Sometimes, the most nourishing art is that which surrounds us with illustrious histories of creativity, such as the Louvre’s presentation of works by Renaissance master Cimabue and the luminous frescos of Fra Angelico in Florence. Other times, we need to look to artists who have not given up the fight against oppression, like Pussy Riot founder Nadya Tolokonnikova, whose durational performance in Los Angeles, “Police State,” uncannily reflected the violent ICE presence in the city. Or the Chemehuevi artist and feminist Cara Romero, who photographs Indigenous women — or the venerable Ruth Asawa, for whom art, education, and life were interconnected. A little sense of humor and innuendo also doesn’t hurt; for that, we have figures like the intrepid and audacious Lebanese painter Huguette Caland or the iconoclastic H. C. Westermann.
These are just a few of the artists Hyperallergic’s editors and contributors enjoyed in exhibitions this year. We also saw exceptional group shows addressing subjects such as Indigenous futurism, the role of Asian artists in shaping the creative landscape of interwar Paris, and, in more than one case, the perseverance of artists following January’s Los Angeles wildfires.
Below are our favorite exhibitions of 2025 across cities in the United States, Europe, and Asia. For more of our favorites, take a look at our city-specific Best of 2025 lists: New York | London | Paris
—Natalie Haddad, reviews editor
Tishan Hsu: Interface Remix
Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, September 8, 2024–February 23, 2025
Curated by Kate Wong
Imagine David Cronenberg and Yves Tanguy had a love child, and now picture something more scientific, but still organic. Now, think about that weird thing you dreamt up once that still sticks with you, and blend these all together … That’s how I feel about Tishan Hsu’s solo show that started in 2024 but ended earlier this year. Trained as an architect, his art is alienating, often looks solidly built, and never allows you to settle on what you’re seeing. Even after so many decades, most of this work looked as visually fresh as the day it was made. —Hrag Vartanian, editor-at-large
Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, October 18, 2024–July 6, 2025
Curated by Charlotte Ickes and Josh Franco
It is rare to see anew the work of an artist who is shown so often and in so many different contexts. But Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return at the National Portrait Gallery reasserts the artist’s particular flavor of politics, which — informed by his queerness — values nuance and complexity over binary or reductive thinking. The catalog, which includes excerpts from the curators’ research notes, is its own revelation. —Cat Dawson
Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, November 15, 2024–August 17, 2025
Curated by ShiPu Wang
This exhibition focused on the work of three women artists whose lives were upended by the displacement and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Hayakawa, who fled to New Mexico, and Hibi and Okubo, who were sent to internment camps, were forced to abandon already thriving careers in the Bay Area. Okubo’s “Wind and Dust” (1943) is a literal and symbolic depiction of the harsh climate into which so many were thrown — one in which immigrants were suddenly recast as enemies within. So very timely. —Aruna D’Souza
Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream …
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, November 15, 2024–March 23, 2025
Curated by Patricia Restrepo
MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, May 24, 2025–April 5, 2026
Curated by Denish Markonish
In mordant, realist canvases, painter Vincent Valdez has long grappled with the darker chapters of US history: the losses of war, the legacies of lynching, the terrifying aesthetics of the Klan. His first major museum survey couldn’t have landed at a more poignant moment, when the forces of white supremacy the artist investigates are on the rise. —Carolina A. Miranda
Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, November 23, 2024–April 6, 2025
Curated by Fredrik Liew
The exhibition staged six of Goldin’s major slideshow works in individual rooms purpose-built to heighten their intimacy through the immersive atmosphere of the architecture, while enhancing their theatrical and cinematographic qualities. The third stop on a five-city tour, the retrospective’s presentation was especially poignant in Berlin, to which Goldin has strong and abiding ties. At her opening, she condemned the German government’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza and criticized the culture ministry’s explicit suppression of work and ideas that are critical of Israel, in contrast to the government’s presentation of Berlin as an oasis of free expression. Her remarks, and the controversy that followed, brought international attention to the wave of artists whose like-minded positions on the same issue have resulted in the removal of work or cancellation of shows. —Cat Dawson
Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica
Art Institute of Chicago, December 15, 2024–March 30, 2025
Curated by Antawan I. Byrd, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Adom Getachew, and Matthew S. Witkovsky
In one of its most ambitious, magnificent and timely shows ever, the AIC
explored Pan-Africanism’s cultural manifestations through more than 350
objects created by artists worldwide. Everything and everyone was here, supremely well-organized under themes including “Garveyism” and “Négritude,”
“Interdependence” and “Agitation.” The show embodied a century-plus of idealistic creation: Hale Aspacio Woodruff’s pantheon of Black art through the ages, Ebony G. Patterson’s carnivalesque coffins, Ahmed Cherkaoui’s invented language, Zanele Muholi’s queer portraits, and so much more. —Lori Waxman
Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light)
Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 18–August 9
Curated by Jami C. Powell
I don’t know of a photographer working today who is more visually exciting and innovative than Cara Romero. This enormous survey show included several themes Romero has been working with for the past two decades; among them are “California Desert & Mythos,” “(Re)Imagining Americana,” “Rematriation: Empowering Indigenous Women,” and “Ancestral Futures,” each one containing stunning imagery. The Ancestral Futures gallery, which feels like the exhibition’s culmination, featured portraits of a Native woman with phosphorescently bright striped skin and braids, like some future evolutionary cousin, among cobs of corn suspended from the ceiling on invisible wire. It looked as if Romero had indigenized outer space. —Seph Rodney
A New Look at Cimabue
Louvre Museum, Paris, January 22–May 12
Curated by Thomas Bohl
Museums typically can’t unite enough of Cimabue’s works for an exhibition. It’s been 19 years since the Frick’s Cimabue and Early Italian Devotional Painting, and even longer since the Italians last tried with two more narrowly focused shows in Pisa in 2005 and Arezzo in 2001. In 2025, the Louvre beat the odds and put on the first major show of his work in two decades. Presenting the museum’s recently cleaned paintings by the artist to the public for the first time, A New Look at Cimabue was a watershed moment for examining the breakthrough painter long lionized as the first old master. —Daniel Larkin
Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, February 9–May 4
Curated by Erin Christovale with Nyah Ginwright
Monument Eternal bathed the legacy of Alice Coltrane in a glowing orange light. The exhibition thoughtfully presented the impact the musical and spiritual guru had on both the creative culture of Los Angeles and the wealth of music-makers who flowed in her wake, unfolding a biography as one moved through. It was a powerful demonstration of how artistic fidelity in one field can be of great importance across the gamut of artistic mediums. —Nereya Otieno
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior
Cincinnati Art Museum, February 14–May 4
Curated by Ainsley M. Cameron
Cleveland Museum of Art, February 14–June 8
Curated by Emily Liebert
Before I visited Collective Behavior, I was a fan of Shahzia Sikander’s art, but I didn’t expect the work in these two associated exhibitions to stay with me long after. The Cincinnati Art Museum’s deep dive into Sikander’s career, in tandem with the Cleveland Museum of Art’s pairings of her art with the historical works that inspired it, was revelatory. Forms morph, glass mosaics paint with light, and all is open and fluid in the artist’s visual world, while remaining as strong and powerful as the femme figures that populate the imagery. —Natalie Haddad
David Hammons: Concerto in Black and Blue
Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, February 18–May 25
Organized by the gallery
Gather an audience and give them one directive: Choose your own adventure. The elegant simplicity of this reprise of David Hammons’s 2002 “Concerto in Black and Blue” used foundational aesthetic and creative elements — light, shadow, collaboration — to craft a living work with a laser-sharp focus on art’s purpose. Hammons urged a gentle and meaningful play that made community out of strangers, a haven out of darkness, as visitors wandered a darkened room with only blue LED flashlights. If you weren’t there, you missed out. —Nereya Otieno
Bonnard and the Nordics
Nationalmuseum, Södra Blasieholmshamnen 2, Stockholm, February 20–May 18
Curated by Per Hedström and Linda Hinners
I’ve wondered what it felt like to behold Post-Impressionism at its advent. Bonnard and the Nordics offered what I imagine to be a fair approximation. Pierre Bonnard’s luminous work is now the stuff of art history textbooks. Learning about his influence on several Nordic painting groups who were transfixed by his use of color — and made it their own — was like discovering a chapter that didn’t make the final printing. One of the most significant revelations, and needed revisions to the canon, was Marthe Bonnard’s art, which appears in the exhibition alongside that of her husband. —Lakshmi Rivera Amin
