Twenty-twenty-six is a big year for those who like their art with a side of pop culture. Many of the world’s major museums and galleries are banking on big names for their first shows. Take Ghosts by Eliza Douglas at Gagosian, which celebrates the artist’s first solo New York exhibition with a body of work that nods to the iconography of advertising. In London, Tate Modern showcases stunning Tracey Emin work that And Just Like That... fans might recognize, while the V&A is going all in on Schiaparelli. Finally, the National Gallery of Iceland is celebrating Björk’s upcoming album with a three-work installation from the artist (plus an accompanying show from her frequent collaborator). Whether you’re fashion, music, or TV-minded, there’s something for you—and we’re still less than halfway through the ever-growing art calendar. More will come both in the U.S. and abroad, so if you’re planning some cultural stops for your next trip or just looking to see what’s on view in your neighborhood, consider this your all-encompassing guide to the can’t-miss art shows of the year.
Tiffany at Crystal Bridges
Crystal Bridges’ connection to its landscapes runs deep. It can even be felt in its Moshe Safdie-designed architecture, which adopts the logic of the site—a crystal-rich river with twists and turns and unexpected vistas—into a museum composed of similarly awe-inspiring moments. Turn a corner and you might be greeted by the legs of a Louise Bourgeois spider looming overhead or a trembling pond of mirrored balls by the late Yayoi Kusama.
One of the newest moments at Crystal Bridges is actually an old one, a monumental 1917 Tiffany window called the Mountain Landscape (Root Memorial Window), featuring a cascading waterfall scene that’s lit from behind synthetically to mirror the sun’s passing light. This masterwork, which the museum acquired recently and has quickly become a local favorite and a national pilgrimage site, spurred Crystal Bridges design curator Jen Padgett to launch a larger exploration of Louis Tiffany’s love affair with the great outdoors, which feels like a story so appropriate for an art space lovingly nestled inside a natural wonder to tell.
The show extrapolates from the Tiffany and Crystal Bridges archive and art collection to create an exhibition that zooms in on the role nature plays in shaping a household American name. Expect jewelry that looks real enough to die and beauty in abundance. —Kat Herriman
Arthur Jafa at the New Museum
Composed of found footage and scored to “Ultralight Beam,” the gospel-inflected opening track from Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo album, Arthur Jafa’s now canonical film Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death catapulted the already established cinematographer and filmmaker to the center of the art world when it debuted at Gavin Brown’s enterprise gallery in 2016. Audiences sat through the full seven-minute loop in stunned or sobbing silence, huddled around the enveloping screen like a flickering fireplace.
Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death carried Jafa around the globe, from one major institution to the next: the Hirshhorn in Washington D.C., the Serpentine in London, MOCA in Los Angeles, the Julia Stoschek foundation in Berlin. Then, in 2019, Jafa made his Venice Biennale debut with a new video work, perhaps the only one that could have toppled the last: The White Album, which earned him a Golden Lion and sealed his status as one of the most consequential voices of the past decade. It feels fitting that this fall, after ten years in the spotlight, the New Museum and its director Massimiliano Gioni revisit the not-so-distant past and put it all together again, as only a New Yorker who watched it all unfold could.
The show carries Jafa’s logic as a filmmaker into the gallery, subverting the museum’s white-cube identity and turning it into a maddening, black-box multiplex that unfurls across two floors. The movie-theater feeling is heightened by a landscape seemingly made of vinyl cutouts, posters, and larger-than-life wallpaper treatments that carry Jafa's imagery—much of it appropriated from pop-cultural phenomena and historical archives—into the material world as only massive dot matrices can. —K.H.
Hanna Hur at Greene Naftali
Hanna Hur’s Annunciation is a show in which one registers, perhaps for the first time, some of the most winning aspects of the space: the multi-paned windows and their mullions, the big gridded stone floor and its slices of compressed fossils, the skyline in layers as one looks out from a normal-ish height at skyscrapers and the city's latest neighborhood. Time scales and grids everywhere, piled high. Colliding. A type of beauty. Which Hur knows well.
The show was conceived for space. Every show the young New York-based painter makes takes its final site into account. This one takes on the shape of an Annunciation narrative, replete with virgins and angels. It is an elongated response by the artist to Antonello da Messina’s haunting 1475 Madonna. The subject is abstracted, for the most part, by Hur's signature process, which begins with acrylic paint thinned to the consistency of ink and pushed in rhythmic strokes on the floor with big brushes, and ends with obsessively penciling line after line of unfixed pigment in perfect interstices on top. If Hur makes a mistake anywhere in the process, she starts over. Under these high stakes, the paintings reach the viewer in near-machined perfection. This holy, rational line, repeated obsessively, takes on a mystical logic. Borrowing a strategy from 1960s minimalists, Hur toils under different auspices and stakes: an era when the AI hand is everywhere, and human perfection reads differently, where time reads differently. Hur's anachronistic way of arriving at new images is putting her in touch with angels and museums; that is, if acquisitions (MoMA) and full-room painting suites (the Hammer’s 2026 Made in LA) are a trustworthy barometer. —K.H.
