This season, New York reveals itself anew with a slew of photography shows for fall. Ricky Powell’s intimate 1980s street chronicles, Robert Rauschenberg’s poetic reengagement with the city, David Wojnarowicz’s masked visitations, Samuel Fosso’s transformative self-portraits, and the Museum of Modern Art’s forward-looking “New Photography 2025” all converge to show how images make and remake our sense of place. Across these shows, from grand institutions to intimate spaces, the city is subject, host, muse, and collaborator. Here are some shows to see now.
2. “David Wojnarowicz: Arthur Rimbaud in New York” at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art
“Go, Rimbaud! Go, Rimbaud!” Patti Smith howled like a punk cheerleader on the opener of her epochal 1975 album Horses. In the late-’70s East Village—bankrupt, blighted, the “Ford to City: Drop Dead” era—the 19th century French poet was certainly in the air: patron saint of outsiders, a teenage runaway who reinvented poetry and then abandoned it. Wojnarowicz, who grew up in chaos and hit the streets young, felt the kinship too. For him, Rimbaud was both a mirror and a spirit guide: the doomed romantic and the radical escape artist.
In 1978–79, Wojnarowicz staged his first conceptual art project, photographing friends wearing a photocopied mask of Rimbaud in everyday New York settings. The city became a stage for his imagined encounter with the poet. The images are deadpan and DIY—Rimbaud in a diner, on the subway, wandering the abandoned Hudson River piers near 14th Street where Wojnarowicz made art and cruised. The mask pops like neon against the city’s decay, turning the backdrops of collapse into scenes of time travel. They work on multiple levels—sometimes elegiac, sometimes pretty goofy. Folded into the exhibition are also images from his first trip to Paris, when he retraced Rimbaud’s steps across the city a century later.
They were also baby steps into the sprawling practice Wojnarowicz would later unleash—writing, painting, photography, film, activism. One can imagine the patience of the friends who donned the mask and posed, indulging an unknown artist as he groped his way through the dark toward a vision that hadn’t yet come into focus.
At the packed opening earlier this week, Leslie-Lohman director Alyssa Nitchun explained: “This was a really pivotal point in his career where he was moving from being a writer to becoming a visual artist. So these were almost experiments in his growth as an artist. This body of work has never been given the attention it deserves.” She added: “Certainly in downtown New York, in the queer world, he’s a beloved figure. I think at this moment in time, having an artist that was really about both their passion and their rage germinating into a creative project feels very relevant.”
“David Wojnarowicz: Arthur Rimbaud in New York” is on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, 26 Wooster Street, New York, through January 18, 2026.