similar energy and stylish joie de vivre. And, much like with Stettheimer, leaning in close to works such as You Still Haven’t Met All of the People Who Are Going to Love You (also the title of the exhibition) reveals even more dazzling details. If you make it to the opening on the 25th, you’ll be treated to an accompanying food installation by Allison Jacks, inspired by Kosann’s vision.
September 25 through October 9.
Each of Somali-born artist Uman’s kaleidoscopic canvases is a world unto itself, one where riotous color, intricate geometries, and bizarre figures create an abstract topography that seems sprung from a dream and executed in a meditative state. Look at them for a while and you’ll feel like you could fall into such a state yourself.
October 30 through December 17.
The ghostly figures—with distended pregnant bellies, limbs akimbo, eyes agape, and sly smiles—roaming Elizabeth Glaessner’s murky waterscape paintings seem suspended between life and death, birth and rebirth. Works like Hot Spring and Out of Body are unsettling and eerie and spellbindingly beautiful.
Through October 18.
To inform her new collection of watercolors and paintings, artist Emma Kohlmann looked to the late Monica Sjöö’s 1987 feminist tome, The Great Cosmic Mother, a guide for the goddess movement that wove together religion, archaeology, and culture to connect women to the earth. Sjöö’s inspiration is clear in Kohlmann’s ritualistically rendered earth-toned flora and fauna, symbols, and primitive figures, which, with their gridlike arrangement in the gallery, beg for quiet veneration.
Through October 4.
Hanson’s work has graced the pages of every major fashion magazine (this one included), and “In the ‘90s,” the exhibition coinciding with a Rizzoli book of the same name, celebrates one specific and wildly influential period of it. Hanson’s lens on fashion is unique because her friendship with her subjects created a relaxed, playful intimacy. It’s Naomi and Carolyn and Kate and Christy et al. unfiltered—which is to say, at their absolute coolest. As Sofia Coppola quips in the book: “I grew up with these images; these were the women I wanted to be… They’re not trying to be sexy, or someone else, they just are.”
Through November 8.
There is no end and no beginning to much of the Brazil-born, Brooklyn-based multimedia artist’s work, in which oil and plastic and paper and sculpture and fabric blend and weave and meld together in what Ana Cláudia Almeida calls an “ecosystem of pieces.” That ecosystem of gestural lines and tactile figures and rich, offbeat color mash-ups makes for organic abstractions that are hard to look away from.
Through October 18.
Artist and composer Amy Sheffer has been using her body, voice, and canvas as a vehicle for artistic expression and experimentation since the late 1960s. Her experiences with LSD therapy have fed many of her fantastical paintings, which seem to float and oscillate between dreams and reality.
Through October 25.