Annunciation is on view from September 10 through October 31.
Raghav Babbar at Rajiv Menon Contemporary
Rajiv Menon Contemporary is hosting Raghav Babbar for his first-ever U.S. solo exhibition. Sangam will be on display across two cities: At the Rajiv Menon Contemporary gallery space in Los Angeles and at the gallery’s booth at The Armory Show in New York. Between those two exhibitions, guests will find entirely new work from the India-born, London-based artist. In 2025, Babbar attended Maha Kumbh, the Hindu pilgrimage in North India, which became the largest religious gathering ever recorded, with over 600 million people in attendance. Babbar, who is known for his intimate portraits, embraced the force of the crowd. There, he found a deep meditation on faith as a democratizing, humanizing force. Sangam is the result of that journey—a depiction of the pilgrimage and a consideration of the universal human experience.
The style of a European history painting is fitting in portraying this important event. Like the old masters, Babbar’s work boasts a muted, earthen palette, as well as a consideration of the light. It distills the Maha Kumbh into a single, charged moment. And though it’s a rendering of an enormous crowd, Babbar’s work celebrates the individual, the many stories, faces, and beings that make up the 600 million.
Sangam is on view from September 12 to October 24.
Sara Flores at White Cube New York
In the ancient geometric act of Kené, no pattern is ever repeated. The intricate designs are more than just that—they speak to a philosophical and spiritual perspective that intertwines shamanistic medicine, our relationship to nature, and healing through aesthetic balance. This is all a part of Shipibo-Konibo culture and tradition, an indigenous Peruvian people to which the 76 year-old artist Sara Flores belongs. Now, Flores is showing her masterful, large-scale Kené paintings and textiles for the first time at White Cube New York. The show, titled Akinananti—meaning a work made with love and joy—is Flores’s first solo exhibition in New York, coinciding with her representation of her country of Peru at the Venice Biennale (she’s also the first indigenous Peruvian to show in Venice).
The pieces are beautifully meditative and become all the more transfixing when you learn that Flores draws freehand, without preliminary sketches. She uses materials sourced from the Amazon—including botanicals, trees, leaves, and wild cotton—in the work, along with natural dyes to create neural, spiritual, and ecological networks. Her art is a form of a territorial resistance; Flores can only create with materials that are increasingly being decimated by loggers in the Peruvian Amazon. She is donating directly to fellow activists to fight for preservation. The work also continues the matriarchal tradition in which Kené is rooted—Flores’s daughters help her bring these pieces to life. —Ashley Simpson
Sara Flores, Akinananti is on view through August 14, 2026.
Adrián Villar Rojas at the Aspen Art Museum
Aspen Art Museum has announced its summer slate, which builds upon the conversations and themes of the second installment of AIR, the museum’s annual festival of contemporary art, performance, and ideas. Included in this lineup is an exhibition from Argentinian sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas. Titled First Gods, Lost Animals, the show evokes the geological and mythological formation of a cave, shaped through eons of material deposition and mineral consolidation. Layered on this accumulation is the cultural impact of human projections, rituals, and symbolic activity. For centuries, we have attempted to navigate this vast world with finite resources and First Gods, Lost Animals explores how humans confront the expansive universe, specifically using symbolic tools, including religion and gods, art, and mathematics.
The Aspen Art Museum co-commissioned a piece by Villar Rojas along with Audemars Piguet Contemporary, which will be on display as part of the exhibition. Untitled (from the series The Language of the Enemy) is a life-size triceratops skull. With this work, Villar Rojas explores the possibility of a prehistoric meeting between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, an assembly that illustrates the first examples of inter-species image-making. The piece challenges anthropocentric narratives that center Homosapiens as the fathers of symbolic creation. Now, there is evidence to suggest the Neanderthals engaged in such practices before us. With Untitled, Villar Rojas considers the transmission of ideas that could have resulted in the foundation of human culture.
Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals is on display at the Aspen Art Museum from July 2, 2026–April 11, 2027.
Yu Nishimura at Sadie Coles HQ
Up in the sun-speckled quietude of Sadie Coles’s 62 Kingly Street loft in London, Dislocation, Yu Nishimura’s second show with the cult-favorite gallerist, offers a sense of space not often available below the crowded streets of Soho. It is a welcome respite, composed of landscapes and paintings radiating with solitude. There are the ghostly stick figures for which Nishimura has long been known, yet here they appear dwarfed by the magnitude of nature.
The ones that feature urban sprawl bring to mind the cityscapes of Anita Steckel, where she pictures herself, giant, lying across the skyscrapers of Manhattan. The ones filled with trees recall the forests of Alex Katz and the jungles of Henri Rousseau.