Crossing Borders: Travelling Women Artists in the 1800s
Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland, March 7–August 24
Curated by Anne-Maria Pennonen
Crossing Borders lays to rest the old question: “Why have there been no great women artists?” Focusing on the 19th century, the exhibition unearths the professional networks of more than 50 women who traveled from places across Northern Europe to study art and build careers in Germany. These artists painted everything from rugged landscapes to warm domestic scenes; they sculpted busts and crossed borders decades before they even had the right to vote. —Julia Curl
Eternal Testament
The Church, Sag Harbor, New York, March 23–June 1
Curated by Jeremy Dennis and Meranda Roberts
Three terms are defined on one gallery wall to carry with you throughout the exhibition: sovereignty, survivance, and Indigenous futurism. These phrases undergird the ethos of this vital show, which was a remarkable affirmation of the longevity of Indigenous cultures and artists working across mediums. Eternal Testament included artists from the Shinnecock and Montauk Nations, including Adrienne Terry, David Bunn Martine, Durrell Hunter, and Denise Silva-Dennis. Among the other highlights were depictions of James Luna’s 1991 performance “Take a Picture With a Real Indian,” Cara Romero’s “Last Indian Market” (2015), and a four-panel canvas by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, “Trade Canoe: Don Quixote in Sumeria” (2005). —Jasmine Weber
City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s
National Gallery Singapore, April 2–Aug 17
Curated by Phoebe Scott, Lisa Horikawa, Teo Hui Min, Roy Ng, and Cai Heng
This exhibition was breathtakingly ambitious, not only for its logistics — 50 international lenders! — but for its art historical remapping of interwar Paris. It reminds us that this golden age in the city of lights wasn’t merely enriched by foreign-born artists — they were its lifeblood. That makes it heartbreakingly urgent right now, as I write from New York City, the new center of the art world, in what, as some have forgotten, has always been a country of others. —Lisa Yin Zhang
Ruth Asawa: Retrospective
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, April 5–September 2
Curated by Janet Bishop and Cara Manes, with Marin Sarvé-Tarr, William Hernández Luege, and Dominika Tylcz
Although I had issues with the exhibition design, championing the life and work of Ruth Asawa right now is a worthy and timely endeavor. We need to move beyond the outdated mixture of celebrity and capitalism that drives the art world and instead focus on figures like Asawa, who — as an innovative creator, a tireless advocate for arts education, a community builder through her public artworks, and a mother of six children — showed us that the ultimate goal of an artist is not to have a lucrative career, but rather to build a rich life filled with curiosity and community. —Alex Paik
Read the review and Lisa Yin Zhang’s review of the New York presentation
Mildred Thompson: Frequencies
ICA Miami, May 10–October 26
Curated by Stephanie Seidel
Mildred Thompson’s cosmological paintings and sculptures filled the galleries at ICA Miami with vibrant bursts of color and rhythm. Frequencies assembled her astrophysics-related works dating from 1959 to 1999. One especially invigorating moment emerged in the Music of the Spheres (1996) series: Four planetary triptych paintings — for Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Mars — were installed together and accompanied by an electronic music composition that Thompson scored herself, drawing inspiration from NASA’s Voyager recordings. Visitors were immersed in an Afrofuturist world of sound, visuality, and space as Miami sunshine streamed through the windows. —Alexandra M. Thomas
H. C. Westermann: Anchor Clanker
Art Institute of Chicago, May 17, 2025–May 17, 2026
Curated by Giampaolo Bianconi
H. C. Westermann: Anchor Clanker celebrates a gift from the estate of Alan and Dorothy Press consisting of 17 sculptures the artist made between 1957 and ’81. An influential, one-person art movement, Westermann was a lone wolf who never fit into any genre or trend. At a time when fabrication had become the rage, particularly because of Donald Judd, Westermann built everything by hand, utilizing materials ranging from both rare and common types of wood to galvanized wire lath and sheet metal to AstroTurf, cast bronze, and copper. Haunted by memories of World War II kamikaze attacks, he created mechanical figures, a giant peanut, boxes, and planes crashing into what he called “death ships.” His beautifully crafted objects were both autobiographical and critical of the brainless materialism of the United States. For him, the country was a bleak comedy, at once disturbing, dangerous, absurd, and comic. —John Yau
Burn Me!
