66 Museum Exhibitions to See This Spring

In most contexts, Alex Da Corte is put forward as a sculptor with a zest for pop culture, whose icons he has memorialized—he built a giant blue Big Bird on the Met’s rooftop four summers ago. But with this survey, Da Corte comes into the spotlight as a painter of strange abstractions. Included among the 40 paintings here are ones made using shampoo, which Da Corte purchased at drugstores and then utilized to form blotchy abstractions reminiscent of Morris Louis and Mark Rothko.

March 2, 2025–September 7, 2025

Renée Green’s multifarious art has always been defined by her ability to press down on historical oddities and mine them for all they’re worth. She’s done so, memorably, in her “Space Poems,” which translate quotations from texts into hanging banners, and she is set to produce new ones for the Dia Art Foundation’s museum in Upstate New York. The spacious galleries there will also play host to her “Color” works from the ’90s, which investigate how the eye perceives certain hues, effectively inviting viewers to look as closely as Green herself does.

Opens March 7, 2025

This is a big year for Anselm Kiefer, a German artist known for making very big paintings and very big sculptures dealing with the trauma still lingering from World War II. Ahead of a US retrospective coming to St. Louis this fall, there’s this two-part show, which spans two of Amsterdam’s most important museums. The Van Gogh Museum will place Kiefer’s chunky canvases alongside those of Vincent van Gogh, while the Stedelijk Museum is showing off some of Kiefer’s grandest installations, including a new one that will fill an entire staircase.

March 7, 2025–June 9, 2025

There’s likely never to be a time when Caravaggio will fall out of fashion, but there’s good reason to believe there’s more interest in this Baroque painter now than in other moments. In 2020, for example, Teju Cole said the darkness of Caravaggio’s paintings moved him to consider injustice of all kinds—and there is certainly quite a lot of that in the world right now. That’s one reason why this show, staged to coincide with the 2025 Jubilee of the the Catholic Church, could strike a chord. It’s not quite a retrospective, since Florence’s Uffizi Galleries and other Italian institutions are holding on to some of their precious Caravaggios. But the Palazzo Barberini has marshaled more than a few great Caravaggios held abroad for the show, which will include The Cardsharps (1595), a salacious canvas that rarely leaves the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

March 7, 2025–July 6, 2025

If you’re an artist and you’re up for a big prize, you should go monumental—that’s the best way to get attention. But Veronica Ryan has typically gone small and spare, and the Spike Island show that gained her a Turner Prize nomination in 2022 was filled with minimalist sculptures composed of clay-cast cocoa pods glazed using ash from her native Montserrat. She won that prize, cementing her status as one of England’s most important living artists. Now, she will have her first US survey, which will assemble some 100 works produced since the 1980s that raise tiny objects such as seeds and fruit—the stuff most people consider minor and unimportant—to the status of high art.

March 7, 2025–July 27, 2025

Should we bitterly confront the dark forces of our world head-on, or should we approach them more rationally, less angrily? This show suggests that artists are actually doing both at the same time, producing paintings, sculptures, and videos that appear calm in the face of colonialism, fascism, and other insidious -isms while also critiquing them. With an artist list that includes young talents such as Hamishi Farah and Taína Cruz, the show has a thesis that would, in most curators’ hands, be risky. Good thing it is being co-organized by Julia Eichler and Susanne Pfeffer, the curatorial maestro behind the MMK’s ambitious surveys for Cady Noland and Marcel Duchamp.

March 8, 2025–August 24, 2025

Broken ancient Chinese pottery, art-historical masterpieces made from Legos, photographs of middle fingers raised before monuments: these are among the works by Ai Weiwei that have garnered audiences far and wide in the US. But the fact is that his earlier work—which mulled thorny ideas such as police violence, censorship, and the AIDS crisis—have never gained quite the same traction here. That makes this retrospective, a 130-work show that will cover the breadth of Ai’s career, a must for Americans, many of whom are likely to encounter of the Chinese-born superstar’s lesser-known pieces for the first time Stateside.

March 12, 2025–September 7, 2025

Historical Afro-Brazilian artists, long overlooked both in their home country and beyond, have gradually moved into the spotlight. The latest exhibition to provide proof of this is El Museo del Barrio’s survey for Mestre Didi, who inventively lured styles associated with the Nagô Candomblé religion into sculpture, producing artworks composed of cowrie shells, beads, and more. The show is billed as a monographic exhibition, but it is, in a way, something more than that, offering an entire cosmos of Afro-Brazilian artists by placing Didi’s work alongside pieces by artists such as Emanoel Araújo, Rubem Valentim, and more.

