{"id":1955733,"date":"2026-05-25T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1955733"},"modified":"2026-05-25T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T06:00:00","slug":"46-museum-shows-and-biennials-to-see-this-summer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1955733","title":{"rendered":"46 Museum Shows and Biennials to See This Summer"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\tSpectacle in all its many forms is the big theme of the summer season, when big, glitzy projects will take over museums across the globe. Laure Prouvost has been given a wide playing field for a show about quantum physics at Paris\u2019s Grand Palais, while Carsten H\u00f6ller is planning a vast exhibition for Beijing\u2019s UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, the details of which he has largely kept secret. Meanwhile, Tom\u00e1s Saraceno will bring his monumental sculptures to Munich\u2019s Haus der Kunst; a permanent land artwork by him is also going on view in his native Argentina.<\/p>\n
\n\tHe is hardly the only artist considering the land and all the histories embedded within it. Carolina Caycedo is having a show at the Museu de Arte de S\u00e3o Paulo, while the National Gallery of Canada is surveying contemporary Indigenous artists from Inuit Nunaat, S\u00e1pmi, and Denendeh. This is not exactly a new theme, of course, and Ana Mendieta was considering it before many others. Tate Modern is giving her a proper retrospective, in one of the season\u2019s most anticipated art events.<\/p>\n
\n\tThis period of relative quiet will also leave collectors, curators, critics, and artists with plenty of time to travel\u2014perhaps to the Venice Biennale, which remains on view through November. It\u2019s not the biennial happening this season, however. Manifesta, a roving European biennial, this time touches down in Germany\u2019s Ruhr region, while two new biennial-style shows will launch in the Northeastern US. If you can\u2019t beat biennial fatigue, join it.<\/p>\n
\n\tBelow is a look at 46 museum exhibitions and biennials to see this summer.<\/p>\n
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\u201cAkinsanya Kambon: Soul Sessions\u201d at Center for Art, Research and Alliances and SculptureCenter, New York<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy the artist and Pan African Art Gallery, Long Beach, California\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tBefore Akinsanya Kambon appeared in the 2023 edition of the Hammer Museum\u2019s \u201cMade in L.A.\u201d biennial, he was not so well known. Now, this California artist who once helped lead the Sacramento chapter of the Black Panther Party seems poised to become a star of the New York scene this summer. In a survey split across SculptureCenter in Queens and the Center for Art, Research and Alliance in Manhattan, Kambon will exhibit the full range of his art, with an emphasis at the Queens venue on his ceramic sculptures, which reconfigure symbols from the African diaspora. Made using the Japanese raku firing technique, these ceramics will be on view at the same time as CARA\u2019s show of paintings, drawings, and archival matter.<\/p>\n
May 28\u2013August 16<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cCao Fei: Testimonies to the Near Future\u201d at Kunstmuseum Basel<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Spr\u00fcth Magers\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tFor her current show at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, Cao Fei filled the museum\u2019s main exhibition space with a diverse set of works, from documentaries about drone technology in China to a faux rice paddy. The Beijing-based artist described the show as a \u201ccontemporary agricultural archaeological site,\u201d a phrase that emblematizes how Cao\u2019s art scrambles past, present, and future, often to suggest that China is constantly remaking its history to imagine itself in the years to come. Similar themes will bind the bodies of work featured in this show. Billed as her largest European survey to date, the exhibition will include classics such as Whose Utopia<\/em>, her famed 2006 video in which Chinese factory workers break into dance, briefly refusing the demand that they contribute to the project of propelling China forward.<\/p>\n
May 30\u2013October 11<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cYouth Palace\u201d at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Jeamin Cha\/Courtesy the artist\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThis intriguing group show takes its name from structures introduced by socialist governments\u2014including ones in China\u2014to give children access to extracurricular activities. Children\u2019s palaces, the show\u2019s description notes, create \u201cthe fantasy that a better society can be engineered by training bodies, attention, and aspirations\u201d; curator X Zhu-Nowell has convened a range of artists who rebut that notion. Among them is Jeamin Cha, a rising artist whose past works include a video about Korean women who never received a proper diagnosis for their mysterious ailments.<\/p>\n
