AIPAD 2026: Essential Exhibitions Beyond Park Avenue Armory

A scene-setter for the days ahead, this guide rounds up notable exhibitions across New York during AIPAD 2026, from major institutional surveys to smaller commercial galleries, giving readers a sense of what to see and where to head during one of the key photography events in the city’s calendar.

1000 Words | Resource | 22 April 2026
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Seydou Keïta, A Tactile Lens – Brooklyn Museum
10 October 2025 – 17 May

Billed as the most expansive North American presentation of the artist to date, A Tactile Lens boasts over 280 works by Seydou Keïta that deliberately widens the usual photo-only frame to include textiles, garments, jewellery, alongside Keïta’s personal items – objects that echo (and sometimes literally appear in) the portraits. In doing so, the family-sourced objects and previously unseen works sharpen a sense of Keïta not simply as a great portraitist, but as a choreographer of self-fashioning, attentive to how modern identity was being tried on, staged and shared in front of the camera. Beneath the patterned backdrops, polished shoes, watches, scooters, and carefully staged poses, the exhibition foregrounds the collaboration between photographer and sitter, forged in late-1940s-to-early-1960s Bamako, an independence-era pressure-cooker in which aspirations for independent statehood, novelty and local style all converged in front of the lens.

Eugène Atget, The Making of a Reputation – ICP
29 January – 4 May

Rather than presenting Atget as the already canonised poet of old Paris, ICP promises ‘a new approach to the story of Atget’s career,’ centering Berenice Abbott as the key agent in the photographer’s posthumous rise. For some, this will be a familiar story, for others, less so. The Making of a Reputation, true to its name, focuses on the period between Atget’s uncredited appearance in the Surrealist journal La Révolution surréaliste (1926) and the first book of his work, ATGET: Photographe de Paris (1930), overseen by Abbott. Structurally, it presents three ‘expressions’ of the work – magazines, prints (primarily from ICP’s holdings) and the book section. Reception has been mixed, with some critics arguing that, despite its compelling premise, the exhibition proceeds under a kind of false pretence, omitting key material such as Atget’s domestic interiors, downplaying the failures that shaped his life, and leaning too heavily on ICP’s own holdings. Yet Atget’s photographs are still full of their usual quiet strangeness from empty streets, shop windows, façades, staircases, and fragments of a city in transition, while also becoming part of a story about circulation, mediation and cultural afterlife.

Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination – MoMA
14 December 2025 – 25 July

MoMA brings together photographers such as Malick Sidibé, Jean Depara, and Sanlé Sory to consider more broadly how Pan-African solidarity and political imagination circulated through portraiture, style and everyday self-presentation in the mid-20th century, and how that charge persists in contemporary practice. The installation reportedly avoids rigid sections and keeps textual framing light; wall labels also refrain from foregrounding photographers’ nationalities, encouraging viewers to read poses, gestures and affinities across, rather than within, fixed borders. A dedicated reading room extends that argument into print culture and, as curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo has explained, emerged from engagement with the artist collective Air Afrique and their reanimation of the Pan-African airline’s magazine culture. The show’s title nods to V. Y. Mudimbe’s The Idea of Africa (1994), while its plural form suggests a more multiple and mobile set of Africas, shaped across diasporic circuits and media.

Sheida Soleimani, Forest of Stars – Yancey Richardson
16 April – 22 May

Forest of Stars turns political history into a family-sized, studio-built cosmos, expanding Sheida Soleimani’s ongoing Ghostwriter series, which draws on her parents’ experiences of political exile following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The exhibition, Soleimani’s first with Yancey Richardson, includes a new site-specific wall drawing by the artist’s mother, bringing a literal second hand into the space and making ‘family’ a medium as well as a subject. Archival photographs and ‘symbolic objects’ are assembled into intricate studio constructions that blur documentation and invention, with Soleimani effectively ‘ghostwriting’ family history through staged scenes rather than direct testimony. A newer strand of the work, tied to Flyways, folds in imagery shaped by her work as federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator – migratory birds appearing not as decorative metaphors but as living bodies that carry the risks of border-crossing in their feathers and talons.

Arlene Gottfried, Young & Old – CLAMP
6 March – 2 May

CLAMP’s premise for their latest show begins in a Westbeth studio where portfolio boxes held decades of work, including one simply marked ‘Young & Old’; inside were portraits of children and elders (sometimes together), images that treat age as something performative, elastic and occasionally mischievous. Scenes in these images play out across neighbourhoods and various situations on boardwalks, parades, domestic scenes, a broader arc of a practice increasingly recognised as central to the visual history of late 20th-Century New York. The gallery’s also stresses the quality of encounter in Gottfried’s practice. These are photographs made through proximity and trust. As the exhibition text notes, Gottfried described her photographs as ‘souvenirs,’ moments and remembrances gathered through sustained attention to people meeting the camera head-on.

–1000 Words

Images:

1-Seydou Keïta, Untitled, 1949–63 / 1997. Courtesy The Jean Pigozzi Collection of African Art and Danziger Gallery, NY © SKPEAC

2-Eugène Atget, Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, 1898. Courtesy International Centre of Photography, Gift of Caryl and Israel Englander, 2010.

3-Silvia Rosi, Disintegrata di profilo (Disintegrated in Profile), 2024. Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Carl Jacobs Fund. © Silivia Rosi

4-Sheida Soleimani, Truce, 2024. Courtesy the artist © Sheida Soleimani

5-Arlene Gottfried, Little Rabbi, Purim, c. 1970s. Courtesy CLAMP

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