March 13, 2025–July 13, 2025

In his 1986 painting Siete últimas canciones (Seven Last Songs), Guillermo Kuitca portrays a darkened room with a gaping doorway leading to a blue void. The blue light falls across several kicked-over chairs and an empty bedframe, but no one is to be seen anywhere. That work and many others produced by the Argentine artist during the ’80s were a reflection on the disappearances that had taken place not long ago, under the Perón regime, and the vacantness of these works became the artist’s calling card. With this show, MALBA looks back on this formative era for Kuitca, who remains one of Argentina’s most famous artists.

March 14, 2025–June 16, 2025

Last year, Oscar Murillo wound his way into the hearts of the British public with a Turbine Hall–filling work at Tate Modern in which visitors were invited to help create a gigantic blue painting—a Monet “Water Lilies” for our times, one that didn’t require an MFA for participation. The Colombian-born artist is asking viewers to help him paint once more for this survey, whose titular work will be a new piece made using canvas marked by people passing through Casanicolás, a shelter for migrants in Monterrey, Mexico. Alongside this piece, there will be past works by Murillo, who is known for producing abstract paintings that are scuffed, dirtied, and slathered with paint.

March 14, 2025–August 10, 2025

Collection shows can be hit or miss, and are generally not very notable either way. But here is one that is not: a survey of a rich grouping of ancient Roman sculptures amassed by the Torlonia family, whose holdings have rarely left Italy. Having gone on show elsewhere in Europe already, nearly 60 sculptures from the collection now are making their way to the US.

March 15, 2025–June 29, 2025

Pablo Picasso was one of the few well-known Western artists to use his work to speak out against the Korean War, memorably using his 1951 painting Massacre in Korea to protest that bloody conflict. Even so, not many exhibitions in Asia—both in Korea and elsewhere—have focused on Picasso’s relationship to the continent and vice versa. This M+ show, featuring rare loans from Paris’s Musée Picasso, including Massacre in Korea, will remedy this. Crucially, the show positions Picasso within a constellation of Asian artists, with works by Keiichi Tanaami, Isamu Noguchi, Simon Fujiwara, and others to map the Cubist master’s influence.

March 15, 2025–July 13, 2025

“I work with these figures until I am released from them,” June Leaf once said. True to her word, she remained committed to figuration until her passing last July, leaving behind an indefinable body of work that spanned a sculptural version of a Vermeer painting and sculptures that moved at the touch of a trigger. Her inventive oeuvre has been elusive, and that makes this retrospective of her work a must-see for this under-known giant of recent American art history.

March 15, 2025–July 31, 2025

Bucking the traditional mid-career survey format, wherein a show takes place at an institution, then closes and travels to the next one, this Park McArthur exhibition will be staged simultaneously by two museums in two separate countries. That gesture is itself connected to McArthur’s practice of making art about access, with her most famous work being her 2014 piece Ramps, for which she exhibited makeshift ramps produced by institutions she sought to enter. Can’t visit the show itself? McArthur has a solution of sorts: she’s creating a text and an audio guide that will exist online, acting as a complement to a show that is tough for anyone to see in full.

mumok: March 15, 2025–September 7, 2025; Museum Abteiberg: March 15, 2025–September 28, 2025

Ever since Tracey Emin offered her own bed as a readymade in 1998, intimacy has been one of the British artist’s main interests. Yet even while her work alludes to the sexual, it is not always sexy: she has commonly explored the loneliness she has felt, even when in the company of another. Desire and its discontents form the basis of this 60-work survey, which will feature paintings, sculptures, embroidered pieces, and her beloved neon installations.

March 16, 2025–July 20, 2025

In 1998, Htein Lin was imprisoned in Myanmar after writing critically of the dominant regime; he would not be released until 2004, by which point he had endured physical abuse and emotional torment. But his time behind bars ended up being generative: he took up painting and has continued creating dazzling images having to do with freedom in the years since. This show surveys these works, but it isn’t entirely contained within Ikon’s walls. Another part of it will appear at HMP Grendon, a penitentiary in Buckinghamshire where Lin has been working with inmates to craft portraits and soap block sculptures.

March 19, 2025–May 31, 2025

One of the last shows staged at the Centre Pompidou before a years-long closure is an art-historical whopper: a far-reaching survey about Black artists who were based in Paris during the second half of the 20th century. Most of these 150 artists hailed from Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean. There is no one aesthetic to be found here, no one way of working—not even a single artistic network. And though its title implies otherwise, the show will include some new artworks by Valérie John, Nathalie Leroy Fiévee, Jay Ramier, and Shuck One, whose commissions will complement past works by Wifredo Lam, Bob Thompson, Ernest Breleur, and more.