June 1\u2013September 20<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cDiego Marcon: The Bubble Boy\u201d at Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Diego Marcon\/Courtesy the Artist, Sadie Coles HQ, London, and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, Cologne, and New York\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tFew young artists are making work with as significant a creep-out factor as Diego Marcon, who has gained a reputation for unsettling videos that enlist digital technology to warp peaceful visions of domesticity. Krapfen<\/em> (2025), this show\u2019s centerpiece, could very well have been a musical for kids, except that the child at the film\u2019s center is dancing to tunes that are threatening, not delightful. (The songs are about the necessity of eating a krapfen<\/em>, or German doughnut, which is something this kid is not wont to do.) Krapfen <\/em>appears in this show alongside other works by the Italian artist, whose star has steadily risen since an appearance in the 2022 Venice Biennale.<\/p>\n
June 6\u2013October 4<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cMusical Bodies\u201d at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tOne of the stars of the Met\u2019s Rockefeller Wing is a 14-foot-tall slit gong by the Vanuatuan sculptor Tin Mweleun. The slit gong transforms an elongated body with big googly eyes into a playable instrument, and as this exhibition demonstrates, it\u2019s hardly the only object in the Met\u2019s holdings to do something along those lines. Across 130 items spanning ancient Egypt to the present, the exhibition suggests that artists have always made connections between music and the body, as is apparent from works such as Nam June Paik\u2019s TV Cello<\/em> (1971), in which a string instrument is outfitted with television screens stacked to vaguely resemble a person\u2019s torso.<\/p>\n
June 7\u2013September 27<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cChico da Silva: And the Soul Is for the Birds\u201d at Nottingham Contemporary, England<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Ding Musa\/Courtesy Galatea\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tLong before Indigenous artists in Latin America made their way into biennials worldwide, Chico da Silva found fame in Brazil, where his glorious paintings of birds and sharp-toothed fish gained widespread recognition during the 1960s (as well as the label primitive<\/em> from non-Indigenous critics). Born to an Indigenous Peruvian mother and a Brazilian father, he was raised in the Amazon rainforest and would go on to form the Pirambu Workshop, whose participants, from the Fortaleza favela, helped Da Silva produce his paintings. Billed as the artist\u2019s first survey in Europe, this show presents the workshop\u2019s collaborative model as an inspiration to Indigenous artists working today.<\/p>\n
June 6\u2013September 6<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cMaren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing\u201d at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Susan Inglett Gallery, New York\/Studio Museum in Harlem\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThe nimble artist Maren Hassinger has spent a career considering humanity\u2019s indifference to nature, a problem she has tried to remedy through graceful sculptures and reparative performances. One such performance, from 1982, involved picking up rubbish from New York parks, painting it pink, and then returning the refuse back to the sites where she found it. Pink Trash<\/em>, as that work is known, may be the defining work by Hassinger, who once noted that \u201cthere\u2019s an absence of nature yet a proliferation of human-made products which reflect nature or imitate nature.\u201d The piece will be restaged during the run of this retrospective, her biggest to date, which includes sculptures, performances, videos, and more from the 1970s to today.<\/p>\n
June 6\u2013November 29<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cKeith Haring in 3D\u201d at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Keith Haring Foundation\/Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tWhile Keith Haring is fondly remembered for painting his graphic figures across canvases, T-shirts, gallery walls, and even subway cars, this exhibition proposes that he was equally significant as a sculptor. Rebutting the notion that his two-dimensional work was his best, this show features such objects as a mask lined with dancing people, an elephant-like sculpture whose trunk is covered in stripes, and a 1963 Buick whose surface Haring covered with such fabulous creatures as a giant snake that makes its way across nearly the entire length of the car. The show is part of a summer of celebrations at Crystal Bridges, whose galleries will expand by 65 percent through the inauguration of a new space designed by Safdie Architects.<\/p>\n
