It’s a balmy summer evening in New York and the Guggenheim is open late. In its rotunda more than 1,000 visitors play chess – many of them on Carol Bove’s handmade chess tables, installed for the artist’s exhibition. It’s the museum’s most attended Late Shift to date, and one of a recent run of chess events held at leading galleries.
On 28 July, which would have been the 139th birthday of Marcel Duchamp (who somewhat disingenuously claimed to have given up art for chess in 1923), MoMA invited 50 members of the art world – from Ai Weiwei to painter Lizzy Gabay, who was the last player standing – to compete against chess’s third-ever female grandmaster, Susan Polgar. On 7 August the Noguchi Museum hosted drop-in games in its gallery and sculpture garden inspired by Isamu Noguchi’s love of the game and while his 1944 design for a chess table is on show. While back in February, Paris’s Perrotin gallery hosted a chess tournament to accompany its Un siècle d’échecs (A Hundred Years of Chess) exhibition: places sold out in 30 minutes and the event helped attract 1,600 gallery visitors (many of them new) on the same day.
Pawn Chess Club in the Guggenheim’s rotunda in July 2026 © Isabel Münter