March 19, 2025–June 30, 2025

When Jenny Savillea key member of the Young British Artists group, began painting grandly scaled images of fleshy women during the 1990s, she “wanted to construct paintings that were about seeing bodies from many different angles all at the same time,” she once told Roxane Gay in an Art in America interview. “You can see bits of yourself that you didn’t even know existed,” she added. Her painting practice has since been dedicated to creating images of bodies that both refute tradition and pay homage to it—what could simplistically be labeled a feminist take on Mannerism, even though that doesn’t do her portraits justice. The Albertina is now staging a retrospective for Saville, who will here also debut new works.

March 21, 2025–June 29, 2025

Born in Senegal, raised in Kuwait, educated in Japan, and now based in Germany, Monira Al Qadiri has led a transnational life that has afforded her an incisive view of the oil industry, the lifeblood of the Gulf region’s economy. Focusing specifically on what has frequently been termed “petroculture,” she creates unsettling sculptures that scale up signifiers of the oil industry, including drills and other machines, until they seem unrecognizable. Her beguiling art is being surveyed in this show, focused specifically on the climatological impact of oil drilling.

March 21, 2025–September 7, 2025

For his 2021–24 piece To know and possess, Kamilaroi artist Warraba Weatherall cast the records for objects owned by the Australia national collections in bronze. One of the casts was for a shield once held by Aboriginal people; the text here notes that its user had been shot to death. This jarring work visualizes how institutional collections are built upon violence committed against Indigenous peoples, both in Australia and around the world, and it is only one of many by Weatherall to do so. He’ll show similar works at this exhibition, which is billed by the artist’s first museum show.

March 21, 2025–September 7, 2025

Ömer Uluç is considered a giant of Turkish contemporary art in his homeland, but he has been tough to pin down, in part because his work took so many forms. He painted animals, people, and other less definable creatures, all in his signature brushy style, but he also worked in sculpture, drawing, and other mediums in which he dabbled in abstraction. All the while, he traveled often, spending time in the US, Nigeria, and France when he wasn’t in Turkey. Now, he’s getting a 300-work retrospective that may finally allow us to take stock of him.

March 21, 2025–December 12, 2025

“i’m not here to play to the gallery,” Raymond Saunders wrote in his 1967 essay “Black Is a Color,” a statement that suggested the seriousness of his art and his paintings’ unwillingness to communicate in simple ways. In the past six decades, the artist has continued to create difficult works that set scrawls, found imagery, ready-made objects, and more against black backgrounds. The works function a bit like rebuses (à la Robert Rauschenberg, a clear forerunner) and are both charming and puzzling in equal measure. Now 90 years old, he’s having a retrospective.

March 22, 2025–July 13, 2025

Judith Lowry has spent her career synthesizing European artistic traditions with the mythologies of the Maidu and Pit River tribes, effectively interpreting Native American imagery—and in particularly Californian Native American imagery—using the lexicon of the Western canon. The paintings she produces are rich with memorable figures: dancing owls, blazing beings, humans pictured against the backdrop of recognizably Californian landscapes. Lowry is now getting the retrospective treatment in tandem with a show of artworks by others that she donated to the Nevada Museum of Art.

March 22, 2025–November 16, 2025

Rarely content to simply put oil to canvas, Jack Whitten was a ceaseless inventor of new possibilities for abstraction: he crafted paintings from dried acrylic chips, utilized a squeegee to pull his wet materials around, and even sometimes embedded his canvases with found objects that made references to Black history and brought his art into the third dimension. There have been other Whitten retrospectives in the recent past, but none so big as the MoMA show, which, at more than 175 works, counts as an apologia of sorts from a museum that held just one work by this pioneer prior to the new millennium.

March 23, 2025–August 2, 2025

The notion that France was the locus of all important painterly developments during the second half of the 19th century has begun to fray, thanks in part to a range of retrospectives for figures who resided outside Paris for much of their career. The latest of these is this survey for Christian Krohg, a painter whose focus on laypeople, not rich patrons, moved Norway’s art scene in a new direction. Yes, Krohg spent time in the French capital, where his studies of Gustave Courbet and others in his circle made a lasting mark. But Krohg’s brushy paintings of seafarers, children, and streetwalkers had a greater impression at home, and it is his influence in Norway that forms the core focus of this show.

