Summer is over, September is here, and New York's art world is coming back to life ✨

After the slower pace of summer, September is the moment when everything starts again: new shows open, well known artists return to the galleries, and suddenly there is once more too much worth seeing. So instead of sending you running across the whole city, this time I built you a light route with four excellent shows in Tribeca, all a few minutes' walk from one another.

You can arrive from 11:00 in the morning, start on Broadway, and walk between all of them.
The route is relevant from September 10.

1. Tony Cragg | Marian Goodman Gallery | 385 Broadway
📅 September 10 to October 24, 2026

Tony Cragg is one of the most important British sculptors of his generation. For five decades he has been exploring what material can do: mass, volume, and movement. Cragg works with bronze, wood, stone, glass, and steel, and out of these heavy, industrial materials he creates large, twisting, flowing forms that move between total abstraction and hints of the human body and of nature. The result looks almost liquid, as if the material itself is still in a process of change and motion.

And if these forms look familiar to you, you may have already seen a work of his in New York: Points of View, a permanent installation of three monumental stainless steel sculptures in the lobby of One Vanderbilt, right across from Grand Central Terminal. Each of the sculptures weighs more than 2,000 pounds, and the work was designed especially for the space and its relationship to Grand Central. It is also Cragg's first permanent public work in New York.

2. Hew Locke | The Wanderers | P·P·O·W | 390 Broadway
📅 September 9 to October 24, 2026

A few steps away is the exhibition of Hew Locke. Locke was born in Edinburgh but raised in Guyana, during the period when the country moved from British colonial rule to independence. That background sits at the heart of his practice for more than three decades: through richly ornamented sculptures, boats, historical figures, and documents he has intervened on, he examines empire, colonialism, and what remains of them long after the rule itself has ended.

The exhibition includes, among other things, a fleet of boats loaded with beads, medals, coins, and flags; sculptures of figures such as Queen Victoria; and original share certificates of railway and trading companies from the colonial era. And this may be the strongest part: the paperwork that literally financed commerce and empire becomes, itself, the surface on which Locke paints, investigates, and reinterprets that history.

The result is beautiful, dense, and almost festive at first glance, but beneath the surface lie questions about power, money, migration, memory, and the way history keeps shaping the present.

3. Melissa Joseph | Casserole Culture | Charles Moffett | 394 Broadway
📅 September 9 to October 17, 2026

A few more steps, and we reach Melissa Joseph. Joseph creates two-dimensional works in a distinctive technique called needle felting. She translates family photographs, childhood memories, and everyday moments into tender scenes built by pressing wool fibers with a needle. The soft material gives the works an intimate, nostalgic feeling, heightened by the hazy visual effect the felting technique creates.

Her choice of this medium also carries a wider context in art history. For years, textile crafts and handwork were considered lesser next to "high art," in part because they were associated with domestic labor and with women. With Joseph, the material that was once left outside the canon steps into the center of the stage and becomes a contemporary painterly language in its own right.

4. Ilana Savdie + Chaïm Soutine | Savdie / Soutine | James Cohan | 48 Walker Street
📅 September 10 to October 24, 2026

And to close, an exhibition that connects two painters separated by almost a hundred years.

The show brings together Chaïm Soutine and Ilana Savdie, two painters who use color, distortion, and texture to break down the body and the image.

Chaïm Soutine, one of the important figures of the School of Paris and of early modernism, preferred emotional intensity and the materiality of paint over an accurate depiction of reality.

Savdie, a Colombian artist who works today in Brooklyn, paints bodies that dissolve into acidic, intense, almost neon colors. Her figures come apart into layers of paint, transparencies, and textures influenced by the surrealist spirit of Salvador Dalí and by digital language.

For both of them the body is never stable or whole, but is always in a process of change, dissolution, and coming into being again.

And if you have already made a gallery day in Tribeca, you can end at Frenchette on West Broadway, sit over a glass of wine and something to eat, and digest everything you saw.

Save this post for the next time you are looking for something to do in New York in September. ✦