The Six Best is a monthly column where contributor and writer of The Rose Period, Rose Florence Anderson, gives an edit of the most happening shows in NYC. Each edition covers the shows worth seeing and the special, unusual, and little-known stories behind them – written for the curious (not the credentialed). There’s no inside art jargon here. This column is sponsored by Showrunner, the most comprehensive guide to art in NY & LA, and Elephant Magazine, a global art publication specializing in artist-led coverage. See the full list of exhibitions on Showrunner.
For the art world, September is New York’s real New Year. We’ve returned from Montauk, our offices are kindly reminding us that yes, business hours exist, and while New York Fashion Week might be getting the press, the gallery scene is the one that’s REALLY dressed to the nines. The white cubes switch the lights back on, museums pull out all the stops, and suddenly we’ve got places to be.
I’m Rose, the author of The Rose Period, a newsletter about the special, the unusual, and the slightly unexpected stories from the art world that you should know. Here are the (free!) shows to see in September.
Lynda Benglis: KNOTTING, TYING, FOLDING at Pace Gallery (9/11 through 10/24)
Fashion is my day job, which is why I’m lasering in on Lynda Benglis’s latest show: her twisting, folding sculptures inspired Jonathan Anderson’s Fall 2026 Dior couture collection. Benglis has been doing her own thing with sculpture since the late 1960s, working with everything from beeswax and latex to glass, ceramics, bronze and gold leaf. This exhibition stretches across more than five decades of experiments, including my favorite: a giant, sparkly gold knot from the early ’80s. Yes, those knots are exactly what Anderson was looking at!
IYKYK: In 1974, Benglis took out an ad in Artforum to promote her own exhibition. The image showed her completely nude – except for a pair of spanking-white sunglasses – and holding (children, guard your eyes) a huge dildo. Several editors formally denounced it, but Benglis got exactly what she wanted: an irreverent, hilarious middle finger to the macho art world. Today, it’s considered one of the most iconic images in feminist art.
Becky Suss: Night House at Jack Shainman (9/10 through 10/31)
Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and your own house feels a little…odd? That’s the feeling Becky Suss’s Night House is trying to capture.
Eerie rooms and exteriors at the midnight hour – patterned wallpaper, books, tchotchkes – all pulled from memory: her grandparents’ homes, rooms from books and places that might not exist at all. For this show, she has quite literally turned off the lights. Suss usually works in bright, saturated pops of colour – but now everything appears in moody shades of emerald, sapphire and grey. J’adore.
IYKYK: I first discovered Suss through her series based entirely on my favourite book – Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House. She’s made a whole career painting homes we can’t actually go back to: places from childhood, from fam lore or from the rooms we’ve only met inside books. Patchett loved Suss’s imagined version of her fictional house so much, she bought one of the paintings.
Zoya Cherkassky: American Cooking at Fort Gansevoort (9/16 through 11/7)
My favourite shows are the ones that are pure FUN – and the bustling, frantic food scenes of Zoya Cherkassky (b. 1976) can’t help but leave you a little disarmed.
The Ukrainian-born artist has made a name for herself painting the immigrant experience. Her painting Katz’s (2026) is the feeling every non-New Yorker gets walking into Katz’s Deli for the first time – wide-eyed and overwhelmed – rendered in her signature candy-coloured chaos.
The paintings are pure joy with a twist underneath: a family Shabbos dinner with a keffiyeh at the table or a new take on American Gothic in which her Nigerian-born husband holds a menorah instead of a pitchfork.
IYKYK: A note on Grant Wood’s American Gothic: for nearly a century, viewers have assumed the stern couple are husband and wife – but they’re not! Wood used his sister and the family dentist as models for a father and daughter. Cherkassky’s version, unlike the original, features an actual married couple: the artist and her husband, whom she met after asking him to model for one of her paintings. They married in 2013.
Vittorio Marella: To Stand Bare at Amanita (9/11 through – closing date not yet published)
I am always saving new artists on Instagram for my daily Substack notes in an endless archive. But when I came across Marella’s paintings – sundrenched bodies, wrinkly hands, glowing sand – his work jumped to the top of my queue.
The 29-year-old is from Venice and paints the place that made him – but he physically paints with it too. Look closely, and you’ll see fragments of glass, sand, and shells mixed in.
IYKYK: Before becoming a painter, Marella studied astrophysics for four years. He eventually decided that painting – not science – was his better way of understanding nature. Allora! I will have to agree.
Frederik Nystrup-Larsen at Galerie Sardine (opens 9/16 – 10/24)
Tell me anyone is from Copenhagen, and I fear I’ll instantly deem them cool – but Frederik Nystrup-Larsen IS and you’ll have to agree.
His first US solo show is about flowers – and not just any flowers – but the flowers in rural Denmark his toddler son first saw when he learned to walk. Flowers, insects, fields and the family dog are big discoveries when you’re that age. The show is about looking at it all for the first time again.
One of Nystrup-Larsen’s goal with the show is getting rid of “plant blindness”: aka our increasing inability to notice – or even name – the plants growing all around us.
IYKYK: This may be Nystrup-Larsen’s first solo show in the United States, but you may have already seen his work at Flynn McGarry’s restaurant Cove. The floral paintings there are based on plants grown at Isabella Rossellini’s Mama Farm on Long Island.
Showrunner’s Downtown Gallery Night (9/25)
The Armory Show – a huge, ticketed art fair with more than 230 galleries under one roof at the Javits Center – is back September 24–27. But for a **FREE and far less fluorescent (!) ** way to do Armory Week, head downtown.
On September 25, Showrunner is turning Lower Manhattan into one giant gallery crawl, with galleries staying open late so you can bounce between shows at your own pace. My friend Hannah is hosting it – and I follow her anywhere she goes!
IYKYK: Showrunner is my favorite way to keep up with art in NYC. Its app puts the city’s openings, exhibitions, and galleries in one place – aka the art-world group chat you wish you were already in.