The exhibition feels like the partner to Synopsis, Nishimura’s first show with Sadie Coles, which focused on urban scenes populated by bodies in motion and coincidentally sent the artist’s career flying. Now, two years later and a bona fide market darling, Nishimura returns in a more reflective mood. His figures, most of whom appear to be men, seem isolated, floating in a world bigger than themselves. Perhaps it is a reaction to Nishimura’s newfound fame, or a portrait of what it feels like now, in this overcrowded, overstimulated world, to be truly alone on a planet teeming with life. —K.H.
Yu Nishimura Synopsis is on view through August 22, 2026.
Paolo Roversi at the MOP Foundation
The MOP Foundation in A Coruña, Spain, believes there is no one like Paolo Roversi—a statement the museum is ready to prove with a new exhibition, Doubts. Described as an intimate journey through the Italian photographer’s artistic universe, Doubts is a celebration of Roversi’s enduring influence on the language of fashion photography. The title was Roversi’s choice. To him, doubt is “the door to creativity and imagination.” The idea of doubt is most closely linked to his work on Polaroid—a finicky format whose unpredictable nature requires the artist to truly relinquish control.
Doubts will unfold in a series of interconnected rooms, each representing a different aspect of Roversi’s aesthetic. Theater, Appearances, Shadows, People, Grace, and Beauty are among the themes to be explored in the exhibition. Experience them separately to truly appreciate the many layers of Roversi’s work, but consider them as one body of work illustrating the breadth of his mastery and the singularity of his vision.
Doubts is on display at The MOP Foundation from June 20 until September 2026.
Willem de Kooning at the Art Institute Chicago
Throughout his seven-decade-long career and in the quarter-century since his passing, Willem de Kooning has been the subject of dozens of solo exhibitions displaying his abstract expressionist paintings. The Art Institute of Chicago’s upcoming show for the Dutch American artist is different. Willem de Kooning Drawing—the artist’s first solo exhibition at the museum since 1969—is the first major show to examine de Kooning’s drawing practice. The show brings together over 200 works that reveal drawing’s integral place in de Kooning’s oeuvre. Pieces were gathered from across the world, with 25 works hailing from private collections and the Willem de Kooning Foundation, which have rarely, if ever, been shown publicly. Sketches on legal pads and those done with his eyes closed prove a spontaneity in de Kooning’s work. They’re displayed along with more known pieces by the artist—including Excavation and Woman I—and together encompass the impressive scope of de Kooning’s career. Even if you’ve seen his art one hundred times over, Drawing displays even the most popular pieces in a different light, allowing for a more well-rounded view of the artist’s production, as well as drawing’s influence on his work in other media.
Willem de Kooning Drawing is on display at the Art Institute Chicago through September 20, 2026.
Mickalene Thomas at the Shepherd
After two decades spent developing a highly influential, distinctive artistic practice centered on the depiction of Black womanhood, Mickalene Thomas has, for the first time, turned her creative eye toward Black masculinity. An entirely new body of work, Beneath the Moonlight, will be on display at the Shepherd in Detroit from June 6 through August 23, 2026, presented by Library Street Collective. The exhibition includes large-scale paintings, collages, and photography, as well as Thomas’s trademark staged settings. “The representation of masculinity spoke to me more, and using the Black male body as a vehicle, as a conduit to express those ideas that are resonant and paralleled to my concepts that I’m already working within with the female body,” Thomas said in a release. She worked with models beyond the gender binary to create her works, exploring themes of representation, stereotypes, and self-agency. She was inspired, in part, by the work of photographers like Quil Lemons and John Edmonds, who represent a new generation of artists grappling with themes of identity. To accompany the show, a catalog featuring original essays and interviews, designed by artist Bob Faust, will also be available for visitors to read. Beneath the Moonlight follows Thomas’s first major touring solo exhibition, All About Love, which debuted at The Broad in 2024.
Mickalene Thomas Beneath the Moonlight is on display at the Shepherd through August 23, 2026.
Eliza Douglas at Gagosian
Ghosts is filled with firsts. It is Eliza Douglas’s first solo exhibition in New York, her first at Gagosian, and the first in a new program at the gallery consisting of solo presentations by different artists curated by Francesco Bonami. “The unique and historic character of the Park Avenue and 75th Street location is an ideal space for a laboratory of fresh perspectives that will complement the gallery’s existing programming,” Bonami says of the series, which kicks off on May 12 with a display of Douglas’s “meta-paintings.”
The works in Ghosts borrow from the iconographies of advertising and popular culture, blending them with gestural abstraction. Through this practice, Douglas emphasizes art’s status as a consumable good. Those familiar with the artist’s work may recognize some of the pieces in Ghosts because they are reworkings of paintings she exhibited over the past decade at her gallery, Air de Paris. In this new show, she combines the existing compositions with selfies taken by her aunt, Leslie Kean, an investigative journalist who has long been reporting on UFOs and “otherworldly phenomena.” Douglas also pulls from a 2022 group exhibition at Gagosian London titled Haunted Realism, which explored the idea that the past continually haunts the present. Douglas has always toyed with the idea of hijacking, but Ghosts marks the first time she has incorporated such a practice into her production. The use of an existing body of work acknowledges the constant repackaging of cultural products. As theorist Mark Fisher says, “Those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever.”
