Article | Artists To Watch November 2026

Miyoko Ito

Born in California to Japanese parents, Miyoko Ito’s early life was marked by the trauma of wartime internment, just shy of her graduation from UC Berkeley in 1942. Following her release and brief studies at Smith College, she attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the city where she lived and worked for the remainder of her life. Though well-known in the city’s art circles during her lifetime, it is only in recent years that Ito’s practice has come into full light, as collectors and institutions reappraise areas of American art history that have long been overlooked. Represented during her lifetime by the legendary dealer Phyllis Kind — famed for launching the Chicago Imagists — Ito’s work shares a certain strangeness with that group of artists, but draws more directly upon Cubist geometry, Abstract forms, and Surrealist mirage. These ideas are clearly seen in Odyssey, painted in 1980, and Yellow Sea, painted in 1959, which share a fluidity between figuration, abstraction, and landscape. Both showcase her meticulous and layered painterly approach, inventive color palette, and her memories of the California and Japanese landscapes of her youth.

Today, Ito’s work aligns directly with broader institutional efforts to address historical oversights surrounding mid-century female artists in general, but also to establish an Asian-American art canon and further explore American abstraction beyond the New York School. Her works are held in prominent public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a series of landmark presentations — including a major 2023 exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery, a 2017–2018 survey at Berkeley Art Museum and a 2018 retrospective at Artists Space in New York — has fueled intense demand. Fresh-to-market canvases have shattered estimates at auction recently, establishing new benchmarks and cementing Ito as an essential icon of Post War abstraction.

Patrick Eugène

Self-taught painter Patrick Eugène (b. 1984) investigates diaspora, memory, and resilience through large-scale figurative works and portraits. Constructing his images without models or references, Eugène relies on memories tied to his Haitian-American culture, discovering a connection with his imagined subjects. Particularly drawn to the colors and designs prevalent in the 1950s in Haiti and America, his subjects encapsulate elegance, strength, and tenacity, as he explained in an interview with WhiteWall: “When I went to Haiti for the first time in 2010 — after the earthquake — I saw devastation, yes, but also this unshakable pride. People carried themselves like royalty, even in ruins. That experience changed everything for me. It’s what drove me to start painting seriously.”

This unshakable pride is embodied by the subject of Eugène’s 2023 painting With Fur and Smokes. Lounging in an extravagant white fur coat and jewels, hair permed, cigarette in hand, she epitomizes the kind of opulent grace that Eugène references from mid-century Port-au-Prince and Harlem, the era when his grandparents migrated to New York from Haiti. Yet her enigmatic expression is psychologically charged — we sense an inner struggle and her capacity to overcome it. Eugène is represented by Mariane Ibrahim Gallery and has presented lauded solo exhibitions with the gallery, including Solitude (2024) in Paris and 50 lbs. (2023) in Chicago, as well as presentations at Frieze Los Angeles and Art Basel Paris in 2025. Recently, Vielmetter Los Angeles announced their additional representation of the artist, commencing with a presentation at Art Basel Miami in 2026 and a solo exhibition in fall 2027. In 2025, the artist was selected for the 10th edition of the Dior Lady Art project, which saw the artist reimagine the iconic Lady Dior handbag using rich textiles, pearls, and raffia to pay homage to his Haitian heritage and Caribbean roots.

Oscar yi Hou

Liverpool-born, New York-based Oscar yi Hou (b. 1998) is among the most rapidly rising names in his generation of artists. At just 24, following his UOVO Prize, he was one of the youngest painters to launch a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum with East of Eden. Known for his layered, “never purely figurative” portraits of queer Asian subjects, yi Hou utilizes varied cultural references ranging from anime to art history to create what he calls poem-pictures, or narratively rich entanglements between his subjects and the diasporic worlds they inhabit. This multiplicity is immediately apparent in Sailor Moon Rising aka Pacific Passenger, with its sitter donning U.S. Navy blues in front of a traditional partition, quite literally casting a shadow over his background in the act of becoming American.

yi Hou’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, ICA Miami, M+, and Crystal Bridges, among others. His most recent show, Nightcrawling, was presented at James Fuentes Gallery, New York, from September to October of this year.

