The Don't Miss List: November '26
The Don’t Miss List is a lovingly curated list of things to see, do, read, listen to, and explore, sent at the start of every month. If you would like to submit an event or idea, please email dontmiss@misstropolis.com.
FIRST
Edel Rodriguez, The Future is in Your Hands – VOTE (2024), acrylic on board. A Cuban American artist, Rodriguez said that growing up in Cuba, a country without free elections, left him with a great admiration for the American electoral process. From the Norman Rockwell Museum’s Unity Project, a poster campaign to get people voting.
Tuesday, November 3: Election Day. GET OUT AND VOTE! Your vote matters, and our state is depending on you. Voting, my friends, is the ultimate DON’T MISS event. This time Massachusetts voters decide on the governor, five statewide offices, 200 legislative seats, and nine ballot questions, the most on any Massachusetts ballot since 1918.
Of the nine questions, two would send us backwards. Question 8 would repeal recreational marijuana and prohibit its sale in Massachusetts. Question 9 asks whether to keep the 2024 gun law, which tightened regulations on firearms, including ghost guns, machine guns, and assault-style weapons. On Question 9, a yes vote keeps the law, and a no vote repeals it and sets regulations back to where they were in 2023.
Art Fairs
Boston Art Book Fair, Boston, MA.
November 13–15 at the BCA Cyclorama.
This year’s fair brings 140 exhibitors showcasing and selling independently published, often handmade, books, zines, and art. Don’t miss the interactive installation by Pneuhaus, the Directangle Press mobile library, and two days of book arts in-person programming. At 2pm on November 14, my friend Gabriel Sosa, who launched ñ press last year as part of the Boston Public Art Triennial, and Marius Keo Marjolin of Binch Press / Queer.Archive.Work will discuss risograph printing and publishing as a way to protest, gather, and speak with the communities we live in. The talk is moderated by Rene Zhang.
The fair is open to all ages and free on Saturday and Sunday.
Boston Center for the Arts Cyclorama, 539 Tremont Street, Boston, MA.
Brooke Stewart, Love the Game, 2026. Wood, oil, acrylic, flashe, and stained glass. 50 1/2 H x 80 W x 22 D inches.
Exhibitions
Brooke Stewart: Scoreboard
Praise Shadows Art Gallery. 129 Kingston Street, Boston, MA.
Opening November 6, Brooke Stewart: Scoreboard is a much-anticipated show for Stewart’s fans. The Boston-based artist, who (just so you get a sense of the type of person we’re talking about) ran the Boston Marathon dribbling a basketball, was in my Ritual Practice / Sacred Space show at the Beehive in January. This is her first solo show at Praise Shadows, part of a powerful lineup Yng-Ru Chen has organized to inaugurate her gallery’s new downtown space. Stewart has been stretching herself as an artist and hopes to surprise people with what she is showing here, as Crystalle LaCouture did with her recent show Portable Coordinates. Stewart played Division 1 basketball and finds poetic alignment between sports and art, especially as it pertains to gender, representation and protected space. The field, like the artist’s studio, is a place with its own history, heroes and rules, where a woman can strive for excellence, temporarily free from life’s inevitable limitations.
Show runs November 6-December 19, 2026.
Artist talk with Dina Deitsch, director of the Davis Museum, December 1, 6:30–7:30pm.
Installation view: Krakow Witkin Gallery. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger: Certain Terms.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger: Certain Terms, 1982-1986
Krakow Witkin Gallery, 10 Newbury Street, Boston, MA.
Krakow Witkin is Boston’s only true blue-chip gallery. The canonical artists from whom many of the contemporary artists written about on these pages drew their earliest inspiration land, inspire, teach, and move through Krakow Witkin’s upstairs space at 10 Newbury. Certain Terms brings together three giants from the Manhattan art scene of the ’70s and ’80s. Before they were blue-chip, all three were putting words on the street: Basquiat as SAMO, Holzer on wheat-pasted posters, Kruger in the language of the magazines she designed. As the gallery puts it, “all three artists engage the assumption of the trustworthiness of text to question relationships and power dynamics—social behaviors, norms, and narratives.” What’s most impactful is how prescient their words are 40-plus years later.
Exhibition on view through December 12, 2026.