Ghosts is on view at Gagosian Park and 75th location through July 31.
Ad Hoc at Studio2M
Studio2M has opened in SoHo as a workshop and exhibition space—and for its inaugural exhibition, founder Abby Caulkins has asked French artist Marie Hazard and Portuguese designer Constança Entrudo to collaborate on a body of work. The result is Ad Hoc, an exhibition that provokes a dialogue between art and fashion while deconstructing the usual hierarchies found within both disciplines. Hazard provides tactile compositions with poetic narrative qualities and installations combining weaving, beading, and crochet. Similarly, Entrudo uses digitally layered textiles to explore the ideas of weaving as a language and the intersection of craft and technology. Together, they push the limits of traditional weaving practices, blurring the boundaries between fashion show and performance, and taking into consideration the connections between fabric, space, and the body.
Ad Hoc will be on view at Studio2M from May 7 to June 13.
Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón
Intrinsically tied with music and sound, dance and movement have always played an integral role in spaces of collective organizing for liberation across the globe. On view at MCA Chicago through September 20, 2026, Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón underscores the histories and lasting impact of dancehall and reggaetón across visual, political, and spiritual registers. The major exhibition looks at how these musical genres have expanded beyond their “grassroots origins” and now serve as major shapers of culture on a global scale.
Spanning painting, sound sculpture, installation, photography, and video, Dancing the Revolution features the work of over forty contemporary artists, including Isaac Julien, Edra Soto, and Alberta Whittle, to name a few. The works in the show meditate on the revolutionary power of dance, particularly within the realms of dancehall and reggaetón, and how the practice functions not only as a source of joy but also of resistance. From sexual liberation to political protest, Dancing the Revolution positions dance and music as pillars of Black Atlantic history and culture, in the Caribbean and beyond. —Daria Simone Harper
Hidden Treasures, 250 Years of Franco-American Luxury Stories at The Shed
Comité Colbert presents “the most exclusive exhibition on French luxury held in New York,” at The Shed from May 26 to 31. Hidden Treasures, 250 Years of Franco-American Luxury Stories brings together over 65 French luxury maisons and cultural institutions, along with their never-before-seen American archives. Together, these pieces illustrate two-and-a-half centuries of friendship between France and the United States, and the role luxury has played in that relationship.
Each luxury brand is represented by one singular artifact, and together, a story is told about two countries and their cultural dialogue. Hidden Treasures explores the diplomacy, identity, and popular culture shared across the Atlantic. Jewelry, hotels, fragrance, liquor, and more are all represented in the exhibition, which attempts to portray the universal language of beauty. Christofle tableware from the Normandie collection and a Louis Vuitton trunk represent the luxury of cross-Atlantic travel. A 1933 gown designed by Cristóbal Balenciaga and worn by American socialite Mona von Bismarck exemplifies the influence of French couture on American style. Pieces from Berluti, Hermès, Chanel, and more luxury brands add to the narrative. A Celine scarf printed with U.S. Mail iconography and a Christian Louboutin heel inspired by Cinderella’s glass slipper, meanwhile, proves that inspiration flows both ways.
Emmanuel Boos at Raisonné
French ceramist Emmanuel Boos is bringing his glazed porcelain practice to NYC with his first solo show in the United States. A “glaze consultant” for Hermès and the recipient of the “Special Mention” award at the 2024 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, Boos has long boasted a transatlantic career. But this show, Noir C’est Noir, takes border-jumping to a new level. From April 9, Raisonné will host over 70 of Boos’s unique works, including coffee tables, side tables, stools, vases, and other objects. Together, these pieces illustrate Boos’s distinct style and exploration of fragile beauty and humorous practicality.
Boos’s porcelain practice allows him to embrace imperfection and welcome the unexpected, which he calls “happy accidents.” Also important to the process is Boos’s arrangement of his work within a space. There’s a modular aspect to this practice, with pieces grouped into various unfixed cohorts. This provides a reflection of the artist’s own nomadic life, and his closely held belief that meaning always exceeds function. “My practice of glaze does not aim for mastery nor domination,” the artist said in a statement. “I wish to slip into the glaze and develop a friendly relationship with chaos and eventually trust chance. It is emotion, sensuality, poetry.”
Dean Majd at the Camera Club of New York
In his debut solo show, Hard Feelings, Palestinian-American photographer Dean Majd chronicles a decade of brotherhood, grief, gore, and glory. As a young boy, the Queens, New York-born artist was often left alone, with only a camera in his hand to document his loved ones. But the sudden passing of a childhood friend in 2015 thrust him back into the nocturnal and hypermasculine graffiti and skate scenes, where the odyssey of Hard Feelings begins.