June 6\u2013January 25, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Medina Triennial at various venues, Medina, New York<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Etienne Frossard\/Courtesy the artist\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tEven though it may be a crowded year for biennials and other recurring art exhibitions, two newcomers are hoping to make a splash in the northeastern United States. The first of them, the Medina Triennial, is betting that it can lure the international art elite to western New York State, which is not necessarily a destination for collectors and dealers from abroad. Under the theme \u201cAll That Sustains Us,\u201d organizers Kari Conte and Karin Laansoo have assembled 39 participants ranging from Nigerian-born photographer Abraham O. Oghobase to Lina Lapelyt\u0117, who contributed to the Golden Lion\u2013winning Lithuanian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Many of the artists featured in this show are invested in sustainability and rebuilding the natural environment.<\/p>\n
June 6\u2013September 7<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Aldrich Decennial at Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy the artist\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tImagine a Connecticut-focused response to the Hammer Museum\u2019s \u201cMade in L.A.\u201d biennial and MoMA PS1\u2019s \u201cGreater New York\u201d quinquennial, and you\u2019d have the Aldrich Decennial, the second high-profile recurring art exhibition to launch its inaugural edition this summer. Set to take place once every decade, this show features artists who work in Connecticut or lived there at some point. First up is an edition called \u201cI Am What Is Around Me,\u201d which features well-known names such as Em Rooney, Aki Sasamoto, Philip Taaffe, and Tammy Nguyen, the latter of whom is also showing paintings about the intertwined legacies of the Cold War and the American War in Vietnam at the Venice Biennale.<\/p>\n
June 7\u2013January 10, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cLaure Prouvost: We Felt a Star Dying\u201d at Grand Palais, Paris<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Laure Prouvost\/\u00a92026 ADAGP, Paris\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tYou can always count on the ceaselessly creative French artist Laure Prouvost to deliver a good spectacle, and she looks to deliver once more with this show, the result of research into quantum physics aided by philosopher Tobias Rees and scientist Hartmut Neven. Given carte blanche at one of Paris\u2019s most storied exhibition spaces, Prouvost will show such works as The Beginning<\/em>, a large-scale kinetic sculpture resembling a flower, its petals extending around the Grand Palais\u2019s glassed-in main room. Across a video and other sculptures exhibited around it, Prouvost will contend with notions of ephemerality and infinitude\u2014heavy topics taken up with the artist\u2019s signature mix of curiosity and humor.<\/p>\n
June 10\u2013July 26<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cPicasso, Through the Eyes of Paul Smith\u201d at National Art Center, Tokyo<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo by George Stroud\/Daily Express\/Hulton Archive\/Getty Images\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tMost people would say that Picasso\u2019s greatest contribution to the arts came in the form of paintings and sculptures. Few would suggest that he made a significant impact through fashion, though indeed he did, for as a GQ<\/em> editor once put it: \u201cJust as Picasso made his name through the prism of cubism, he also manufactured a unique identity through the prism of his wardrobe.\u201d (And the other wardrobes of others, too\u2014the dresses worn by his female sitters in his paintings are quite memorable.) Maybe that\u2019s why Tokyo\u2019s National Art Center thought to bring on Paul Smith, a fashion designer, to aid in the production of this show. Works on loan from Paris\u2019s Mus\u00e9e Picasso will be exhibited in a setting that the center suggests is evocative of Smith\u2019s clothes\u2014a gimmick, perhaps, but one that\u2019s certainly in keeping with Picasso\u2019s and Smith\u2019s shared love of stripes.<\/p>\n
June 10\u2013September 21<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cBefore the Eclipse: Archeologies of Art in Mexico\u201d at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy the artist\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThe artist Rufino Tamayo, the namesake of this museum, at one point led the ethnographic drawing department of Mexico City\u2019s National Museum of Archaeology, History, and Ethnography, furthering an interest in his nation\u2019s past that guided his entire practice. And he was hardly the only Mexican artist fascinated with the exhumation of history, as this exhibition proves. Focused predominantly on the 1980s, the 100-work show is in part dedicated to reframing the way Mexican art is typically discussed, moving the narrative away from Duchampian aesthetics and toward archaeological revisitation. Featured here are a range of the era\u2019s top artists, from Francis Al\u00ffs to Maria Thereza Alves.<\/p>\n
