What to See and Do in the Artworld in Spring 2026

Ai Weiwei has flaunted, skirted, interrogated, and in countless other ways resisted censorship over the course of a decadeslong career beginning in his native China and transpiring around the world. This book tells the story in his own words, which are likely to be more than a bit barbed.
On sale March 3

With a title borrowed from former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, this survey focuses on contemporary Latinx painting by way of 58 artists poking and prodding the medium in different ways. The show’s seven thematic sections were assembled around “(New) Histories,” “Bodies & Figures,” “Identity/Place,” “Land/Tierra,” “Community,” “Abstractions,” and “Pinturx” (the last referring to traditional painting modes such as portraiture and still life).
March 6–Sept. 6

Now in its 82nd edition, the newest incarnation of this closely watched survey is curated by Marcela Guerrero (the Whitney’s first curator with a stated focus on Latinx art) and Drew Sawyer (hired by the museum as a photography curator in 2023). Whitney director Scott Rothkopf told The New York Times that the show—which includes 56 artists, many of whom have not shown in New York before—“doesn’t try to simplify the strangeness of our times.”
Opens March 8

One goal of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo’s “Latin American Histories” program this year is to understand how museums have exhibited the region’s artistic heritage, in ways both historically accurate and not. Consider it apt, then, that one figure being surveyed by the museum is Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, a Peruvian artist whose projects have frequently taken the form of institutions as a commentary on all that is shut out by museum doors. Some 25 years’ worth of projects in this vein will be surveyed in this 80-work show.
March 6–June 7

“Art of Noise” Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Music, and designs inspired by it, are the subjects of this iteration of an exhibition that originated at SFMOMA in 2024. Governmental issues held up the schedule, due to the Cooper Hewitt’s status as part of the Smithsonian, but the show will go on with a mix of products from the dawning hi-fi age (vintage record players, transistor radios) to offerings from the present (iPods, a custom “listening room” by sound-system designer Devon Turnbull, aka “OJAS”). Interspersed with all that are album covers, concert posters, and other kinds of ephemera that make music culture a feast for the eyes as well as the ears.
Through Aug. 16

The spiraling rotunda of the Guggenheim will meet its poetically architectonic match when filled with the sculptures of Carol Bove. Using formidable sheets of steel that she paints, polishes, and sometimes leaves plain, the New York–based artist has created her own subtle language of twisting, torquing forms that belie their scale. She’s also worked in smaller registers—via presentations of bookshelves and other elegant modes of display—that show her affection for archives and esoterica.
March 5–Aug. 2

This exhibition in Paris aims to shine new light on the final years of Matisse’s life and career, before he died of a heart attack in Nice at the age of 84. That means there will be a special focus on his cutouts, which the artist plied as a new method for depicting vividly colored flora, fauna, and expressive abstract shapes with a vital spirit that remained until he clipped his last piece of paper.
March 24–July 26

Now in her 90s, Kim Yun Shin continues to take a chainsaw to wood to create her sculptures. In her hands, however, those heavy wood blocks seem light and lithe. Hot off an appearance in the 2024 Venice Biennale, Kim is having a retrospective—her second in her native Korea in the past few years—at this institution in Yongin, South Korea, which will survey seven decades’ worth of prints, sculptures, and more.
March 17–June 28

More than 200 works—among them paintings, drawings, and tapestries from collections all over the world—will figure in this blockbuster show for one of the Renaissance’s premier talents. Look out for what an exhibition description calls “particular attention to Raphael’s portrayal of women—from his use of nude female models for the first time in Western art to his tender depictions of the Madonna and Child,” as well as new technologically abetted discoveries about classic works for the ages.
March 29–June 28

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s luminous paintings of French nightlife and bourgeois lifestyles are rarely singled out for their depictions of amorous lovers. But this show presents the Impressionist as a keen observer of shifting social mores surrounding romantic liaisons, focusing on how he pictured the act of seduction and represented what an exhibition description labels “female consent” during the 19th century. Though the show is also traveling to London and Boston, there is no better place to see it than Paris, the city that was core to Renoir’s art.
March 17–July 19

Michael Armitage was one of the breakout stars of the 2019 Venice Biennale, where he showed vast paintings made on lubugo (bark cloth) that offered dreamy visions of life in Nairobi, the city where he was born. Seven years later, the London-based painter makes his return to Venice with this survey, featuring a decade’s worth of paintings contending with the refugee crisis in Europe and realms beyond our own.
March 29–Jan. 10