Driven by devastating loss and a desire to record truth, Majd captures deeply intimate portraits, demanding reflection and healing. In early imagery like geri on the hellgate bridge or bohemian rhapsody, risk and bliss alike appear in ritual and full force, from a young man undergoing a rite of passage, to friends sharing a hotel tub. The trust between Majd and his community is palpable, offering his sitters and viewers the opportunity to confront self-destruction head on. Brutality and tenderness unfolds as Majd’s community allows him to lens aftermaths of self-harm, abuse, and death. As both participant and observer, the artist’s visual language is unflinching and profoundly empathetic. Notably, Hard Feelings begins and ends with celebrations of life. —Ayesha Le Breton
Jonas Wood at Gagosian
The worlds of sporting and art combine in a series of works on display now at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills gallery. Over the past two decades, American artist Jonas Wood has turned prominent tennis matches into works of art, depicting these on-court battles in oil and acrylic paintings. The works are uniform in their vantage point, with each placing the viewer behind the baseline. Players and officials are nowhere to be seen, while spectators make an infrequent appearance in the form of abstract brushstrokes or dots.
Wood’s paintings blur the line between abstraction and Pop Art. A painted wood pattern surrounds Wimbledon with Wood Grain (2025), while the dotted audience of Mexican Open (2025) places the court in a star-filled galaxy. Homages to Roy Lichtenstein come in the form of works like Paris Olympics with Crying Girl (2025) and Dubai with Nude with Blue Hair (2026), where the late artist’s iconic Crying Girl (1963) and Nude with Blue Hair (1994) frame the courts. There is a standard followed with each painting: saturated colors, similar dimensions, and repeated elements. This uniformity allows the differences to come alive, making you ponder—and rethink—each piece.
Lorna Simpson at Punta della Dogana
Since her first solo show in New York in 1986, Lorna Simpson has explored concepts of race, gender, identity, and subjectivity, archiving Black lives and experiences in vivid, boundary-breaking form. She changed the language of photography, turning the media on itself as she framed Black women with their faces just out of view, text collaged on the images that hinted at and asked the viewer to question how the women were seen. In the decades since, Simpson brought her renowned conceptual experimentation to collage, film, sculpture, and—beginning at the 2015 Venice Biennale—painting. Now, the legendary artist is opening her first major European exhibition at Pinault Collection’s Punta della Dogana in partnership with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Third Person, running March 29 through November 22 at the Venice museum, features over 50 of Simpson’s paintings, spanning 20 years. There’s a special focus on the aforementioned large-scale works from Okwui Enwezor’s Biennale, never-before-seen offerings from Simpson’s personal archive, and new paintings made especially for this exhibition. —A.S.
Jessi Reaves at Arts and Letters
Ever since Arts and Letters NYC got a curatorial team (including Jenny Jaskey and curator Kristin Poor) two years ago, the uptown establishment has been increasingly showing up on downtown feeds. Rotated on the half year, a new suite of exhibitions has recently taken over Arts and Letters’s enviable rooms, including a mutation of Jessi Reaves’s first institutional solo show, which opened at the Walker Art Center earlier this year, and now has been reconstituted in a new configuration for Arts and Letters.
Cushions for tetris-like banquets welcome visitors into Art and Letters’s right wing; sitting atop these hand-painted perches, as you are encouraged to do, one can pivot in place and survey the show’s topography—namely, an archipelago of free-standing sculptures populated by a flock of reusable water bottles. Each water bottle bears a different paper cut-out of a bird, and these flightless creatures are like everything in Reaves’s world—a recombination. Reaves first made a name for herself in sculpture by dressing down modernist icons, Marcel Breuer seats and Le Corbusier lounges—until only their vulnerable essentials were left. Now more than a decade in, her attentions have turned elsewhere: to the empty promises of pure function and the transformative powers of accumulation. Here, a Nalgene bottle becomes a paper crane, a WPA mural becomes a bench, an art show in one city is something else entirely in a different location. By the time you’ve sat down, you’ve forgotten there is a painting underneath you. —K.H.
Carol Bove at the Guggenheim
For the next several months, tea will be served in the rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The occasion? Artist Carol Bove’s monumental new survey, which has taken on the Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece as a co-conspirator rather than an obstacle. Bove—whose work has long explored the juxtaposition of geometries, both found and made—draws out the patterns and repetitions embedded in the architect’s design. In doing so, she reveals that the museum’s famous circle is in fact composed of countless rings and discs, to which she adds several of her own in metal, fabric, and paint.
As you ascend the building’s signature spiral, you travel in reverse chronology through Bove’s career. You might notice you are also moving from dark to light; Bove has applied a black-to-white ombré that unfurls floor by floor. It is a minimal intervention with maximum impact. It all comes into focus the higher you climb—Bove has consistently, and gently, adjusted the essential forms we think we know so well. By doing so, she renews them, revealing truths that were hidden in plain sight. The most glaring and delightful example? A diamond-shaped cut Bove has made in a false wall, which reveals a Joan Miró work that hasn’t been seen for decades.