March 25, 2025–July 27, 2025

For decades, Arpita Singh, an influential artist of the Indian scene, has been using her paintings to spotlight women in her home country. Her main means of doing so has involved remixing age-old visual material, luring folk styles into the realm of contemporary art and showing that India’s past is inseparable from its roiled present. Her Serpentine show, billed as her first major museum exhibition outside India, surveys more than 60 year’s worth of work, with ink paintings, watercolors, and more on view.

March 25, 2025–July 27, 2025

The Pirelli HangarBicocca has a reputation for ambitious site-specific surveys, but even with a program chockful of them, this retrospective stands out because the art included should prove especially challenging to mount. Yukinori Yanagi made a splash at the 1993 Venice Biennale will an installation featuring flags remade using colored sand that shifted as ants moved through it. He’s continued to make works that unsettle fixed notions of national identity, and the Japanese artist is now presenting them in a way that responds to the museum’s vast halls. How Yanagi will do this is being kept under wraps, but a press release suggests that references to Greek mythology will figure throughout.

March 27, 2025–July 27, 2025

“We are living in the most violent time that the world has ever seen,” Egon Schiele wrote to his sister Gertude in 1914, four years before he died of the Spanish flu. Sound familiar? It should, and perhaps always will, which may explain why Schiele’s images of disheveled, emaciated people are always of interest. But rarely do big shows devoted to him focus on his final years, something this survey remedies. Appropriately, it’s themed around death, with Schiele’s works made in preparation for planned frescoes at a mausoleum reunited for the first time.

March 28, 2025–July 13, 2025

Not until now has a Latin American artist had a solo show at London’s National Gallery. The first to receive such an honor is the 19th-century Mexican painter José María Velasco, whose subject was his country’s landscapes—its snow-capped mountains, its verdant hills, its vacant plains. Every so often in Velasco’s paintings, trains, buildings, and roads can be seen, making them crucial records of how Mexico was industrialized during this era. That industrialization was in part the product of European intervention, and so, the National Gallery is augmenting this survey with Western paintings that illuminate this darker history as well.

March 29, 2025–August 17, 2025

What saves this sprawling exhibition from being yet another boring survey about graffiti and contemporary art is its curatorial team: Ned Vena, an artist known for making paintings that look like spray-painted tags, is organizing the show with Leonie Radine. Vena and Radine have amassed a group of artists that does include a few people who may firmly qualify as street artists, including Futura 2000 and Lee Quiñones. The bulk of the artist list notably does not. Among those featured are Lawrence Weiner, an artist more commonly associated with the Conceptualist movement; Melvin Edwards, whose sculptures reference histories of anti-Black violence; and Jeanette Mundt, a Vena collaborator who also works solo, producing figurative paintings that sometimes intentionally look like “low” street art, not the “high” art you normally see in galleries.

March 29, 2025–September 14, 2025

In his 13-hour video Last Night (2016), Martin Beck shows records playing from start to finish, with each album chosen referencing one spun by David Mancuso on one night in 1984 at his New York dance party called the Loft. That work, like many others by Beck, questions how much information is really communicated by looking at an object, whose context always communicates more than is always obvious. And that’s why it’s all the more necessary to see much of his past works in context of one another at this exhibition, a survey of sorts that includes drawings, a video, and more.

March 30, 2025–October 5, 2025

Not unlike the Centre Pompidou’s “Paris Noir” show (opening in March), “City of Others” proposes that our understanding of the French capital’s recent art history is severely limited and now makes some attempts to rectify that. The focus, here, is specifically Asian artists; they, like the Black artists of the Pompidou show, made a significant contribution to the Parisian art scene, even if they have often gone under-acknowledged in France. One such artist is Georgette Chen, a Chinese-born painter whose enchanting portraits and still lifes were exhibited in the Paris Salon early in her career.

April 2, 2025–August 17, 2025

Ed Aktins’s videos featuring computer-generated avatars that speak poetic gibberish and undergo bodily change defined an era, speaking well to a generational malaise that accompanied the rise of Web 2.0. Having begun creating works constructed entirely of this digital imagery in the 2010s, Atkins has continued to push the form in increasingly bizarre directions, with one memorable recent work featuring a version of the artist himself taking a real call from his mother. These works, along with richly detailed drawing produced alongside them, are eerie meditations on what constitutes reality when most things are viewed behind screens. For this survey, you’ll have to see all the works in person, but ironically, that will make them that much more resonant.