The Box, Los Angeles, May 17–July 5
Curated by Mara McCarthy, Paul McCarthy, and Molly Tierney
Burn Me! displayed partially “destroyed” artworks by Los Angeles mainstays including Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhoades, and Wally Hedrick that had been burned in the city’s January fires. The results unveiled new or hidden tensions in the selected works: Rhoades’s concrete and aluminum “Recession Era Perfect World Park Bench” (2001) was cracked nearly in two, as though demonstrating the fallacy and fragility of its design — which was modeled on public infrastructure crafted to discourage sleeping or loitering. With wildfires becoming increasingly common in the LA area, this exhibition mapped a helpful path through the flame. —Claudia Ross
Lygia Clark: Retrospective
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, May 23–October 12
Curated by Irina Hiebert Grun and Maike Steinkamp, with Assistant Curator Sarah Hampel
This chronological survey of Clark’s career traced her evolution from abstract painting to three-dimensional objects and participatory performance. Particularly evocative were the reconstructions of Clark’s interactive works, where viewers walked through dark black-box environments, and tried on herbal masks, optic devices, and constrictive costumes, all highlighting ways in which the Brazilian artist conceived of her object-based art as an embodied, quasi-therapeutic experience. —Ela Bittencourt
Kaari Upson
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, May 27–October 26
Curated by Anders Kold
Part carnival, part lucid dream, this sprawling retrospective honored the late artist by mirroring her singularity. Dollhouse dutifully displayed Kaari Upson’s knack for vivid storytelling through multiple mediums and her deep, curious excavation of the darker parts of our childhood minds. Invoking a soiled perfection, the exhibition seemed to tell ghost stories while it questioned why we’re afraid of the dark. —Nereya Otieno
Anna-Eva Bergman & Hans Hartung: And We’ll Never Be Parted
Kunsthalle Praha, Prague, Czech Republic, June 5–October 13
Curated by Theo Carnegy-Tan and Pierre Wat
This exhibition presented the intertwining lives of two mid-century European painters, Hartung and Bergman, who produced most of their mature works living together in modernist houses they designed. From the early 1950s to the late ’80s, they worked side by side, but rarely collaborated. While both shared a lasting love of abstraction, Hartung increasingly conveyed ephemerality, while Bergman turned to earthy materials, such as stones, and cosmic themes. —Ela Bittencourt
Nadya Tolokonnikova: Police State
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, June 5–June 21
Curated by Alex Sloane
Nadya Tolokonnikova, founder of the Russian feminist group Pussy Riot, has been imprisoned, surveilled, and threatened by Russia her country for her activism. (Russia recently labelled Pussy Riot an “extremist” group.) For her durational performance at MOCA Geffen this past summer, she recreated a cramped prison cell, where viewers could watch her through peepholes as she remixed actual prison recordings into haunting soundscapes. The urgency of Police State was made chillingly clear when anti-ICE protestors and police clashed in the streets outside the museum a few days into the performance, prompting Tolokonnikova to emerge from her simulacrum of state-sponsored repression, and confront its real-world analog. —Matt Stromberg
Noah Davis
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, June 8–August 31
Curated by Eleanor Nairne and Wells Fray-Smith; the Hammer Museum presentation was organized by Aram Moshayedi, with Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi and Nyah Ginwright
This is the first institutional survey for Davis, a preternaturally talented painter and co-founder of the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, who died at the age of 32 in 2015. Davis ostensibly pursued the depiction of everyday Black life—but “everyday” in his hands doesn’t mean ordinary. His scenes are infused with a gentle surrealism, as when he translates the broken post-Emancipation promise into “40 Acres and a Unicorn” (2007). In “Isis” (2009), he depicts a woman standing in her backyard, a golden semicircle fanned out around her like the wings of an Egyptian goddess. —Aruna D’Souza
Read Aida Amoako’s review of the exhibition’s London presentation
Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California, June 8–November 30
Curated by Elaine Yau
In this landmark exhibition, more than 100 quilts traced the personal histories and lineages of quiltmakers, who moved from the American South to California’s Bay Area during the Second Great Migration. Featuring selections from the museum’s expansive new collection of African-American quilts, the works pulsed with rhythmic patterns, lively colorwork, and inventive riffs on traditional techniques, forming a heartbeat of life’s moments and memories, committed to fabric and preserved for generations. —Julie Schneider