June 10\u2013October 18<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cJulio Le Parc: Light. Colour. Action\u201d at Tate Modern, London<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a92025 ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London\/Atelier Le Parc\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tAs he nears his 100th birthday, Julio Le Parc is getting a survey at Tate Modern, which plans to return this Argentinean sculptor to his experimental roots. Though his colorful sculptures now appear eminently Instagrammable, Le Parc came out of the European avant-garde of the 1960s\u2014he became famous through his work with the Groupe de Recherche d\u2019Art Visuel and initially made work using Plexiglas, a type of plastic then associated less with art than with industry. He has continued using the stuff to make grand sculptures that throw their vibrant hues around the rooms they occupy, in the process questioning how the eye perceives color and movement. Some 60 works will be featured here.<\/p>\n
June 11\u2013May 3, 2027<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cCall Me Gravity\u201d at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Lu Guo-Way\/Courtesy the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThis heady group show is centered on the notion of debt. One might associate that concept with economics, but this show\u2019s description notes that it also \u201cencompasses social, spatial, historical and emotional dimensions.\u201d One participant in the exhibition is Sung Tieu, a Vietnamese\u2013German artist whose recent pieces include one in which she sold art to gain the curator Mi You a position on the board of Berlin\u2019s KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Tieu said at the time that this was an effort to diversify the board and contend with \u201clegacies of exclusion and economic gatekeeping [that] persist within cultural institutions and beyond,\u201d something that others in this show will also address.<\/p>\n
June 11\u2013September 20<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cMariuccia Secol: Unraveling\u201d at Muzeum Susch, Switzerland<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Magdalena Typiak\/\u00a9Mariuccia Secol\/Courtesy the artist\u2019s family\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThis museum has a reputation for rescuing female artists of the postwar era from obscurity and reviving interest in them. The latest artist to receive the treatment is the nonagenarian Italian artist and activist Mariuccia Secol, who at one point in her fascinating career, in the 1960s, led a painting workshop at a psychiatric hospital. Following the feminist calls for liberation during the late \u201960s, Secol stopped painting altogether and instead began making textiles. Often these textiles depict bodies, whether figuratively or abstractly, their dangling threads and woundlike forms reflecting \u201cthe experience of women,\u201d as she once said of a series about pregnancy and stretch marks.<\/p>\n
June 11\u2013November 1<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cQillaniq\u201d at National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Inuuteq Storch\/Courtesy the artist and Wilson Saplana Gallery\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tContinuing an emphasis on Indigenous art that has defined the National Gallery of Canada\u2019s programming for the past decade and a half, \u201cQillaniq\u201d includes dozens of artists from Inuit Nunaat, S\u00e1pmi, and Denendeh. (The title is borrowed from the Inuktitut word for the shimmer of sunlight or moonlight on water.) Though broadly billed as \u201ca celebration of those that share love as an answer to difficulty,\u201d the exhibition is less notable for any binding theme than for convening so many of these artists in North America, whose biggest museums rarely mount shows like this one. Included among the artists are Hans Ragnar Mathisen, the artist who composed the S\u00e1mi anthem and a recent star of the Carnegie International; Inuuteq Storch, who in 2024 became the first Greelandic artist to represent Denmark at the Venice Biennale; and Tanya Lukin Linklater, an artist and choreographer of Alutiiq descent whose works consider how acts of violence shape what can and can\u2019t be said.<\/p>\n
June 12\u2013September 20<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cArch Connelly: Straighten Your Wig and Pray\u201d at Aspen Art Museum, Colorado<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy the Estate of Arch Connelly and Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\t\u201cMY WORK is MANNERED, is HOMOSEXUAL, is EFFETE, is BASE, is SNOBISH,\u201d begins the text included in one Arch Connelly work, acting as \u201ca kind of manifesto,\u201d as critic David Frankel wrote in Artforum<\/em>. All those adjectives are apt descriptors for Connelly\u2019s art, which frequently featured photographic material\u2014including images taken from gay porn\u2014that he studded with rhinestones and other materials. These works, which Connelly exhibited at the storied Fun Gallery in New York\u2019s East Village, celebrated excess and defied the prevailing standards of good taste, which may be one reason he failed to achieve widespread fame in his lifetime. Now comes an attempt to canonize him in the form of a full-fledged survey, the biggest since his death of AIDS-related complications in 1993.<\/p>\n
June 12\u2013October 11<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cThe Century of Gehry\u201d at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Frank O. Gehry & Gehry Partners, LLP\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tFrank Gehry, the starchitect who died last year, reshaped the museum world with his designs for spaces ranging from the Vitra Design Museum to the Guggenheim Bilbao, whose sloping titanium exterior defined an entire era. (At the time of his passing, he had yet one more museum building to come: the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, which is not yet open.) What does it mean to museumify Gehry, an architect whose designs often bristled against the strictures of institutional practices? Find out with this retrospective, which is centered around 19 of his projects.<\/p>\n
June 12\u2013December 30<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cCyprien Gaillard: When You Expect Flutes, It\u2019s Whistles\u201d at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Max Paul\/\u00a9Cyprien Gaillard\/Courtesy the artist\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tCyprian Gaillard works best at a monumental scale, which is probably why the Kunsthaus Bregenz made the wise decision to give this artist three of its floors to fill. One will feature the debut of DETERRENT<\/em>, a new video that starts with a 7Eleven in Los Angeles before tackling the world of museums and the urban environments of cities across Europe. Another floor will feature sculptures\u2014flutes that have rolled-up euros planted in their holes\u2014that relate to the show\u2019s eccentric title. Running across both the video and the sculptures, as well as in some photographs included in the show, is an interest in what happens when an object or a space is made to function in ways beyond its original use.<\/p>\n
June 13\u2013October 4<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cSaodat Ismailova: Melted into the Sun\u201d at National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, D.C.<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy the artist\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Melted into the Sun<\/em>, the 2024 film from which this survey takes its name, considers the eighth-century prophet Al-Muqanna, who was known for wearing a veil and leading an uprising against the Abbasid Caliphate. Rather than directly representing Al-Muqanna in the film, Saodat Ismailova focuses on the landscape of Central Asia that he is thought to have graced\u2014particularly her native Uzbekistan, whose deserts she films in long, dreamy takes. This work, like many others by Ismailova, a star artist of the biennial circuit, is about the history contained within the region, whose cultural memory was upended during the Soviet era. Alongside several of her hypnotic films, this museum is showing ikat textiles produced in Uzbekistan during the 19th century.<\/p>\n
June 13\u2013November 29<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cWillem de Kooning Drawing\u201d at Art Institute of Chicago<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Robert Lifson, Art Institute of Chicago\/\u00a92026 Willem de Kooning Foundation\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Art Institute of Chicago\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tWillem de Kooning\u2019s name typically conjures thick, chaotic strokes of paint slathered together to form images of nude women. And indeed, one such work from that series by the famed Abstract Expressionist\u2014his beloved Woman I<\/em> (1950), long held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York\u2014is making its way to Chicago for this survey. But the show is less focused on De Kooning\u2019s paintings than it is on his drawings, which form the bulk of the 200 works assembled here. These works on paper suggest that De Kooning mastered figuration before he turned to abstraction: One early work depicts a bowl and two jugs, rendered with a crisp precision attributable to his academic training in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n