Turner Prize–winning sculptor Jesse Darling invests everyday objects—disused barricades, stacked binders, vases full of flowers, and more—with maximal meaning, using his materials to explore states of fragility. The artist’s work is equally about resistance: His chosen items may break or bend, but they still find ways of surviving. This exhibition in Paris will feature an ambitious array of large-scale installations set within a museum known for its monumental size.
April 3–Sept. 13

This hefty biography published by W. W. Norton & Company tracks the life and work of the great Dutch master as chronicled by the English writer Andrew Graham-Dixon, a former art critic for The Independent and The Sunday Telegraph and the author of Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. According to vaunted Australian novelist Peter Carey, “This book is going to revolutionize the way we understand Vermeer.”
On sale April 7

Londoners can lay claim to one of Francisco de Zurbarán’s masterpieces: Saint Francis in Meditation (1639), featuring the Catholic friar cloaked in shadow as he prays on his knees. With its awestruck religious fervor and dramatic lighting effects, the painting emblematizes the best of both the Spanish painter and the Baroque movement he helped define. Most of the time, there are few other Zurbarán paintings of its caliber in the British capital; but that will change with this retrospective—billed as the first of its kind in London—which offers a full view of Zurbarán’s career, including his time spent cultivating his son Juan’s painting career.
May 2–Aug. 23

This long-running survey of global art, inaugurated in 1896, attracts lots of eyes to Pittsburgh—a city that will come even more to the fore as the Carnegie Museum partners with other institutions around town (among them the Children’s Museum, the Kamin Science Center, the Mattress Factory, and a YMCA) for the 59th edition. The program also includes 14 commissions by artists including Torkwase Dyson and G. Peter Jemison, so expect to discover work never seen before.
May 2–Jan. 3

The US edition of this autobiography, already published overseas, tells the story of the art world’s most omnipresent figure—a curator who knows no bounds and seems to be everywhere, all the time. Promo copy touts the book as “part unputdownable coming-of-age story, part insider’s tour of the contemporary art world, part user’s manual on how to live a life driven by curiosity, conversation, and coincidence.”
On sale April 14

Aleksandra Kasuba seemed to have no love for 90-degree angles: Nearly all her artworks, many of them unclassifiable pieces that trotted the line between sculpture, installation, and architecture, featured undulating surfaces and curvaceous forms. The Lithuanian-American artist expressed an interest in how environments shape one’s experience of the world, fulfilling her inquiry by crafting mind-bending installations from fabric and tile in the World Trade Center, the New Mexican desert, and even her own home before her death in 2019 at the age of 96. The exhibition, one of Kasuba’s biggest shows to be staged outside Lithuania, will explore how she realized her ambitious projects.
May 2–Oct. 4

“In Minor Keys,” the main exhibition of this year’s edition of the world’s biggest art festival, will take on extra resonance given that its curator, Koyo Kouoh, died in the midst of working on it. But despite the significance of her passing, the show stands to be a somewhat muted affair, with an emphasis on artists who “refuse orchestral bombast,” per an exhibition description. (At press time, the artist list had not yet been revealed.) The Biennale’s accompanying national pavilions, on the other hand, have generated quite a bit of noise, most notably the controversial selection of Alma Allen to represent the United States.
May 9–Nov. 22

Though Anni Albers was once forced to share the spotlight with her husband, the painter Josef Albers, she has in recent years emerged as a star in her own right, with a retrospective visiting multiple European cities in 2018. Further sign of her increased fame arrives with this biography by Nicholas Fox Weber, the head of the Albers Foundation. Having more than a little familiarity with his subject, the author charts how Albers moved fluidly across multiple mediums, translating her abstract compositions from paintings to textiles and back again.
On sale April 28

Titled after a 1990 group exhibition in Madrid that featured him, this exhibition offers a survey of Felix Gonzalez- Torres’s wide-ranging practice, from his “portraits” composed of text and piles of candy to his stacks of posters printed with images of vast skies and seas. What makes this Gonzalez-Torres show especially interesting is its curators: Nancy Spector, who organized the artist’s posthumous US Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and her collaborator, conceptual artist Alejandro Cesarco.
May 27–Oct. 12