April 2, 2025–August 25, 2025

When seen together, August Sander’s plainspoken photographs of men, women, and children form a well-rounded picture of German society as it stood in the 1920s. In that way, Sander “succeeded in writing sociology not by writing, but by producing photographs,” as novelist Alfred Döblin once said. Sander’s mark on Germany can be seen far and wide, and it may explain why there is such a rich tradition of photography in that nation, whose artists have long been interested in just how much information about society a picture can really communicate. MMK Frankfurt director Susanne Pfeffer endeavors to survey that rich lineage with this 600-work show, which charts a trajectory that runs straight to the end of the 20th century, with conceptual pictures by Gerhard Richter and the late Marianne Wex figuring here.

April 3, 2025–July 14, 2025

Roman Signer has strapped a house to rockets, launched a car down a ramp, and exhibited opened umbrellas in buckets as sculptures. It may be easy to dismiss these works as deadpan jokes, but they are presented so dryly that Signer may just be serious about it all. How ironic is he being? This Kunsthaus Zurich survey for Signer, one of the most famous artists in Switzerland, may provide an answer in the form of objects, both old and new, that move their viewers to reconsider everyday materials.

April 4, 2025–August 17, 2025

This artist—a purveyor of a style known as Black Dada, which he has described as “a way to talk about the future while talking about the past”—is known for brushy paintings in which short phrases of dissent drip and blur. Those works will figure here in this show featuring a newly commissioned video installation about Resurrection City, the encampment staged in the National Mall in 1968, at the height of the civil rights era. The Trump administration’s actions have so far posed a threat to federally funded institutions like the Hirshhorn, a part of the Smithsonian Institution, whose DEI office was disbanded. Pendleton’s show has thus already gained new currency.

April 4, 2025–January 3, 2027

Just when it seems like there’s nothing new to be said about Henri Matisse, here comes a fresh perspective on the famed French painter. Matisse’s daughter, Marguerite Duthuit-Matisse, is typically regarded as a dutiful keeper of her father’s legacy, but this show suggests she was more than that—a model, a sounding board, and a source of inspiration. The 110 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and more featured here attests to their rich back-and-forth, which very well may have put Matisse on a more experimental course in his later years.

April 4, 2025–August 25, 2025

At more than 300 works, this retrospective has what may count as the longest checklist of any show being staged this season—and for good reason, given the outsized influence that Ruth Asawa has exerted upon many young sculptors working today. She is known for hanging looped-wire sculptures inspired by her studies of basketry in Mexico; there will be no shortage of them on hand here. But the show brings Asawa beyond the wire sculptures, paying mind to her Black Mountain College days, her relationship to nature, her public art, and her politics, all in an effort to stake a claim for her practice as being much more expansive than most realize. Fittingly for such an epic exhibition, it will go on to travel the world, visiting the Museum of Modern Art (its co-organizer) in the fall before heading to the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Fondation Beyeler.

April 5, 2025–September 2, 2025

During the past half-century, Belgium has produced a particularly rich lineage of painters, principal among them Luc Tuymans and Raoul De Keyser. Who’s carrying on the tradition now? Expect to find some answers in this 70-artist survey focused on Belgian painters born after 1970, featuring talented young artists such as Libasse Ka and Hannah De Corte.

April 5, 2025–November 2, 2025

Contemporary artists have taken up all kinds of unexpected materials in their work, but it’s likely that few have ever described dreams as their medium. One is Tatiana Trouvé. “I would like visitors to have access to different levels of reality,” the Italian artist has said, explaining how sleep states have influenced her large-scale drawings in which landscapes move in and out of focus. These works, as well as sculptures and installations alongside them, have marked an attempt by her to imagine the world before humans populated it. She will undertake that project once more with this show, for which Trouvé will take over all three floors of the Palazzo Grassi, one of two private museums in Venice run by the collector François Pinault.

April 6, 2025–January 4, 2026

It’s not as though the world is lacking in David Hockney shows, but if one is to stage yet one more, let it be as expansive as this 400-work survey. Featured here will be some of Hockney’s most famous works from the 1960s, including A Bigger Splash (1967). But with this show, the artist, working closely with the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s curatorial team, has largely placed the emphasis on his art of the past 25 years, with an entire gallery given over to his Covid-era iPad paintings, for which he sketched sights seen in Normandy every day as a means of assuring himself and others that nature would continue to prosper, even while people ailed.

April 9, 2025–August 31, 2025

It’s possible that no social network had as a great an impact on art history as the one that bound the five people surveyed in this show. These creators were not just artists—Merce Cunningham was a choreographer and a dancer, and John Cage was a composer—but their output changed visual art forever, proposing new ways for their inheritors to utilize chance and ready-made objects in their work. The 150 works by them featured here are a bounty of riches, with Jasper Johns’s famed Painted Bronze (1960), a sculpture composed of two painted Ballantine beer cans, on hand here.

