The Best Shows to See Across America This January
From Sohrab Hura’s autobiographical survey to Les Levine’s parodic installation built around Vincent Van Gogh
From Sohrab Hura’s autobiographical survey to Les Levine’s parodic installation built around Vincent Van Gogh

Les Levine | Ulrik, New York | 2 November – 25 January
Vincent van Gogh must have seemed omnipresent when Les Levine, pioneering video artist and self-identified ‘media sculptor’, produced Analyze Lovers: The Story of Vincent for Utrecht’s Centraal Museum in 1990. It was the centennial of Van Gogh’s death; he was the subject of numerous blockbuster exhibitions; and his paintings were regularly breaking auction records. Levine’s video, currently on view at Ulrik alongside a selection of related works, gently parodies efforts to locate meaning within art and to separate, if possible, artists from their mythologies. – Chris Murtha
Sohrab Hura | MoMA PS1, New York | 10 October – 17 February
New Delhi-based artist Sohrab Hura’s first US survey, ‘Mother’, showcases the many different mediums he employs, from the lens-based practice for which he is best-known to more recent forays into drawing and painting. Sitting somewhere between testimony and confession, his perspective scrambles the autobiographical and the sociopolitical in unexpected and often revealing ways.
The black and white photographs comprising the earliest work on display, Land of a Thousand Struggles (2005–06), document the daily hardships experienced by rural communities in central India, as well as their ongoing fight for dignity and justice. Hura pairs the images with hand-scrawled captions that situate them within a diaristic frame, offsetting the possibility of objectifying his subjects through the camera lens. – Murtaza Vali
Cady Noland | Glenstone Museum, Potomac | 17 October – 23 February
In 1987, artist Cady Noland delivered a lecture entitled ‘Towards a Metalanguage of Evil’, which theorized that psychopathy is at the heart of American society, wherein success is gained through violence and manipulation. Oft quoted by scholars and critics reviewing her work, this lecture is regarded as the key to parsing an oeuvre of readymade sculptures as beguiling and confrontational as the artist herself. Following an ascendant career in the late 1980s and ’90s as one of the art world’s most elusive, abrasive figures, Noland has largely retreated from public life since the 2000s, mainly appearing via legal counsel to litigate the validity of collectors’ attempts at either selling or restoring her work. Many saw her blockbuster 2018 retrospective at Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt and a 2021 presentation at New York’s Galerie Buchholz as her swan song, making her reappearance in 2023 with brand new work in a solo exhibition at Gagosian in New York a surprising move. – Madeleine Seidel
Jeffrey Gibson | Mass MoCA, Massachusetts | 3 November – May 2026
It’s fitting that, from the opening moment of the Cherokee and Choctaw artist Jeffrey Gibson’s expansive new show at MASS MoCA, ‘POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT’, he’s rarely in the spotlight alone. On a crisp autumn afternoon in North Adams, Massachusetts, he takes the stage for a public talk with the writer and activist Albert McLeod, from the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation and Metis community of Norway House in northern Manitoba. ‘Separating it into two words, it’s like the power comes from a multiplicity of things,’ Gibson says of the exhibition’s title. ‘I think it somehow feels more collective. In my mind, it’s speaking not just about one person, but about a group of beings, or some sort of grouping.’ – Jesse Dorris
‘Scientia Sexualis’ | Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles | 5 October – 2 March
Bodily autonomy is a fragile affair. This present reality finds historical context in ‘Scientia Sexualis’ at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which offers a window onto the ways in which scientific discourses of sex, gender and sexuality have violent (racist, colonial) histories or are put to violent ends. Curated by Jeanne Vaccaro and Jennifer Doyle, the exhibition sees 27 artists using menstrual blood, hormones, pills, latex gloves and toilets to turn the ‘science of sex’ into a communal art project instead of a diagnostic tool. The works on view range from grimly realistic to radically utopic, from bubblegum-pink paintings to disorienting, abstract films. It’s a powerful array of erotic possibilities. Colourful banners (all 2022) by Cauleen Smith herald the world we’ve made and the one we have yet to build. ‘YOUR PAST MADE MY FUTURE,’ one declares. ‘WELCOME TO THE AFTERMATH,’ says another. – Grace Byron
Main image: Sohrab Hura, The Coast (detail), 2020, video still. Courtesy: Collection Moraes-Barbosa