It is an exhibition that insists you slow down and unwind time. It warms you up for the act of steeping by creating the conditions conducive for it: ample seating and something to sip. —K.H.
Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages at The Getty Center
The Biblical narrative of creation is explored in a modern context in Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages. Paintings by American artist Harmonia Rosales are shown in dialogue with transcripts from the Getty’s collection, situating her work within the world of visual storytelling and placing her paintings in direct conversation with medieval representations of creation. Rosales has long been known to draw on artistic methods from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, combining them with African diasporic histories. She continues this practice with Beginnings by contributing a contemporary perspective shaped by West African spiritual traditions, adding to the ongoing conversation around creation. In addition to previous work, including Portrait of Eve (2021), Beginnings will feature a new piece, created in response to the significant illuminated manuscript, Stammheim Missal.
Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages is on view at the Getty Center in Los Angeles from January 27 to April 19.
Leonard Baby at Half Gallery
Leonard Baby’s new show may have a quirky title, but don’t be fooled. Resting Babyface features work from the New York-based artist, which he created during a period of profound sadness. As a result, the paintings on display encapsulate the essence of vulnerability and the complexities of personal experience. This is nothing new for Baby, who often draws on his past and emotions in his work, transforming trauma into acts of resilience and self-acceptance. In Resting Babyface, Baby turns the focus to two very vulnerable settings: the bedroom and a therapist’s office. With this new set of work, Baby explores themes of aftermath and introspection, using the paintings as personal confessionals meant to leave viewers in a state of discomfort and ambiguity.
Resting Babyface is on view at Villa Carlotta in Los Angeles from February 26 to March 11.
Say It Loud: AAMARP, 1977 to Now at ICA Boston
This February, the ICA Boston turns its attention to an artist-led institution that has shaped the fabric of New England’s art community since 1977. Founded by Dana C. Chandler Jr., the African American Master Artists-in-Residence Program (AAMARP) is one of the longest-running Black artist residency programs. Therefore, its story resonates not just on a local level but a national and international one. AAMARP’s influence can be felt far beyond Boston through its alumni network of artists, educators, and organizers. Conceived originally as a Black artist-led exhibition space, AAMARP evolved into a living ecosystem: part studio collective, part political area, and part cultural refuge, where new modes of working could take root even as institutional support shifted around it.
As the first exhibition devoted to AAMARP’s far-reaching legacy, it was essential for Mannion Family Curator Jeffrey De Blois to spend lots of time with members past and present. Developed in close dialogue with the founder Chandler before his passing in 2025, the show arrives less like a retrospective and more as a constellation of practices whose collective energy points outward. At the exhibition, the story of AAMARP’s community-driven approach is told through the work of five decades of participants. There are some folks you know. The rest are discoveries. Rather than closing a chapter, the exhibition feels like an opening gesture. —K.H.
Ming Smith: Jazz Requiem–Notations in Blue at the Portland Museum of Art
This new exhibition from photographer Ming Smith traces an artistic journey shaped by movement, experimentation, and freedom. The Detroit-born artist came of age at a time when Europe offered Black artists greater opportunity and receptivity. Smith’s travels abroad, specifically in the 1970s in Paris, proved formative; there, she encountered the evocative work of photographers like Brassaï and Henri Cartier-Bresson while developing a visual language of her own. This exhibition reflects on how those early experiences continue to inform Smith’s practice, highlighting photographs—many of which have been printed for the first time—that capture fleeting moments infused with rhythm, intuition, and motion. Smith’s work resists photography’s long-standing impulse to define, document, or objectify Black subjects. Rooted in the core principles of the Black Arts Movement, her photographs expand the medium beyond realism, often confronting and subverting the gaze itself. Her signature use of blur and abstraction is both poetic and political, mimicking the improvisational spirit of jazz while responding to the ways Black Americans are rendered simultaneously invisible and hypervisible. A pioneer for Black women in photography, Smith’s legacy lies in her innovation, her fearless experimentation, and her unwavering commitment to capturing the depth and richness of Black life. —Che Baez
Ming Smith: Jazz Requiem–Notations in Blue is on view at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine from February 6th to June 7th 2026.
Max Jahn at Gratin
For the German artist Max Jahn, frames are just as important as the imagery inside of them. As part of his practice, Jahn painstakingly chooses each border for his painted works from his father’s antique shop. They are personal to him—as personal as the colorful portraits he creates, which will be on view in the new show, Time Spent Looking. The exhibition features both portraiture (like Self With Fan, a painting in which Jahn is depicted coyly holding a floral accordion fan to his face) and still life. Jahn paints what he knows; his subjects often come from within his social circle. His relationships with them—and by extension, his depictions of them—are shaped by time and prolonged observation. He paints his sitters for an hour at a time over the course of a week, in varying lights for each session. But his work in self-portraiture arguably features his most familiar subject of all.
