6 Should-See Exhibitions at Phoenix Art Museum this Fall

Arts & Culture • Seasonal

By Royal Young • November 19, 2025

Downtown Phoenix boasts one of many largest artwork museums within the Southwest, the Phoenix Art Museum. For over 60 years, since its opening in 1959, this museum has impressed desert dwellers and guests from everywhere in the world with its astounding array of each Southwest-specific artwork and worldwide works. 

This oasis of creativity options over 20,000 work, sculptures, pictures, archival trend items, and extra artworks. With such all kinds of unimaginable artworks to discover, it may be exhausting to determine what to see first.

As a useful information, listed below are six must-see reveals opening this autumn at Phx Art. From Arizona’s subsequent technology of rising artists, to an immersive swarm of black paper-crafted butterflies, radical works of clay by Japanese girls artists, humorous images, trend and extra. 

As a part of its mission to make artwork accessible to all and supply a free inventive house for the group, the museum presents Pay What You Wish Wednesdays, the place admission is free to all after 3 p.m. each Wednesday.

2024 Arizona Artist Awards

Representing Arizona’s subsequent technology of rising artists, the winners of the 2024 Arizona Artist Awards, Safwat Saleem, Elizabeth Z. Pineda, and Omar Soto mix themes of id, migration, and human situation on this thrilling group exhibition. Saleem’s interactive and immersive work invitations viewers to stroll by a surreal workplace house, designed to be the fictional headquarters of The Unrequited Love Institute. This merges with Pineda’s work, which facilities on migration tales, with huge white sheets hanging from the ceiling, and lined with a whole bunch of names of migrants who’ve perished within the Arizona desert, amongst different startling and thought-provoking artworks. In distinction, Soto shows vividly colourful and glamorous pictures, which heart queer, trans & non-binary folks of colour in dreamlike tableaus, referencing non secular iconography and classical artworks. This exhibition sends a strong message of visibility, celebrating the richly various cultures of Phoenix. On view through January 25, 2026.

Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists From Japan

Featuring astounding works of clay from 36 Japanese girls artists who revolutionized this typically male-dominated medium. From hyper-realistic clay sculptures to summary organic-shaped works impressed by geology and human anatomy, this beautiful exhibition options forty avant-garde ceramic and clay items designed in post-World War II Japan. On view through September 13, 2026.

Funny Business: Photography and Humor

Since the earliest daguerreotype images within the mid-1800s, images has modified the best way humanity each sees and expresses itself. Spanning almost your complete historical past of this medium, Funny Business presents seventy pictures which seize humor, surrealist absurdity, comedian collage and extra. This exhibition celebrates humor as joyful inventive expression, and an antidote to an typically harsh world, on view through January 4, 2026.

The Collection 1960-now 

This ongoing exhibition highlights among the museum’s most iconic modern artwork items in an enormous and dazzling assortment. From summary expressionist work to sculptures made of sunshine, to daring Pop Art, and video installations, this complete exhibition presents artwork for all tastes. Focusing on artists who’ve been traditionally ignored, together with girls and artists of colour, the galleries are filled with contrasting and complementary artworks that invite viewers to ponder themes similar to land conservation and materialism and the way artists throughout generations discover our ever-changing world and the human situation. 

The Collection: Greatest Fits (Vol. 1): The Art of Archiving Fashion 

This thrilling “living” exhibition options rotating clothes and revolutionary designs from  legendary trend designers all through the centuries. Spanning the 18th century by the current day, this assortment reminds viewers how trend may be elevated to a excessive artwork kind. With works from Schiaparelli and Dior, to Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen, Diane von Fürstenberg, Tom Ford, and extra, it is a fantastical couture treasure trove of inspiring glamour. On view through March 2026.

Carlos Amorales’ “Black Cloud” set up 

Inspired by the annual migration of monarch butterflies, this immersive set up welcomes guests, starting within the museum’s foyer. Composed of 25,000 black paper moths and butterflies of 30 completely different species, these crafted creatures adorn the partitions of the museum en masse, giving the phantasm of flight and immersing viewers in a literal swarm of fanciful bugs. This is an ongoing installation.

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Royal Young is a non-binary poet and writer from downtown New York City, who now lives and creates within the desert. Their work has appeared in Interview Magazine, New York Times, The Rumpus, Phoenix Magazine, Phoenix New Times, LOOKOUT, and DTPHX, amongst others.