April 10, 2025–August 17, 2025

It’s been 50 years since the artist Bas Jan Ader disappeared at sea, and the mysteries surrounding this artist—both himself and his small, acclaimed output—intrigue no less than they once did. That’s why the Hamburger Kunsthalle has awarded this Dutch artist yet one more retrospective, this one centered around his fascination with failure. It will feature works such as Fall II (Amsterdam), a 1970 film in which Ader is shown riding a bike along a canal before pedaling straight into the water, making quite a splash as he does so.

April 11, 2025–August 24, 2025

Kim Chong Hak has gained a loyal following in South Korea, where he’s known for painting multiplying flowers, often at a grand scale. These paintings may not seem so subversive, but consider them within the context of Korean art history: he transitioned from abstraction to figurative paintings of nature at a time when monochromes were still considered the highest art form in his nation. This survey offers the opportunity to reassess Kim’s art, giving it a solid a historical grounding while at the same time introducing American audiences to a painter not so well known here.

April 11, 2025–November 2, 2025

Ever since his 1989 film Looking for Langston, a landmark of queer cinema, Isaac Julien has been using his work to build on the historical record through a mix of fiction and fact. His formula has often involved taking a well-known figure—Langston Hughes, for example—and then augmenting well-known biographical information with speculative scenes that guess at what their personal life may have been like. In the past two decades or so, Julien has expanded his visions beyond single screens, allowing them to exist in expansive multichannel installations that look like exploded Hollywood productions. One of those works, his famed 2010 piece Ten Thousand Waves, about the death of 20 Chinese cockle pickers in England during a flood, figures here in this survey.

April 12, 2025–July 13, 2025

The Spanish painter Maruja Mallo has often been called a Surrealist, given that her paintings of the 1920s and ’30s conjure fantastical beings in dreamy landscapes. But it seems unfair to classify this restless artist under just one movement. There were periods when she was interested in mathematics, and there were ones where she was fascinated by Spanish carnival traditions. There were years where she lived in exile in Buenos Aires, having departed Spain during the Civil War, and there were ones where she was back at home, working largely in obscurity. This retrospective aims to take stock of her diverse output, proving that there are more sides to her than most realize.

April 12, 2025–September 14, 2025

Here is yet one more much-needed retrospective for a female painter marginalized within the male-dominated annals of modernism. Born in Portugal, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva created abstractions influenced by experiments in Cubism and Futurism that she saw while firsthand while she was based in Paris. But once World War II struck, she went into exile in Brazil, where she continued painting her shattered, prismatic forms in Rio de Janeiro. The show proposes Viera da Silva was seeking to understand the true nature of seeing at the same time as her better-known male colleagues—and that she may even deserve the same level of recognition as them.

April 12, 2025–September 15, 2025

Over the past decade, Rashid Johnson’s calling card has become his “Anxious Men” paintings, in which nervous faces formed from black soap and melted wax gnash their teeth before viewers. But his work has taken many other forms, some of which are lesser known to the public: a film in which Black dancers perform yoga on a beach, grand installations filled with plants, and more. This rotunda-filling Guggenheim retrospective will show why Johnson’s oeuvre is more diverse than many realize. It’s one of the last major projects Guggenheim senior curator Naomi Beckwith will undertake before turning her attention to Documenta 16.

April 18, 2025–January 16, 2026

History painting, once the province of white males, has been given new life by a range of artists, including the Cree painter Kent Monkman, whose revisitations of the genre both upend and pay homage to beloved America artworks of centuries past. Monkman frequently takes tranquil representations of landscapes worthy of Frederic Edwin Church and co., and then populates them with a cast of Native characters, an anti-colonialist gesture as much as a queer one. This survey featuring some of his biggest works to date will explore just what makes these subversions feel so daring.

April 20, 2025–August 17, 2025

Madame X (1884), John Singer Sargent’s famed painting of a woman in a slinky black dress, is today considered an iconic work of American art, even though its origins actually lie in France—Sargent first exhibited it at the Paris Salon, where it generated no shortage of controversy. The painting was the crown achievement of Sargent’s period in Paris, the city where he lived between 1874 and 1884, and this 100-work show traces how he got there, exploring along the way how his travels to North Africa, Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy also influenced him.

April 21, 2025–August 3, 2025

Typically, it is easy to pinpoint a certain set of interests that guide an artist’s oeuvre, but not so for Kandis Williams, who, at this point in her relatively short career, has defined herself by her willingness to be undefined. She’s created sculptures and films, some drawing on her sizable library of clipped images, some not. She’s created performances that dialogue with these works. And she’s founded a publishing house focused on writings by Black thinkers called Cassandra Press, which has itself even appeared in the Whitney Biennial alongside Williams. Her first-ever survey makes no attempt to pigeonhole her, either, and that’s why it should be so interesting.

April 24, 2025–August 24, 2025

Edi Hila’s 1972 painting Planting of Trees, with its bluish saplings and its joyous gardeners, is inoffensive to contemporary eyes. But its colors flew in the face of social realism in Albania, and so, Hila was awarded several years of forced labor. The sentence did not have its intended outcome: Hila continued bitterly critiquing those in power in Albania in the years afterward and has gained a following for it, memorably appearing in Documenta 14 in 2017. He will now have a proper survey in Germany, where the Hamburger Kunsthalle is pairing his work with that of another artist born in a formerly Soviet nation: the Georgian sculptor Thea Djordjadze, whose spare installations look a bit like deconstructed architectural structures.

April 25, 2025–October 5, 2025

Internationally, at least, Kenjiro Okazaki’s calling card remains a 2007 performance, staged with dancer Trisha Brown, in which he had robots create abstract paintings for him. Many of Okazaki’s other paintings have been made by his own hand, not his mechanical friends, but the result is often all the same: experiments with how strokes are made and what these marks signify. Despite having long been based in Tokyo, he’s never had a sizable survey in the city he calls home. That will change this spring with this show, which features a smattering of old works alongside many paintings produced since 2021.

April 29, 2025–July 21, 2025

On the biennial circuit, Irena Haiduk has cultivated a reputation for pesky, beguiling artworks: a wifi network accessible only to women for the 2017 Whitney Biennial; a project produced that same year for Documenta 14 under the name Yugoexport, which purported to be a mysterious corporation. Works such as these have loosely referred to the shapeshifting power relations she experienced firsthand in the former Yugoslavia, the country where she was born in 1982. She will return once more to that nation’s history, this time more explicitly, with a new work in which she utilizes the Rockbund Museum as a set for a film she will shoot there called Nula. Set against the backdrop of a period of economic instability in Yugoslavia, the film “captures a society unraveling after five decades of non-aligned Socialism, as civil war and international sanctions ignite a catastrophic freefall of value,” per the museum’s synopsis.

May 2, 2025–February 8, 2026

It was never obvious, at least at the start of her career, that Mildred Thompson would go on to paint abstractions bursting with color. She began by forming her paintings from wooden wedges arranged to form squares and rectangles, implying that one hardly needed a palette to make an abstraction. But by the end of her life, having found inspiration in science and cosmologies, she let loose, committing to canvas imagery that recalls colliding cells and imagined universes. An expression of the liberation she felt as a queer Black woman, her art will be surveyed this spring under a title that befits Thompson herself, who seemed to function on a frequency all her own.

May 10, 2025–October 12, 2025

On paper, the paintings Néstor Martín-Fernández de la Torre produced for his series “Poem of the Atlantic” (1912–23) sound dull, since the project was ostensibly meant only to depict the titular ocean as it changed over the course of the day. But the resultant works are far stranger than that—they depict people merging with waves and putti grabbing gigantic fish. The Canarian artist, an adherent of the Symbolist movement, was known for oddities such as this. He admired androgyny, embraced Freemasonry and the occult, and even brought his art outside galleries, into theaters. This 100-work retrospective stakes a claim for Néstor—he went by his first name—as a nutty innovator worthy of more attention.

May 14, 2025–September 8, 2025

For last year’s Whitney Biennial, Dala Nasser exhibited an installation in which dirtied fabrics were draped across tall columns reminiscent of the ones that typically appear in Greek temples. The fabrics were dyed using materials found in Lebanon, which also happened to be the place where Adonis was slain by a boar, according to ancient lore. She thus established a connection between violence, the distant past, and bodily trauma, and is now returning to those themes once more for a new commission centered around a Byzantine church in the Lebanese city of Qana, which has faced widespread destruction at the hands of the Israeli military twice in the past half-century.

May 16, 2025–August 10, 2025

Increased attention paid to our current climate emergency has coincided with a turn toward the non-human world, with many artists advocating on behalf of the animals we need dearly. This survey takes stock of some 60 artists who have done just this, broaching knotty ethical issues along the way. It includes figures such as Lin May Saeed, a German artist of Iraqi descent who sculpted animals as an extension of her activism.