Hailing from Berlin and growing up in the aftermath of German reunification in the ’90s, Jahn was raised with the ghosts of a different era. He spent time at his father’s antique store on Motzstrasse, in the heart of the Schöneberg neighborhood, where painters and poets ruled before the Second World War. Otto Dix, the Dutch Masters he studied at school, Balthus, and more combine to create Jahn’s own signature style, now on display in his first solo show in New York.
Time Spent Looking runs from January 29 to Match 2026 at Gratin New York.
Samora Pinderhughes at MoMA
Multidisciplinary artist and composer Samora Pinderhughes centers his work on one urgent question: “What if we built a world around healing rather than punishment?” In Call and Response, a new exhibition at MoMA on view through February 15, 2026, Pinderhughes beckons audiences to ponder this inquiry alongside him. The show comprises two core components including a two-channel film created with Christian Padron, REAL TALK, which examines the impact of absence on families whose loved ones are incarcerated. It also features a series of performances and programming developed in collaboration with community organizations in New York City.
With Call and Response, Pinderhughes considers how narratives of criminalization are applied to groups of people to justify violence against them. “As a country, we’re willing to allow basically anything to happen if there’s this illusion that it will protect us from [who]ever is deemed criminal,” the artist said. The show is part of his stint as the 2025 Adobe Creative Resident at MoMA, and builds upon his work as a creator of The Healing Project, a community arts organization founded in the spirit of prison abolition. It also underscores Pinderhughes’s commitment to unearthing how art, particularly collective sonic practices, might contribute to collective healing and liberation. —D.H.
Sterling Ruby at Sprüth Magers New York
Sterling Ruby is an artist who, over the years, has become larger than life, a boldfaced name in both the art and fashion worlds. His work, moving across sculpture, textile, ceramics and video, explores themes of violence and the impacts of social norms while remaining autobiographical. His fashion line, S.R. Studio L.A.C.A., echoes his love of craft and feels very much due after years of lending inspiration for designers like his close friend Raf Simons. On January 30, the Los Angeles-based multihyphenate will present his first solo show in several years, running until March 28. Ruby’s new work, titled Atropa for the nightshade herb known for its deadly quality, is inspired by the duality of the deeply poisonous yet medicinal plant and the mythology that surrounds it. The Greeks associated the genus with the cutter of the thread of life. Ruby uses it as a launch pad for stirring watercolor collages, bronze flowers, and graphite pen-and-ink studies that switch between decay and vibrant bloom. As in all of Ruby’s work, material exploration is at the heart of the show. So are themes of mortality. An as usual, the exhibition is not to be missed. —A.S.
Catherine Opie at the National Portrait Gallery London
The American photographer Catherine Opie broke into art-world fame with portraiture of her early ’90s queer family, often friends from the Los Angeles S/M scene captured in the style of Baroque paintings. Early self-portraits, Self-Portrait/Cutting and Self-Potrait/Pervert display incredible tenderness, giving viewers the opportunity to lay down assumptions and connect with Opie’s community with equal depth. Over three decades later, the seminal artist will present the first major museum exhibition of her work in the U.K. at The National Portrait Gallery, from March 5 to May 31. Catherine Opie: To Be Seen will explore intimacy, home, and family—the personal and the political—through the photographer’s images of these communities, surfers, high school footballers, and more. Opie is directly involved in the curation of the show, which will speak in dialogue with the permanent collection of the museum. —A.S.
Marguerite Humeau at White Cube Gallery
The French multidisciplinary artist Marguerite Humeau is known for reimagining and creating extinct worlds. One extensive land art project saw mystics and scientists lending expertise as Humeau brought to life 84 sculptures that could survive the climate apocalypse on land deemed unfarmable. Another gave Cleopatra a reborn voice as she sang in the nine extinct languages she was recorded to know. Now, Humeau will open a solo show for the first time at White Cube’s New York gallery. Open from January 16 to February 21, the exhibition blends stalactite-like and bat-shaped sculptures with works on paper, all inspired by a trip to a bat cave in West Papua. As in the case of previous work, the cave is not just a cave, but rather a metaphor for the unknown and the unnamable. Pastel drawings mimic prehistoric cave drawings. Stalagmite and stalactite sculptures help us navigate our precarious environment. The pieces reference John Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (2021): can Humeau’s sculptures give emotion to words we have yet to invent? Her new work certainly makes us feel. —A.S.
Björk at the National Gallery of Iceland
The public will experience a different side of the perennial musical enigma Björk when she returns to her native Iceland to stage a new art exhibition at the country’s National Gallery. Echolalia, as the show is called, is comprised of three immersive installations, the first of which will provide the public with a peek into the artist’s upcoming album. The two other works, Ancestress and Sorrowful Soil, both honor Björk’s mother, environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, who passed away in 2018. While these pieces were originally released with Björk’s 2022 album, Fossora, their presentation at the museum will allow for a more theatrical experience. Ancestress, specifically, features a film set in a remote valley in Iceland where a ritualistic procession is taking place. Björk and her son, Sindri Eldon, star—with contributions from filmmaker Andrew Thomas Huang and James Merry, Björk’s co–creative director and the designer of the masks and ritual objects worn in the video.