June 14\u2013September 20<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cDemocracy Matters\u201d at New York Historical<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: The New York Historical\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThere have been plenty of shows mounted this year to mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, but most thus far have been disappointing, either failing to critically address the nation\u2019s history or flaccidly attempting to do so using an anodyne theme. This show looks like the rare one to thread a very difficult needle. Teased with a Johannes Adam Simon Oertel painting from the mid-19th century that shows early Americans pulling down a George III monument, the exhibition suggests that democracy has always been a contentious notion\u2014and that debate and dissent are integral to this country\u2019s culture. The show inaugurates a fresh wing devoted to democracy, a topic that has taken on an unfortunate degree of importance as high-ranking politicians continue devising new ways to strip voters of their rights.<\/p>\n
June 18\u2013November 1<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Opening of Obama Presidential Center, Chicago<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy the Obama Foundation\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tPerhaps more than any other U.S. president in recent history, Barack Obama demonstrated a passion for the art of his time: He chose Kehinde Wiley to paint his official portrait, he commissioned Shepard Fairey to create the iconic \u201cHOPE\u201d poster, and he hung an Alma Thomas painting in the White House well before she had mainstream recognition. Now he\u2019s preparing to open his Presidential Center, and thought not exactly an art museum, it abounds with more commissions than most spaces recognizing former presidents. The star of those commissions is arguably an 83-foot-tall glass painting by Julie Mehretu that looms high above the 19.3-acre complex, but the ones around it, by artists ranging from Aliza Nisenbaum to Rashid Johnson, are no less notable.<\/p>\n
Opens June 19<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cEd van der Elsken: Up Close\u201d at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Rijksmuseum\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\t\u201cI\u2019m not a journalist, an objective reporter,\u201d said the photographer Ed van der Elsken, whose black-and-white pictures taken on the streets of Paris and Amsterdam are raw and highly stylized, with areas left blurry. Indeed, these are not the kind of crisp shots one might find in a newspaper to accompany reporting on the events of the day. Having come into possession of the Dutch photographer\u2019s archive in 2019, the Rijksmuseum will now stage a survey of his work, which bore witness to changing social mores across Europe in the postwar era and beyond.<\/p>\n
June 19\u2013September 13<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cGabriele St\u00f6tzer: Dabei sein und nicht schweigen\u201d at Gropius Bau, Berlin<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Heike Stephan\/\u00a92026 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn\/Courtesy the artist\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tIn 1976, the artist Gabriele St\u00f6tzer signed a petition in support of Wolf Biermann, an East German dissident. In response, St\u00f6tzer was kicked out of school in East Germany and thrown in prison. While incarcerated, she realized that \u201cmy body was the only medium I had left,\u201d as she told ARTnews<\/em> last year. After a year behind bars, St\u00f6tzer devoted an entire career to exploring the body as a site of political resistance, occasionally courting controversy for doing so: She once photographed a model in drag in her studio, only to learn that this person was actually a Stasi informant who was monitoring her. With one retrospective in Switzerland in 2025, St\u00f6tzer is now receiving another in Berlin, a city where East Germans remain underrepresented in most museums.<\/p>\n
June 19\u2013December 6<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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\u201cAvatar: Forms of Vishnu\u201d at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tVishnu, the Hindu deity that protects the universe, and all the many forms he takes are the main subjects of this mega-show, which brings together 200 works, many of them on loan from countries ranging from Cambodia to Switzerland. On hand will be the classic images one might expect\u2014for example, a 16th-century illuminated manuscript of the Mahabharata<\/em>, the ancient epic in which Vishnu descends to earth as Krishna. But there will also be contemporary artworks, courtesy of Indian artists such as Pushpamala N, who has periodically posed as Hindu deities for her own photographs, suggesting the way in which tradition remains mutable in the present.<\/p>\n
June 20\u2013October 5<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Manifesta at various venues, Ruhr region, Germany<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Monika Keiler\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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