Coral Forest, part of the worldwide Crochet Coral Reef project by Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim and the Institute For Figuring. Photo courtesy of Lehigh University Arts Galleries, by Stephanie Veto.
Crochet Coral Reef
MIT Museum, 314 Main Street, Cambridge, MA.
Crochet Coral Reef at the MIT Museum.
Jacques Cousteau wrote that “The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.” The first of three exhibitions in the museum’s OCEANS season, Crochet Coral Reef is a net of wonder crocheted by “thousands of artists and crafters across the world in a collective act of making that echoes the marine ecosystems it spotlights.” (MIT Museum).
Creators Margaret and Christine Wertheim incorporate mathematics, marine science, design, and international co-creation to weave complex kaleidoscopic sculptures that seems to move as if underwater. In this way the artists ask us to reflect on interconnectedness, life force, and nature’s fierce resiliency. And while you are at the MIT Museum, don’t forget to admire Janet Echelman’s Remembering the Future — two fiber works built on climate data.
Exhibition on view through February 14, 2027.
Ying Stone in the Form of Spiraling Incense Smoke. Limestone from Yingde county, Guangdong province; 20th-century wooden stand, Southern openwork style Gift of Alan Helms, Davis Museum, Wellesley College.
Shi: Stories in Stone
Davis Museum, Wellesley College, 106 Central Street, Wellesley, MA.
Two local shows celebrate fine art’s relationship to the study of shi 石, stones prized for their strange and beautiful forms and known in English as scholars’ rocks. In China, reverence for rocks grew out of Daoist ideas about mountains as sacred places full of qi, the energy of the cosmos. As early as the Han dynasty, imperial gardens introduced large stones to evoke the mythical mountains of immortals and ancestors. A rock was a mountain in miniature, inviting deep contemplation.
The Davis show, curated by Yuhua Ding, Kemper Assistant Curator of Collections and Academic Affairs, focuses primarily on the Davis’s encyclopedic stone collection, a gift from Alan Helms, but it does include a small selection of contemporary pieces, including some by Yu-Wen Wu, whose work is also included in Interpreting the Natural (below).
Exhibition runs through May 30, 2027.
Yu-Wen Wu, Artifact XXVI, 2026. Rock, lichen, Walnut wood base. 32" h x 10.5" w x 5.5" d.
Interpreting the Natural: Contemporary Visions of Scholars’ Rocks
Art Complex Museum, 189 Alden Street, Duxbury, MA.
Once you have seen the original stones at the Davis, head to Duxbury to see contemporary artists’ takes on the ancient practice. Sculptor Donna Dodson first curated a version of Interpreting the Natural in 2020 at Gallery Korea, the Korean Cultural Center in New York. Now she brings the show to New England with a lineup of artists with Boston or New England ties: Kate Gilbert, Paul Harris, Danielle Krcmar, Lisa Tang Liu, Cathy Della Lucia, Andy Moerlein, Wen-hao Tien, Alice Wu, Yu-wen Wu, and Quanzhou Zhao. “Seen through the lens of contemporary art, these minimally altered stones become both micro landscapes and abstract sculptures, raising questions about authorship, authenticity, and the meaning of art.” (Donna Dodson).
Exhibition on view through January 17, 2027.
Events
Native American Heritage Month Celebration
Museum of Science, 1 Science Park, Boston, MA.
November 14, 10am–4pm.
Celebrate Native American Heritage Month at the Museum of Science with a full day of programs including performances by Eastern Medicine Singers, Thea Hopkins, and Rodrigo Cordova. This is the museum’s first Heritage Month celebration in the new Bloomberg Public Science Common. Indigenous scientists, STEM professionals, artists, performers, and community members share their work through conversations, performances, and hands-on programs across the museum.
Remember, the RSVP is yes.
Spirit and Style Inside and Out.
Cover image: Brooke Stewart, June 21, 1997, The First WNBA Game, Los Angeles Sparks vs. New York Liberty: Court, 2026. Court: Oil and acrylic on wood panel. Scoreboard: Ceramic wood panel, grout, acrylic flash. Court: 59 x 105 x 2 3/4 inches. Scoreboard: 12 x 24 x 2 inches. At Praise Shadows Gallery, Boston.