Read Julie Schneider’s article on quilt-centered exhibitions
Toyin Ojih Odutola
Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, June 13, 2025–January 4, 2026
Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, with Emily Finkelstein
Toyin Ojih Odutola transformed the Hamburger Bahnhof’s east galleries into an imaginary station on Berlin’s U-Bahn rapid transit system called “Adijatu Straße” after the artist’s Muslim first name in Yoruba. An evocative backdrop of tiled walls and columns plunged viewers into the depths of a subway tunnel and served as the backdrop for 25 figural drawings rendered in the artist’s idiosyncratic style of intricate mark-making. Intermittent announcements for the fictional U22 line, voiced by Odutola’s cousin, reverberate throughout the exhibition, which elegantly bridged the familiar architecture of urban space with multilayered investigations of colonial history and identity. —Valentina Di Liscia
Queer Lens: A History of Photography
Getty Center, Los Angeles, June 17–September 28
Curated by Paul Martineau
The term “homosexual” came into existence in 1869, only three decades after the invention of the camera. This stunning exhibition — which featured everything from intimate photo booth snapshots to elegant portraits — gathered images that revealed how queer people have presented themselves before the camera across almost two centuries. —Carolina A. Miranda
Stan Douglas: Ghostlight
Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, June 21–November 30
Curated by Lauren Cornell
A fascination with improvisation, with the question of what if, lies at the center of Stan Douglas’s work. His meticulous photographs and videos often reconstruct, reimagine, or wholly invent moments in history, from protests and uprisings to the kinetic energy of the free jazz movement. Masterfully evoking episodes of upheaval and possibility, Douglas reminds us that the path we’re on now isn’t the one on which we have to stay. —Alexis Clements
Takako Yamaguchi
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, June 29, 2025–January 4, 2026
Curated by Anna Katz and Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo
Most contemporary painting that I’ve seen in recent years seems like a disjointed collection of influences and references, so it feels like a small miracle to encounter an artist who can synthesize many seemingly disparate influences into a coherent and mature vision. Takako Yamaguchi’s gorgeous paintings, which combine the aesthetics of Art Nouveau, the Transcendental Painting Group, and Japanese printmaking into an utterly unique visual language, commanded the small space they received for the artist’s first Los Angeles museum show. Someone please give Yamaguchi the retrospective she deserves! —Alex Paik
Temporary Home
Galka Scheyer House, Los Angeles, July 18–27
Curated by Beatriz Cortez
In 1933, German-Jewish art collector and dealer Galka Scheyer hired celebrated architect Richard Neutra to build her a home/gallery in the Hollywood Hills, which became a hub for other European emigres, artists, and actors. She died in 1945, before she could fulfill her dream of creating an artist residency. However, 80 years later, the house has been reborn as the Blue Heights Arts & Culture Residency. Beatriz Cortez became its first unofficial artist-in-residence when she found refuge there after being displaced by the Eaton Fire in January. The group show she curated, Temporary Home, featured rafa esparza, Maria Maea, Sarah Espinoza, and other contemporary Angeleno artists who explore community, migration, and resilience in their work, echoing the historical precedents of Scheyer and her circle. —Matt Stromberg
Rachel Ruysch: Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer
Museum of Fine Arts Boston, August 23–December 7
Curated by Anna Knaap of the MFA Boston, with guidance for the scientific content from Charles Davis, Harvard University
Beloved in her own time for her floral still lifes, Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch’s star sank like a stone after her death. The star rises again in this, her first-ever monographic exhibition. Ruysch emerges as a highly connected artist, engaging with plant collectors, naturalists, and other flower painters, and serving as court painter to the Elector Palatine. Her bouquets and still lifes stun with their abundance, inviting the viewer into a bee’s-eye view of her subjects’ fragile, richly colored petals as insects and lizards bask and battle among them. —Natasha Seaman
Jennie C. Jones: A Line When Broken Begins Again
Other Octaves: Curated by Jennie C. Jones
Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, September 5, 2025–February 1, 2026
A Line When Broken Begins Again curated by Stephanie Weissberg with Heather Alexis Smith; Other Octaves curated by Jennie C. Jones
