If Andy Warhol is the name most people reach for when they think Pop Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art wants to make the case for a rematch. Opening October 11, 2026, Roy Lichtenstein: Like New brings together roughly 130 works — paintings, drawings, sculpture, prints, collage, and film — spanning six decades, from the early 1940s through the 1990s. It’s the Whitney’s first major Lichtenstein exhibition in more than twenty years, and it arrives with a sharper thesis than “greatest hits.”

Not a Retrospective — A Reconsideration

Organized by curator Meg Onli with artist Alex Da Corte as guest curator, Like New skips the usual chronological victory lap. Instead, it zeroes in on something Lichtenstein was doing decades before it had a name: appropriating, duplicating, enlarging, and recontextualizing images until they became something else entirely. Comic panels, ads, brushstrokes, even his own earlier paintings — all treated as raw material to be copied and altered.

The exhibition’s framing is deliberately timely. Long before screen culture normalized copying and pasting, cropping, and reposting, Lichtenstein was interrogating what happens to an image once it’s been duplicated and stripped of context — a question that feels, as more than one critic has pointed out, more relevant in the age of memes and AI-generated imagery than it did in 1963.

What’s In the Show

The checklist reads like a syllabus on 20th-century image culture: Look Mickey (1961), Drowning Girl (1963), Happy Tears (1964), and Artist’s Studio “The Dance” (1974) anchor the show. In a genuine curatorial coup, all eight works from Lichtenstein’s 1962 debut at Leo Castelli Gallery will be reunited publicly for the first time since that show.

Scale is part of the argument, too. The exhibition includes recreations of three of Lichtenstein’s murals, including a nearly 96-foot-long version of Greene Street Mural (1983), plus an outdoor presentation of Girl in Window (1964) realized by Da Corte. To round out the argument about copying and authorship, the show also features work by artists who built on Lichtenstein’s ideas — Louise Lawler, Richard Pettibone, and Sturtevant among them.

Why Now

The timing isn’t incidental. Like New opens amid a broader institutional wave of Lichtenstein attention — the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center jointly presented Roy Lichtenstein in the Studio earlier this year, and the Kunstmuseum Basel is running a parallel print-focused show through March 2027. For a generation raised on filters and reposts, the Whitney is betting that Lichtenstein’s decades-old questions about originality and reproduction will land as freshly relevant — maybe more relevant now than when he first painted them.

Planning Your Visit

• Member Previews: October 8–10, 2026
• Public Opening: October 11, 2026
• Location: Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY (Meatpacking District)
• Format: Painting, drawing, sculpture, prints, collage, and film across multiple galleries

For anyone building a fall New York itinerary, this is shaping up to be one of the season’s most talked-about museum moments — pair it with a walk down the High Line, which sits practically at the Whitney’s back door.