Alvaro Barrington

On a meteoric rise for the past decade, Alvaro Barrington (b. 1983) continues to play by his own rules through an expansive practice that interrogates cultural themes, often utilizing mixed media. Barrington’s momentum has culminated in major recent milestones, including the installation Labor Day Parade ’91 at the 2026 Venice Biennale’s central exhibition, In Minor Keys, and his critically acclaimed 2024 Tate Britain commission GRACE, which transformed the Duveen Galleries with an immersive blend of sound, painting, and sculpture honoring Black women and community. And now, his public commission for the High Line in New York opens this November, overlooking 14th Street. Represented by multiple leading international galleries and held in major public collections — including Tate Britian, ICA Miami, and Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art — Barrington continues to redefine how art serves as an experiential meeting point for cultural exchange.

Born in Caracas, Venezuela and raised between Grenada and a working-class immigrant community in Brooklyn, the artist earned his MFA at London’s Slade School of Fine Art in 2017 before establishing a practice that spans both sides of the Atlantic. Barrington’s tactile, often multimedia works disrupt traditional art-historical narratives, freely weaving together his personal history, Caribbean carnival culture, broader dialogues between the Harlem Renaissance, modernism, contemporary immigrant culture, and whatever he looks to next. Primarily a painter, he frequently expands his surfaces into rich visual topographies, as seen in the use of yarn, locks, chains, a drum, and burlap in the present work.

Tidawhitney Lek

Examining the banalities of everyday life through the eyes of the Cambodian-American experience, Tidawhitney Lek (b. 1992) stages quiet scenes in which discrete figures like hands, shadows, or household objects create confluences between Southeast Asian and American cultures. Lek often renders her works with an interplay of pictorial space and the uncanny that draws the viewer’s eye all over the painting in search of the moment as it unfolds, as seen in the present work. We see the struggle between the natural and built environments in the cracked sidewalk and emerging weeds, glamour in the presentation of fashionable heels and manicured nails, both in shadow and in view, and an entire story of encounter occurring just outside the visible work. We can imagine the shared compliments between the two subjects as their fleeting encounter passes, as the day continues, as the dandelions bloom, as the shadows grow longer.

Lek’s work was included in the 2023 Made in L.A. exhibition at the Hammer Museum, the same year as her first solo exhibition, Living Spaces, at the Long Beach Museum of Art. Her work is also in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, MACMA, the K11 Art Foundation, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. She has recently exhibited with Victoria Miro in London and will launch a solo exhibition, Something Familiar, at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, from November 2026 through early 2027.

George Morrison (Ojibwe)

Born in Chippewa City, Minnesota, and a citizen of the Grand Portage Band of Chippewa, George Morrison (Ojibwe, 1919–2000) is now increasingly recognized as a major contributor to the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Bringing together the landscapes of his childhood with the gestural force associated with his contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Morrison blended his Indigenous visual language with the bustling idioms of his travels and encounters with some of the most influential painters of the 20th century. His Ojibwe name, Wah Wah Teh Go Nay Ga Bo, translates to “Standing in the Northern Lights,” and the appellation carries strongly in both Morrison’s palette and gesture, as we see in the intensely vibrant Untitled, from 1953, executed just before the artist’s return to New York and ahead of an important Tanager Gallery group exhibition in 1954, which placed Morrison squarely within the heart of the legendary artist circle.

From July 2025 through May 2026, the Metropolitan Museum of Art staged The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York, bringing together 35 paintings and drawings from his early years in the city and showcasing the remarkable legacy of the artist’s time within the Abstract Expressionist scene. Current exhibitions include The Way We Came: A Century of Indigenous Art from the William P. Healey Collection at The Phoenix Art Museum through July 2027 and Hold to this Earth: Works by Contemporary Indigenous North American Artists from Tia Collection, on view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield.