Summer Guide: 20 Art World Highlights Not to Miss

The stormy, steamy relationship between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera did not lack for operatic extremes, so expect a mix of emotions when the creative couple’s story goes onstage at New York’s premier opera house. With music by Gabriela Lena Frank, direction by Deborah Colker, and a libretto by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Nilo Cruz, El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego imagines Kahlo reuniting with Rivera after leaving the underworld on the Day of the Dead.
May 14–June 5

“Costume Art” is the first show in new 12,000-square-foot gallery spaces that will host the Met Costume Institute’s annual spring exhibitions, among other shows. The debut will feature close to 400 objects from the Met’s collection, juxtaposing garments with artworks to “examine the centrality of the dressed body within the museum,” as curator Andrew Bolton put it.
Through Jan. 10

Björk was not well served by a notoriously panned MoMA exhibition in 2015, but an ambitious undertaking in her hometown of Reykjavik offers a second chance to do right by an artist whose visionary work has drifted beyond music into realms of performance art, theater, fashion, video, and lots more. Titled “echolalia,” this show features three “immersive installations”: one inspired by Björk’s forthcoming album, and two that pay tribute to her late environmental-activist mother Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir.
May 30–Sept. 19

If you’ve ever wanted to know how—and why—one assembles so strange a creature as the Venice Biennale, here’s one heck of a chance. For this book, Massimiliano Gioni, who curated the 2013 edition, interviewed 11 curators—including his wife, Cecilia Alemani; the late Okwui Enwezor; and the team executing Koyo Kouoh’s posthumous 2026 edition. 
On sale in May

Raven Halfmoon’s stoneware sculptures serve as monuments to her Caddo Nation ancestors, especially the long line of women who taught her ceramics. “Flags of Our Mothers” surveys her work from the past five years. For this incarnation of the show—which originated at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and then traveled to the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska—Ballroom Marfa commissioned new works addressing West Texas.
Through Oct. 11

Swiss institutions always save their biggest exhibitions for Art Basel season. This major Pierre Huyghe show sees recent works join several new commissions, among them a site-specific environment that promises to make the building appear to inhale and exhale.
May 24–Sept. 13

James McNeill Whistler contained multitudes as a notoriously combative figure best known for a tender portrait of his aging mother. All his complexities will be on view in his retrospective at the Tate. 
May 21–Sept. 27

In its namesake town on the Erie Canal, about an hour’s drive north-northwest from Buffalo, the inaugural Medina Triennial opens this summer. It was conceived by the New York Power Authority and the New York State Canal Corporation to bring attention to a canal that was a marvel of civil engineering when it was completed in 1825. Site-specificity is a priority. Among this edition’s projects are Mary Mattingly’s Floating Garden on a repurposed barge and Two Waters, a film by Tania Candiani shot in an abandoned school auditorium, a site that will double as a main exhibition space during the triennial’s run.
June 6–Sept. 7

The so-called forgotten generation hits the limelight in this show in Greece curated by the New Museum’s Massimiliano Gioni. It features artists born between 1960 and 1980 who ushered the culture through the transition from the analog to the digital age and set a lasting ironic tone featuring “lowbrow aesthetics, self-deprecation, and a healthy disregard for convention.” 
June 11–Nov. 26

The art world’s flagship fair returns with 290 galleries, 21 of them participating for the first time. The fair’s Unlimited program, devoted to monumental work, will be curated by Ruba Katrib of MoMA PS1, and Stefanie Hessler of the Swiss Institute in New York returns as curator of the Parcours program of presentations around town.
June 18–21

When two lesbian icons of modernism met—Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein—it was love at first sight. Fate is in their favor yet again as a pair of novels inspired by each of their lives make their way around the world: Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein comes out just as Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain’s Bone Horn, which tackles Toklas, makes its paperback premiere.  
On sale in June 

At long last, the unveiling of an institution associated with a president whose name doesn’t instantly make the blood boil is upon us. On the South Side of Chicago, the Obama Presidential Center will open with a flood of commissioned artworks by some major names, among them Julie Mehretu, Nick Cave, Maya Lin, Kiki Smith, Theaster Gates, Mark Bradford, and Carrie Mae Weems. (That’s really just a sampling, too.) Expect some liveliness: As Obama himself has said, “I’m not interested in a mausoleum.”
Opening June 18

As part of an exhibition related to storied sculptor Edmonia Lewis and her brother Samuel, Edgar Arceneaux will stage a two-day theatrical production in Bozeman, Montana, where Samuel helped support Edmonia’s rise as one of the first internationally acclaimed Black artists. Edmonia, who worked in the late 19th century, is best known for her legacy in Rome; Samuel’s stint as a Black settler in the American West is another part of her story that Arceneaux will retell in a live production. The performance will form the basis of an installation of painting and video and will remain on view throughout a monthslong show titled “Chisel & Razor: The Artistic Legacies of Edmonia & Samuel Lewis.”
June 20–21

For his solo show at this summer destination in the Hamptons, Alan Ruiz responds to an installation by Dan Flavin, considering Flavin’s light sculptures not as pure light and line but as materials with a history—electric light was invented to extend the workday. Refiguring white lights into a white picket fence, Ruiz’s show draws attention to the Latinx labor on Long Island’s East End. 
Opening June 26 

In 1994, the Navajo artist Marilou Schultz was commissioned by Intel to weave a replica of one of its computer chips. The project marked the beginning of a body of work that wove together historical and physical threads—connecting histories of copper mining in Navajo Nation to the overlooked labor of women and Indigenous people in early computer history. This show at Bard College, titled “Replica of a Chip: The Weaving Technology of Marilou Schultz,” surveys the artist’s work.
June 27–Nov. 29

Tony Oursler’s career-spanning museum survey in Japan includes over 3,000 works—but one will stand apart, as the show marks the world premiere of his collaboration with David Bowie, which Oursler has been working on for more than 25 years. 
July 3–Sept. 27

As the United States turns 250, a smattering of museum shows tackle the nation’s past and present—from the Norman Rockwell Museum to Crystal Bridges to the American Folk Art Museum. Their different tacts and tones are explored by Greg Allen in his D.C. “Diary” essay elsewhere in this issue.

The first AIR Festival in 2025 featured a heady mix of talks and performances around Aspen, Colorado, a destination known for its art collectors and a museum to match. Under the guidance of Nicola Lees, who took over as director of the Aspen Art Museum in 2020, AIR garnered lots of attention in its first year—and stands to do so again under the theme “Figures in a Landscape.” Its program will include the likes of Camille Henrot, Lucy Raven, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Adrian Villar Rojas.
July 27–31

This year has seen a slew of reissues by the beloved critic, from both Verso and The New York Review of Books. G, reissued by NYRB, boasts a new introduction by Ben Lerner. All this is crowned by a new Berger biography coming out in September—a 500-page tome by Tom Overton that offers new glimpses into the great critic’s life and mind.

The vaunted photography magazine and publishing enterprise Aperture is opening a new headquarters on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where it will host exhibitions, events, and a bookstore. The organization is marking the occasion with “Aperture Loves New York,” an exhibition of photographers who regarded the city as a muse. The show will include works by Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, and Dawoud Bey.
Opening in July