5 Shows to See in the US This October

Steve McQueen | Dia Beacon and Dia Chelsea, New York | 12 May – 26 May 2025

I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. – Ralph Ellison 

This refrain from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) has been referenced thousands of times in Black cultural studies, deployed so often that we have risked emptying it of its meaning. The most imaginative artists, though, can give new amplitude to, and find new cadences in, the texts and ideas we think we know so well. Ellison, whose work raises eternal questions around the meaning of visibility in a racialized world, is a vital connective tissue binding together two current exhibitions by Steve McQueen at Dia Beacon and Dia Chelsea. – Zoë Hopkins

Tau Lewis | Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston | 29 August – 20 January 2025

Entering the Fotene Demoulas Gallery at the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, viewers encounter a quintet of towering soft sculptures by Tau Lewis, a Toronto-born, Brooklyn-based artist of Jamaican descent. With names ranging from The Night Woman to The Reaper (all works 2024), these larger-than-life beings are composed of natural and manmade materials – as varied as goatskin, coral, gold thread and steel – collected by the proudly self-taught artist. Akin to these materials, the figures are hybrid, drawing upon an array of mythological and historical sources. What are these beings’ stories, and why have they landed here? The Last Transmission, a circular quilt in the room’s centre, may hint at their cosmology: mundane objects including house keys, seashells and silver spoons are overlaid on long strips of fabric, creating a pleasingly repetitive pattern. The quilt’s outermost circle evokes eyes of protection, a ward against those wishing to do harm – yet this work, like the entire exhibition, delightfully evades straightforward explanations. – Thea Quiray Tagle  

Christine Kozlov | American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York | 26 September – 9 February 2025

Exhibited in the palatial South Gallery of the newly reopened American Academy of Arts and Letters, Christine Kozlov’s Information: No Theory (1970) consists of a large, antiquated recorder and a ‘continuous’ loop tape, which an accompanying print by Kozlov states will record ‘all the sounds audible in this room’ throughout the duration of the exhibition. Yet, this recording will not be a complete document of the exhibition as ‘the nature’ of the tape requires ‘that new information erases old information’. The recorder will reset every two minutes. The work, then, shows that ‘proof of the existence of the information does in fact not exist in actuality, but is based on probability’.

Curated by Rhea Anastas and Nora Schultz, ‘Christine Kozlov’ – the artist’s largest solo (and to date, only) exhibition in the United States – showcases the brilliance and intellectual rigour of Kozlov’s practice, focusing on her years in New York’s conceptual art scene in the 1960s and 1970s. The immaculately researched and organized vitrines spread across the gallery spaces establish Kozlov as a major figure in this mode of artmaking. She collaborated with Joseph Kosuth and Art & Language, and her work was included in landmark exhibitions curated by Lucy Lippard and Kynaston McShine. – Madeleine Seidel

Tina Girouard​​​​​​​ | Center for Art, Research, and Alliances (CARA), New York  | 20 September – 12 January 2025

The first thing you will see upon entering Tina Girouard’s retrospective at the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances (CARA) is a loop of floral fabric that hangs down from the second floor. Drawn from a set of 1940s-era fabrics that Girouard received from her mother-in-law, who in turn received them from a relative named Solomon Matlock, the ‘Solomon’s Lot’ fabrics (1970s) recur in various installations and performances across 50 years of her collaborative practice. Girouard’s loop recalls a contemporaneous work by conceptual artist Daniel Buren: Painting-Sculpture, travail in situ (1971) – a large sheet of striped fabric installed in the Guggenheim’s atrium that was ultimately removed because it blocked views of the other exhibited artists’ work, igniting a now-canonical discussion over the ‘bounds’ of an artwork and its relationship to the institution. In contrast, Girouard’s ‘Solomon’s Lot’ fabric loops back onto itself, a gesture of circularity rather than obfuscation. – Simon Wu 

‘Life on Earth’ |  The Brick, Los Angeles | 15 September – 21 December

Nobody goes to an exhibition of ecological art expecting to take home an escape plan for humankind’s impending extinction. Nor does ‘Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism’ – curated by The Brick’s deputy director, Catherine Taft, in the nonprofit’s new space – claim to provide any such solutions. What the exhibition does offer are ‘ways of being’, as Taft writes in the wall text, that decentre not only a male perspective but also a human one, while taking up ecofeminism’s central argument that environmental catastrophe is incepted by the Western capitalist patriarchy.

The 18 artists and collectives in ‘Life on Earth’ – hailing from as far afield as Belgium, French Guiana, Lithuania and South Korea – are less concerned with assigning blame than they are with establishing new models for living and making. The most pragmatic approach is taken by one of the senior figures in the exhibition, Leslie Labowitz Starus. In the 1980s – not long after the term ‘ecofeminist’ was coined – the artist began cultivating nutritious plants in her California garden, estimating that the greens could feed her entire neighbourhood. Her installation SPROUTIME IS NOW! (2024) includes trays of wheatgrass and protest signs bearing slogans like: ‘At the root of resistance is renewal.’ – Jonathan Griffin

^{Main image: Steve McQueen, Bounty (detail), 2024, installation view, Dia Chelsea, New York, 2024–25. Courtesy: © Steve McQueen and Dia Art Foundation; photograph: Don Stahl}