What to See Across the US and Canada This November

Abbas Akhavan | Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver | 5 September – 7 December 

How sustainable is the current moment? ‘One Hundred Years’, Abbas Akhavan’s exhibition at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, asks the audience to suspend both belief and their sense of time. The show of installations by the Montreal and Berlin-based artist, who will represent Canada at the 2026 Venice Biennale, considers the fictions and mechanisms that shape our subjectivities. In so doing, it reveals ways in which imposed binaries, both natural and constructed, are foundational to the structure of the art world, which instrumentalizes such divides to sustain looping narratives. – Xenia Benivolski 

Lu Yang | Amant, Brooklyn | 18 September – 15 February 2026

The ontological distance between body and flow of data has become minimal for Lu Yang, whose recent videos can be said to be technologically sophisticated Buddhist agitprop. The artist’s exhibition at Amant, ‘DOKU! DOKU! DOKU!: samsara.exe’, presents three videos – made with motion capture, 3D animation, game engines and artificial intelligence – that stage various timelines, scenarios and scenographies for Lu Yang’s digital avatar, DOKU, who, after much indulgence, realizes that Buddhist truths lie beyond the world of appearances, and embodiment, even when assisted by advanced technology, is ultimately frivolous. – Qingyuan Deng 

Suzanne Jackson | San Francisco Museum of Modern Art | 27 September – 1 March

The path through Suzanne Jackson’s retrospective, ‘What Is Love’, is structured by the various places in which she has lived: San Francisco, California; Fairbanks, Alaska; Savannah, Georgia; New Haven, Connecticut and other locations around the US. I first encountered Jackson through Kellie Jones’s pioneering scholarship on Black artists working in Los Angeles in the 1960s and ’70s; upon winding my way through the exhibition, however, this association between the artist and any one scene or school was supplanted by a general impression of passage as the pivotal heuristic for approaching Jackson’s practice. This is all the more appropriate given the formal character of the paintings themselves. Across the span of the exhibition, which takes us from the late 1960s to work from the past few years, Jackson demonstrates manifold ways of translating that geographic sense of drift into a subtly motile visual grammar. – Blake Oetting

Yasmine El Meleegy | Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh | 13 September – 6 September 

For centuries, sundry superstitions have stalked the mineral of salt. Beliefs persist in Europe that spilling salt is a bad omen, a sign that a demon might be lurking behind your shoulder, ready to abscond with your soul. In the Old Testament, Lot’s wife alchemized into a pillar of salt for daring to look back at the burning Sodom and Gomorrah – inverting legends of ancient armies spreading salt across the territory they had pillaged, scorching the earth.

There’s something ironic about salt’s association with destruction and decay, since it is actually a tool for preservation. Growing up, my family had a salt-related ritual of our own: each weekend, my dad would buy blocks of salt to soften the water on our rural property to prevent the pipes from prematurely degrading. It is to those blocks that my mind turned when I entered Yasmine El Meleegy’s installation Red Gold (2025), on view in a show of the same name at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. – Elizabeth Wiet 

Elizabeth Catlett | Art Institute of Chicago | 30 August – 4 January 2026

In May 1970, the defiant gust of Elizabeth Catlett’s voice swept from Mexico to Evanston, Illinois: ‘For I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black revolutionary artist, and all that it implies!’, she declared to those gathered at Northwestern University for the Conference on the Functional Aspects of Black Art. As opposed to addressing the crowd directly, she delivered her rousing speech over the phone. Having been labelled an ‘undesirable alien’ by the US government, in part due to her collaboration with Taller de Gráfica Popular (a Mexican printmaking collective), she was prohibited from re-entering the country of her birth. Fifty-five years after they were first uttered, the zephyr of Catlett’s remarks continues to reverberate at the Art Institute of Chicago, where her retrospective ‘A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies’ is on view. – Camille Bacon

^{Main image: Abbas Akhavan, ‘One Hundred Years’ (detail), 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Catriona Jeffries and the artist; photograph: Rachel Topham Photography}