5 Ongoing Exhibitions Featuring Women Artists To Add To Your Art Calendar

October is a lovely time to look around and see what is happening in the art world. Galleries are opening new shows, museums are bringing fresh exhibitions to their spaces, and artists from different parts of the world are finding new ways to share their work with audiences. For anyone who loves discovering new artists, an exhibition can be an invitation to slow down for a little while, wander through a new body of work, and perhaps leave with an artist you want to follow more closely.

This month, women artists are at the heart of some especially interesting exhibitions taking place across museums, galleries, and art spaces. From photography and the body to books, color, spirituality, and imagined worlds, these shows explore very different sides of artistic practice. Some bring together artists from different generations, while others give us the chance to spend time with the work of one artist and understand her practice a little more deeply.

What makes this selection especially exciting is the range of ideas and approaches on display. Some of these exhibitions look at the spaces women occupy and the ways their bodies and identities are represented, while others turn toward nature, memory, imagination, or the mysterious parts of our inner worlds.

So, if you are looking for something new to add to your October art calendar, here are five live exhibitions featuring women artists that are worth knowing about right now.

1. Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives

The Museum of Modern Art, New York
September 20, 2026 to May 2, 2027

At The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives brings together eight women artists whose work considers the relationship between bodies and space through intersectional feminist perspectives. The exhibition opened on September 20 and will remain on view into spring 2027.

The exhibition places Marianne Wex’s important 1977 photographic project, Let’s Take Back Our Space: “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, in conversation with more recent work by Nona Faustine, Martine Gutierrez, K8 Hardy, Yuki Kihara, Joiri Minaya, Paulina Olowska, and Wendy Red Star.

Across the works, photography becomes a way of thinking about how bodies occupy public and private spaces, how people are represented, and how social structures can influence something as familiar as body language.

One of the most interesting aspects of the exhibition is the conversation between generations. Wex’s work from the 1970s sits alongside contemporary practices, showing how questions around visibility, identity, and space continue to find new forms in photography.

For anyone interested in feminist art and photography, this is one exhibition to keep on the radar.

2. Ana Mendieta

Tate Modern, London
On view through January 17, 2027

Few artists explored the connection between the human body and the natural world quite like Ana Mendieta. Her work moved between performance, photography, film, sculpture, and earthworks, often creating an intimate dialogue between the body, landscape, absence, and belonging.

Tate Modern’s major exhibition brings together different periods of Mendieta’s career, giving visitors an opportunity to see the breadth of her practice rather than focusing on a single series.

Her celebrated Silueta Series is particularly important to understanding her work. In these pieces, Mendieta created traces of the human form within natural environments, using materials such as earth, flowers, fire, and water. The resulting images can feel both deeply personal and almost otherworldly.

The exhibition is also a reminder of just how influential Mendieta has been for generations of artists working with performance, the body, nature, and place. For anyone wanting to spend time with an artist whose work continues to inspire contemporary practice, this is a show worth seeing.

Tate currently lists the exhibition as running through January 17, 2027.

3. RED RED RED, Geometry of a Scar

Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California
October 4, 2026 to February 21, 2027

What can one color say about the experiences of women artists?

RED RED RED, Geometry of a Scar explores that question through an international group exhibition dedicated entirely to women artists. Organized by MIA Art Collection and presented at the Museum of Latin American Art, the exhibition opens on October 4 and remains on view through February 21, 2027.

Around 40 artists from 20 countries are represented, including Marina Abramović, Hilma af Klint, Louise Bourgeois, Nan Goldin, Sonia Gomes, Zanele Muholi, Beatriz Milhazes, Meret Oppenheim, and VALIE EXPORT.

The exhibition uses red as a visual thread, but its meaning changes from one work to another. Red can suggest love, passion, danger, resistance, violence, freedom, or power. Across painting, sculpture, video, textiles, and installation, the participating artists approach the color from very different cultural and personal perspectives.

That variety is what makes the exhibition particularly interesting. Rather than presenting one fixed interpretation of red, the show allows the color to shift and take on new meanings as audiences move between works.

It is also a beautiful opportunity to encounter established and contemporary women artists within the same exhibition and see how their practices speak to one another across generations and geographical boundaries.

4. Closer Reading: Three Bay Area Book Artists

California College of the Arts Campus Gallery, San Francisco
September 2 to October 23, 2026

Books have always been a way of carrying stories, ideas, images, and memories. But what happens when the book itself becomes the artwork?

That is the question at the heart of Closer Reading: Three Bay Area Book Artists, an exhibition at the California College of the Arts Campus Gallery featuring Macy Chadwick, Kate Laster, and Vivian Sming.

The exhibition is part of the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ Women to Watch 2027: A Book Arts Revolution initiative and explores the different ways these three artists use books as spaces for experimentation, collaboration, publishing, and exchange.

Rather than treating the book simply as a container for words, the artists consider its physical qualities and possibilities. Pages, printing, structure, images, and the act of reading can all become part of the artistic experience.

It is a particularly lovely exhibition for anyone who enjoys artists’ books, printmaking, publishing, or art that sits somewhere between the visual and literary worlds.

And because the exhibition is on view only through October 23, it is one to catch sooner rather than later.

5. Conduits of the Unseen: Women Artists Imagine Other Worlds

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York
September 9 to October 31, 2026

For something a little more mysterious, Conduits of the Unseen: Women Artists Imagine Other Worlds brings together seventeen women artists whose practices explore everything that exists beyond the immediately visible.

Curated by Susan L. Aberth, the exhibition looks toward mysticism, spirituality, dreams, altered states, and visionary experiences. It features artists including Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Madge Gill, Emma Kunz, Agnes Pelton, Gertrude Abercrombie, Hilla Rebay, and Paulina Peavy.

The exhibition brings together artists from different generations who approached the mysterious and unseen in their own distinct ways. Some turned to dreamlike imagery, others to spiritual ideas or symbolic forms, creating works that can feel simultaneously intimate, strange, and deeply imaginative.

What makes the show especially fascinating is that it does not ask audiences to look at these artists through a single definition of what visionary art can be. Instead, it opens up a larger conversation about intuition, imagination, spirituality, and the many things artists have tried to represent when ordinary reality does not feel like enough.

For anyone drawn to surrealism, symbolism, outsider art, or simply art that leaves room for mystery, this is one exhibition worth seeking out before it closes on October 31.

Keep These Exhibitions On Your Art Calendar

From photography and book arts to bold explorations of color, the natural world, and imagined realities, these five exhibitions offer very different ways of encountering the work of women artists. Each show opens up its own little world, giving audiences the chance to pause, look closely, and perhaps discover an artist whose work stays with them long after they leave the gallery.

Some of these exhibitions look directly at questions of gender, bodies, identity, and the spaces we move through, while others take a more personal or dreamlike route through nature, spirituality, memory, and imagination. Together, they are a lovely reminder of just how many directions women’s artistic practices can take and how many different stories can exist within them.

Whether you are planning a museum visit, looking for an exhibition to see while travelling, or simply enjoying a quiet afternoon exploring what is happening in the art world, these shows are worth adding to your list. And if you happen to be near one of the exhibitions that closes this month, consider this your little reminder to make the time for it.

Sometimes, all it takes is one afternoon, one gallery, or one unexpected artwork to introduce you to an artist you will want to keep following. So, before October slips by, take a look at what is on view and see which one catches your eye.