2025 FALL ART SEASON: Downtown Art Guide

As we move into fall, the downtown art scene is alive with extraordinary shows across Tribeca and the Lower East Side that ooze modernity and authority, with artists grappling with and acting as witness to our times.

We are pleased to share Artmuse’s Downtown neighborhood guide with the Lower Manhattan shows you must see this season.

Jack Shainman Gallery

Hank Willis Thomas: I Am Many

An expansive show at Jack Shaman features new works by Hank Willis Thomas, whose amazing conceptual practice employs a range of media—from photography and sculpture to video, installation, and screen printing—oftentimes utilizing iconic historical and contemporary images of political resistance and protest.

I AM MANY unites large-scale sculptures, retroreflective, lenticular and textile works, and mixed-media assemblages to show how the past and present are ever-connected. These works explore the legacies of exploitation and oppression and emphasize new forms of community, solidarity, and resistance.

September 5-November 1

46 Lafayette Street

Hank Willis Thomas, Love Over Rules (Horizon Blue), courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery

Company Gallery + Hauser & Wirth

Ambera Wellman

With her career skyrocketing, Ambera Wellmann debuts two new bodies of work simultaneously with One Thousand Emotions at Company Gallery and Darkling at Hauser & Wirth. Across both shows, you will be welcomed into an alluring world of evil, chaos, and desire with rich canvases filled with figures that could be plucked from 17th-century Dutch Painting (which the artist studied)—but are sharply modern in theme.

September 5-October 25

Company Gallery: 145 Elizabeth Street

Hauser & Wirth: 134 Wooster Street

Ambera Wellmann, People Loved and Unloved, 2025, courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

P.P.O.W.

Erin M. Riley: Life Looks Like a House For a Few Hours

The innovative force Erin M. Riley primarily creates meticulous, hand-woven tapestries that focus on contemporary women’s issues. Her new explosive works at P.P.O.W. present complex, at times melancholy, and even painful assemblages of domestic scenes that melt together intimate moments, family photos, car crashes, iPhone selfies, and newspaper clippings. These impressive works investigate the corners of Riley’s own personal identity, and, in-so-doing, continue her amazing evolution of the relationship between fine art and craft.

September 5-October 18

392 Broadway

Erin M. Riley, You Broke, 2024, courtesy of PPOW

Alexander Grey Associates

Donald Moffett: Snowflake

In our era of escalated crises, from climate change to democratic breakdowns, Donald Moffett’s new works push the possibilities for politically engaged art. With a long resume of art activism, including helping found the collective Gran Fury (who were known for creating powerful graphics during the AIDS crisis), Moffett and his work since the 1980s have long addressed the most pressing issues of his time. Snowflake is no different, with new extruded oil and spray paintings, installation of bumper stickers, and video projects that engage with ideas of democratic breakdowns and institutional erosion.

September 12-October 25

384 Broadway

Anat Egbi

Caleb Hahne Quintana: A Boy That Don’t Bleed

With his colorful explorations of family, friendship and memories of home, Caleb Hahne Quintana explores selfhood and the unconscious. Illuminated in bright, warm hues, these impressive canvasses display Hahne Quintana’s impressive command over shadow, light, and movement. This show of new works is not to be missed, solidifying the 30-year-old artist as one to watch.

September 5-October 18

372 Broadway

Caleb Hahne Quintane, Specter (Threshold), 2024-5, courtesy of Anat Egbi

Arsenal Contemporary

Wanda Koop: Magnetic Field

Mysterious and enigmatic, Canadian artist Wanda Koop’s paintings emanate a glow that lures the viewer towards them. Presented in conjunction with LA’s Night Gallery, Magnetic Field features atmospheric depictions of nature that explore the tension between evolving technologies and environmental collapse.

September 5-November 1

21 Cortlandt Alley, 2nd Floor

Wanda Koop, Moon Walk #10, 2024, courtesy of Arsenal Contemporary

Bortolami

Naotaka Hiro: Of Two

With the Japanese-American artist Naotaka Hiro’s second solo presentation at Bortolami, process meets performance in these expressive, dynamic paintings and sculptures that are also the result of the artist’s physical interaction with the materials—such as using his body as mold for sculpture or working under his panels as he paints. Working across canvas, wood, and bronze, Hiro creates process-driven masterpieces that are lyrical and imaginative. This colorful show is not to be missed.

September 5-November 1

39 Walker

Naotaka Hiro, Untitled (Limbs, Blue), 2025, courtesy of Bortolami.

Voltz Clarke

Gemma Gené: CLEAN

With her hyper-realistic depictions of cleaning products, the Barcelona-born, Los Angeles-based artist Gemma Gené explores the concept of wiping one’s life clean and starting over, and the tools we use to do so. Reflecting on themes of destruction and renewal, these meticulously-detailed works transform the power of household items, heightening their emotional weight and emphasizing art’s transformative power.

Opens September 10

195 Chrystie Street

Gemma Gené, Dawn, 2025, courtesy Voltz Clarke

uffner & liu

Anne Buckwalter: Lover’s Knot

With an emphasis on rural and domestic life, Lover’s Knot presents interior vignettes from a fictional house. With each new painting, Anne Buckwalter renders these scenes with tactile warmth and evokes Pennsylvania Dutch folk art tradition. Buckwalter also introduces a new series of geometric works that depart from the interior scenes she is known for yet are filled with endless details of “Americana” charm all the same.

September 5-November 1

170 Suffolk Street

Anne Buckwalter, Lazy Susan, 2025, courtesy of uffner & lie

Perrotin

Leslie Hewitt: Soft Tremulous Light

With her fascinating and poetic new series of works, Leslie Hewitt explores the bounds between space, light, time, and shadow. “Riffs on Real Time” layers found photographs, archival books, magazines, and obscured documents into an assemblage, anchored by her studio floor. Sculptural works “Birthmark” and “Rhombus or Humming Song (1-4-5)” are disruptive interrogations of the “white cube” space.

September 4-October 18

130 Orchard

Leslie Hewitt, Riffs on Real Time, 2024, courtesy of Perrotin

Derek Eller

Jameson Green: Crutches, Crosses, Caskets / Caskets, Crosses, Crutches

We at Artmuse have watched with great admiration Jameson Green’s burgeoning career for the last five years and have witnessed the artist evolve and grow with each show. Now, Green presents a poignant new body of paintings. Referencing a representation of the Black community centered around a cyclical metaphor for change, Green flips this metaphor and makes his exhibition about rebirth: “From the ground we arise; through religion we find faith, and through strength we persevere.”

September 5-October 11

38 Walker Street

Jameson Green, Colored TV, 2025, courtesy of Derek Eller

James Cohan

Jesse Mockrin: First Romance

Jesse Mockrin is known for radically transforming Old Masters paintings into vivid, contemporary works that recontextualize cultural narratives into a distinctly contemporary, feminist lens. With her new series of graphite drawings, Mockrin turns her eye to men, juxtaposing the struggles of male youth in today’s America with depictions of underage soldiers of the Civil War, present-day Civil War reenactors, and Italian Renaissance paintings of young noblemen and soldiers— providing a through line for masculinity today.

October 10-November 1

52 Walker