The fall 2026 art calendar came into sharper focus this week when the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art released new details for its September 22 opening in Los Angeles. Founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, the museum occupies a 300,000-square-foot building in Exposition Park and includes more than 100,000 square feet of galleries. Its arrival anchors a season that also brings ambitious triennials, historical reassessments and major solo surveys across the United States.

• 1. Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles: Opening September 22, the institution will present visual storytelling across illustration, comics, painting, photography and cinema. The museum says its campus includes more than 30 galleries and a 13-acre landscape, making the opening one of the most consequential U.S. museum debuts in years.
• 2. Counterpublic 2026, St. Louis: The third edition of the civic-minded triennial, titled “Coyote Time,” runs September 10 through December 12. It brings approximately 50 new commissions and historical works to sites across St. Louis while addressing issues including climate, education and immigration.
• 3. Juanita McNeely in St. Louis: Two institutions are revisiting the Missouri-born feminist painter. The Saint Louis Art Museum opens a broad survey September 9, while the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis begins a related Counterpublic presentation September 10, bringing McNeely’s work back to her hometown region.
• 4. “If Emmett Till Lived,” Chicago: Opening September 10 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the exhibition asks what Emmett Till might have witnessed had he lived beyond 1955. Developed with historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr., it examines American history through photography and visual culture.
• 5. Teresa Margolles at MoMA and MoMA PS1: MoMA opens a focused Margolles presentation September 17, followed September 24 by MoMA PS1’s first large-scale U.S. museum exhibition of the Mexican artist. Her work addresses violence, migration, disappearance and the interconnected realities of the United States and Mexico.
• 6. “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous,” The Met: Opening October 4, the exhibition places Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock’s careers in parallel rather than treating Krasner primarily through her marriage. More than 120 works from over 80 lenders make it the first major New York presentation devoted to either artist in more than two decades.
• 7. “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New,” Whitney Museum: Opening October 11, the exhibition examines how Lichtenstein transformed comics, advertising and mechanical reproduction into a defining Pop vocabulary. The show also considers how later artists have copied, reworked and questioned his imagery.
• 8. “RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me,” San Francisco: Opening October 3, the exhibition combines nearly 200 works from the personal collection of BTS member RM and SFMOMA’s holdings. It is the first museum exhibition centered on RM’s collection and places Korean modern and contemporary artists in dialogue with international figures.
• 9. “Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images,” Hammer Museum: Beginning October 11 in Los Angeles, this survey features more than 60 works spanning roughly five decades. It gives overdue museum attention to the Jamaican-born abstractionist, whose paintings and prints drew heavily on architecture, movement and the changing urban environment.
• 10. Raven Chacon at SFMOMA: Opening October 24, SFMOMA’s New Work presentation features the Pulitzer Prize-winning Diné composer and artist. The project uses film, drawing and sound to examine Indigenous sovereignty, territorial expansion and the stories through which American landscapes are understood.
• 11. Carroll Dunham at ICA Miami: Opening December 1, the survey brings together more than 50 paintings made from 1983 to the present. ICA Miami describes it as Dunham’s first museum survey of paintings in more than 25 years, tracking his movement between abstraction, figuration and underground-comics imagery.
• 12. “Marfa, Marfa”: Josh T Franco’s book, due October 20, looks at the West Texas art destination through the relationship between Minimalism and rasquachismo, foregrounding Chicanx and Mexican American cultural histories alongside the legacy of Donald Judd.
• 13. “Primary: After and With Alma Thomas”: Alexis Pauline Gumbs approaches the life and work of Alma Thomas through poetry and prose. Scheduled for publication September 29, the book offers a different route into the legacy of one of the most important Black American abstractionists of the 20th century.
• 14. “The Floating World”: Ben Eastham’s novel, also due September 29, turns the contemporary art world into the setting for a story involving extreme wealth, climate anxiety, criticism and utopian ambition, bringing the institutional and market ecosystem into fiction.
• 15. Robert Wilson’s “The Space Behind the Face”: The late theater and opera visionary’s memoir is scheduled for November 3. It looks back on landmark productions, artistic collaborators and Wilson’s distinctive approach to staging, architecture, drawing and performance.
• 16. Leonora Carrington’s “Opus Siniestrus”: Scheduled for December 1, the collection brings Carrington’s rediscovered plays together in English, extending the continuing reassessment of the Surrealist artist and writer beyond the paintings for which she is best known.
• 17. Maurizio Cattelan at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin: Beginning September 10, Cattelan receives an exhibition tied to his 2026 Preis der Nationalgalerie. The pairing of an artist famous for provocation with Mies van der Rohe’s transparent modernist building makes the project an international fall-season focal point.
• 18. Toronto Biennial of Art: The fourth edition runs from September 26 through December 20 under curator Allison Glenn. Titled “Things Fall Apart,” it takes its name from Chinua Achebe’s novel while examining fractures that reverberate across histories and geographies.
• 19. Le Large Museum, Paris: Scheduled to open October 17 on Île Seguin, the new institution arrives during the Art Basel Paris period. Its inaugural exhibition, curated by Cecilia Alemani, focuses on evolving relationships between humans and machines.
• 20. Franz West in Vienna: Beginning in November, the Albertina Modern will stage a major hometown retrospective of Franz West, while related programming elsewhere in Vienna expands the view of an artist who repeatedly blurred the boundaries between sculpture, furniture, participation and everyday life.

Taken together, the season favors breadth over a single dominant movement. New institutions are opening, established museums are revisiting canonical figures, and artists previously pushed to the margins of conventional art history are receiving larger platforms. For U.S. audiences, the strongest concentration runs through Los Angeles, St. Louis, New York and San Francisco, making the next three months one of the most institutionally active stretches of 2026.