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Museums 2 min read

Frida and Diego closes at MoMA on Saturday, and five shows open behind it

Five empty pale picture frames in pale wood hanging in a row on a dark brown wall, the one at the left tilted well off level and the other four hanging square

A museum’s calendar is read backwards. The opening dates are a plan; the closing dates are a deadline, and only one of the two can be missed.

Going, and going soon

Frida and Diego: The Last Dream — through 12 September, with a member last look on the 13th. Art Lab: Sound — through 13 September. The Modern Window: Julien Ceccaldi — through 30 September. Peggy Weil: Core Memory — through 4 October.

Running on, with room to plan

Pierre Huyghe: UUmwelt to 29 November; Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa to 2 January 2027; Odili Donald Odita: Songs from Life to 21 February 2027; and It’s Alive! A Century of Animation from the Collection, which opened on 1 August and runs to summer 2027.

What opens before November

Sarah Michelson: nowhere, 15 September to 11 October. Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives, from 20 September to 2 May 2027. Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design and Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies, both from 27 September to 13 June 2027. The Surrealist Book: Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors, from 4 October to 23 January 2027. Jakob Kudsk Steensen: Wetland, from 12 October to 7 March 2027.

Then Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio from 25 October to 27 February 2027, and Na Mira: NO SMOKING from 14 November to 15 February 2027.

Outside the building

Yoko Ono: IMAGINE PEACE has been up since 3 September and stays into spring 2027. At MoMA PS1 and Socrates Sculpture Park, Ecologies of Care and In the Making 2026 both run 19 September to 15 November.

The useful pattern in that list is that this autumn’s openings are unusually long. Five of the shows arriving between 20 September and 25 October run into 2027, and two of them — Full Disclosure and Nilima Sheikh — sit on the calendar until June. That is nine months of no urgency at all, which is exactly the kind of show that gets missed. The genuinely time-bound part of the season is over by 4 October: Frida and Diego this Saturday, then Ceccaldi and the Weil. Plan the autumn around those four closings and everything else will still be there in the new year. One caveat on dates that end in a season rather than a day — «summer 2027», «spring 2027» — those are the ones a museum revises, so treat them as intentions rather than as bookings.

Source: MoMA checked against the source

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