Those especially interested in Merry’s work will have the opportunity to stop by his show, Metamorphlings, running simultaneously with Echolalia at the National Gallery. The first museum retrospective of Merry’s work, Metamorphlings features 80 pieces offering a look into his artistic output over the last decade. Heavily focused on the mask, the exhibition showcases Merry’s craftsmanship while exploring the piece as a catalyst for performance and transformation. Using embroidery, metalwork, 3-D printing, and jewelry, Merry has created masks for Tilda Swinton and Iris Van Herpen; they will be on display together for the first time.
Echolalia runs from May 30 to September 19, 2026, while Metamorphlings runs from May 30 to October 3, 2026.
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum
The V&A is staging a century-spanning exhibition on Schiaparelli, marking the first time the fashion house will be the sole subject of a museum show in the U.K. Opening March 28, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art will trace the brand from its birth in the 1920s to the present day, exploring Elsa Schiaparelli, the woman, as well as her role as an innovator and key figure in interwar fashion. The exhibition will follow Schiaparelli around the world, from Paris to New York and London, with a focus on the latter—specifically, Schiaparelli’s British clients and the founder’s relationship with the city.
Over 200 objects will make up the exhibition, including archival garments, accessories, jewelry, paintings, photographs, sculpture, furniture, and perfumes. Some of Schiaparelli’s most unique designs—including the “Tears” dress and the famous upside-down shoe hat—will be on display, placed alongside art by her contemporaries like Pablo Picasso and Man Ray. The V&A worked with Schiaparelli and the fashion house’s current creative director, Daniel Roseberry, whose designs will also be featured.
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art will run through November 8, 2026.
Tracey Emin at Tate Modern
Those who sit in small Venn diagram of And Just Like That... viewers and fine art lovers were likely horrified to see Tracey Emin’s seminal work imitated, and then tossed aside in the Sex and the City reboot’s final season. Luckily, Tate Modern is stepping in to provide Dame Emin with deserved credit, by mounting an expansive exhibition tracing four decades of the artist’s work—showcasing her most influential pieces alongside those that have never been exhibited until now. Through painting, video, textiles, neons, writing, sculpture, and installation, Emin has long challenged society’s view of the female body, as well as the line between public and personal. She did this most notably with her 1998 piece, My Bed, using the conversation that sparked around this controversial piece to further challenge the definition of art at the turn of the 21st century. At Tate Modern, My Bed and more work will be on display in a celebration of Emin’s raw and personal approach to artistic expression.
Tracey Emin runs at Tate Modern from February 27 to August 31, 2026.
Dan Flavin at David Zwirner
Dan Flavin’s grids take center stage for the first time at David Zwirner New York, in a new exhibition that explores the matrix-like vertical artist’s body of work, which first gained prominence in the mid 1970s. Like much of Flavin’s fluorescent lamp-based pieces, the grids simultaneously highlight and redefine every space in which they’re installed. This latest exhibition features Flavin’s first two grids: untitled (for Mary Ann and Hal with fondest regards) 1 and 2. Both created in 1976, they will be installed at Zwirner identically to their debut at the Otis Art Institute Gallery, Los Angeles, where they sat kitty-corner to one another in a single room. Other pieces, including four-foot creations like untitled (for you, Leo, in long respect and affection) 3 and 4, illustrate Flavin’s exploration of scale within the format. They are contrasted by untitled (in honor of Leo at the 30th anniversary of his gallery), which spans 24 feet. Flavin’s dedications within the work provide a second narrative to the exhibition, one that follows the many people who helped support the artist’s career. Former gallery director of the Otis Art Institute Gallery, Hal Glicksman (and his wife Mary Ann), plus his longtime New York dealer Leo Castelli are just some of the figures represented through this set of work.
Dan Flavin’s Grids will run from January 15 to February 21, 2026, at David Zwirner New York.
Gloria Klein at Anat Ebgi
Gloria Klein, a contemporary artist known for her bold, expressive work, is championed in a new lively exhibition of paintings, and her first solo show, at Anat Ebgi in New York. Featuring works from the late 1980s and early ’90s, the exhibition immerses viewers in Klein’s hypnotic, repeated diagonal hatch marks that stack and shimmer across the canvas. While her work nods to Minimalism and Conceptual art, it is joyfully rooted in the Pattern & Decoration movement and the feminist embrace of so-called “women’s work,” transforming repetition, ornament, and labor into something bold and eye-catching. Klein’s stitch-like marks echo the crowded streets of New York, visual noise, and the early digital pulses of the 1980s. Visually addictive and intellectually playful, Crisis Management is an irresistible invitation to step into Klein’s radiant world, and the feminist spirit that animates it, up close.
Gloria Klein: Crisis Management is on view at Anat Ebgi through February 28, 2026.