May 15, 2025–January 7, 2026

Recent surveys at major museums dedicated to Alvin Ailey and Alice Coltrane have typified the way that curators have paid homage to Black figures who’ve loomed large in the cultural conscience, often by assembling artists whose work elucidates these giants instead of simply functioning as monographs. This show is the latest one in that vein. Its focus is Essex Hemphill, a poet and performer based in the D.C. area prior to his death in 1995 from AIDS-related causes. Even in his short lifetime, however, Hemphill managed to influence artistic movers and shakers such as Isaac Julien, who once credited Hemphill with having spurred him to make his famed 1989 film Looking for Langston.

May 17, 2025–August 31, 2025

Despite shooting to fame alongside the Abstract Expressionists during the 1950s, Richard Pousette-Dart still may not have widespread name recognition among the general public. Still, Pousette-Dart’s paintings composed of primordial symbols and splattered strokes have many fans among critics and artists, many of whom are likely to flock to this retrospective after Art Basel. The 100-work show loosely explores Pousette-Dart’s spirituality, which can be seen in paintings that appear to envision other worlds.

May 17, 2025–September 14, 2025

Helen Chadwick’s delightfully named “Piss Flower” sculptures (1991–92) involved peeing onto flower-shaped swatches of snow, filling the resultant depressions in plaster, and casting them in bronze—a beautiful, labor-intensive process for a subject that seemed so childish. Chadwick knew exactly what she was doing: she wanted to provoke her viewers, then question what, exactly, they found so shocking. Her various assaults on “good” taste landed her praise among critics (and the scorn of onlookers), along with a Turner Prize nomination, all before her death at 42 in 1996. Though hardly forgotten, her memory is now being revived in her first retrospective in a quarter-century.

May 17, 2025–October 27, 2025

For years, Lorna Simpson was known mainly as a conceptual photographer, deftly combining pictures with text that may or may not elucidate their hidden meaning. Then, in 2015, everything changed when, at the Venice Biennale, Simpson exhibited large-scale paintings featuring people and animals posed before blurry voids. These canvases were every bit as cryptic as her photographs, even if they were thematically consistent—they, too, were about the loss of information that results when images are translated repeatedly. For this show, rather than surveying the whole of her oeuvre, the Met is zeroing in specifically on Simpson’s canvases, offering her up as a major painter in her own right.

May 19, 2025–November 2, 2025

This survey shares its name with a line spoken in voiceover during Coco Fusco’s 2012 video Y entonces el mar te habla (And the Sea Will Talk to You), in which a woman narrates her attempts to bring her dead mother’s ashes from the US to Cuba. It’s a video that stands in well for Fusco’s oeuvre more broadly, which often considers how one’s identity shifts during immigration and whether it is even possible to verbally communicate those changes. The spoken word is the main focus of her MACBA show, which also addresses oppressive forces in Cuba across time.

May 22, 2025–January 11, 2026

The haunted and oddly beautiful works that Kaari Upson produced during the course of her too-short career get under your skin without much effort. She conjured strange psychological states, producing bodies of work that dealt with twinning, a denizen of the Playboy Mansion, and the fragility of bodies. What her videos and sculptures were intended to mean was often ambiguous, but there can be no doubt that they are effective and unsettling. The Louisiana Museum is now staging the first retrospective since her death in 2021, offering a well-rounded view of her creepy oeuvre.

May 27, 2025–October 26, 2025

The 2022 Venice Biennale heralded a turn away from reality, toward supernatural realms populated by mystical beings and bewitching animals. Three years later, this survey on magical realism augurs the beginning of a turn back toward the facts of life. But it suggests that artists aren’t ready to part with alternate planes entirely—they’ve merely set contemporary issues within them. Among the artists featured here is Saodat Ismailova, whose films have pondered the status of women in her native Uzbekistan while also alluding to ancient mythologies and religious lore.

May 29, 2025–September 28, 2025

Lygia Clark’s “Bichos” (Critters), sculptures composed of hinged and folded aluminum sheets, were always meant to be moved around by their viewers, who were not meant to look at them passively. Most retrospectives for this pioneer of the Brazilian Neo-Concretist movement of the 1950s have kept viewers from touching these works, however, due to their fragility. This 120-work show remedies the problem by offering replicas that can be handled with ease, underscoring how Clark engineered a form of abstraction that was interactive, sculptural, and altogether new.

May 23, 2025–October 12, 2025