If there was ever a more perfect union of art, architecture, and ideas I’m not sure I’ve encountered it, not in this lifetime anyway. This show is otherworldly in how sympatico everything ends up being: Jennie C. Jones’s sparse aesthetic language actively converses with the Tadao Ando-designed Pulitzer space before our eyes. The institution’s Ellsworth Kelly’s “Blue Black” (2001) acts as an effective bridge from Jones’s minimalism to the constellation of influences and companions on the lower floor, curated by the artist herself. Titled Other Octaves, the enlightening display includes works by Carmen Herrera, Anne Truitt, Alma Thomas, Martin Puryear, Julius Eastman, and so many others. —Hrag Vartanian
Read the round-up of art spaces to visit in St. Louis
Edmonia Lewis: Indelible Impressions
Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford, California, September 17, 2025–January 4, 2026
Curated by Jennifer DeVere Brody with Patrick R. Crowley
I’ve long been interested in Edmonia Lewis, though it was her work as a Black & Native expat artist in Italy that fascinated me. But experiencing Edmonia Lewis: Indelible Impressions, the small show of her California sculptures at Cantor Arts Center, perfectly situated within its neoclassical interior, was delightful and enlightening. It was a perfect gem of history in place, with a brief, excellent (free!) catalogue on Lewis and her sculpture in the nineteenth-century San Francisco Bay Area. —Bridget Quinn
Fra Angelico
Palazzo Strozzi and Museo di San Marco, Florence, Italy, September 26, 2025–January 25, 2026
Curated by Carl Brandon Strehlke, Stefano Casciu, and Angelo Tartuferi
Somehow a Fra Angelico exhibition seems impossible: His artworks are too rare, too precious, too good for our dark times. Perhaps the show could only happen in Florence, as if some hidden reservoir of the energy of the 15th-century still sparks beneath the streets. The artworks on view show the monk-painter confident in his use of perspective but wont to distill people, landscapes, and buildings into potent yet amiable diagrams. These are amplified with bright colors made from minerals like lapis lazuli and vermillion and set off with gold leaf. Sometimes, we can have nice things. —Natasha Seaman
Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, September 27, 2025–March 1, 2026
Curated by Jenny Gheith and Taylor Jasper, with curatorial support from Auriel Garza and Laurel Rand-Lewis
After six decades of the artist’s transcendental experiments with paint and other media, we finally got a full-fledged Suzanne Jackson retrospective, and it is truly sublime. What is Love at SFMOMA begins with Jackson’s early dreamlike paintings from the 1960s and ’70s, and extends into her later three-dimensional suspended paintings. “Hers and His” (2018) is made from acrylic paint skins, Jackson’s mother’s “his and hers” pillowcases, and quilt block patterns, accented with small touches like a pom-pom fringe along the bottom, with atmospheric results. Jackson’s art invites wonder and rewards sustained close looking. It unfolds as a meditative investigation of boundless, energetic form. —Alexandra M. Thomas
Unbound: Art, Blackness & the Universe
Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, October 1, 2025–March 1, 2026
Curated by Key Jo Lee
Aesthetically and intellectually rich, Unbound takes you on a journey, unraveling expansive ideas about metaphysics, race, and art along the way. The works on view conjure visual and philosophical references to pasts, futures, mythologies, and technologies, painting a rich portrait of Afrofuturistic possibilities in astral and earthly realms. Accompanying wall texts ask thoughtful questions to help viewers engage with the work, organized by subjects such as “decolonizing time” and “black holes and quantum entanglement.” While the world feels increasingly subject to the whims of technocrats terrorizing environments, industries, and individuals, this exhibition offers alternative prospects for the future. —Jasmine Weber
Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, October 18, 2025–February 22, 2026
Curated by Juliet Bingham, Patrizia Dander, and Andrew de Brún. The MCA Chicago presentation was curated by Jamillah James, with Korina Hernandez, in close collaboration with Yoko Ono’s Studio One
In one of the most delightful art experiences I’ve had this year, I poked my hand through a canvas and shook hands with another museum-goer as per “Painting to Shake Hands” and then sat down in a bean bag with a different stranger to listen to the haunting lyrics of the song “Yes, I’m a Witch.” Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at the MCA is a celebration of the artist’s work, but also of what it does so well: bring strangers together through tumultuous times. —AX Mina
Monuments
Museum of Contemporary Art and The Brick, Los Angeles, October 23, 2025–May 3, 2026
Curated by Hamza Walker, Bennett Simpson, and Kara Walker, with Hannah Burstein and Paula Kroll
You might have heard about this exhibition’s premise, which stages decommissioned Confederate monuments alongside or as part of artists’ commissions. Prior to visiting, I worried that it would feel outdated, since the show’s concept originated nearly 10 years ago — when more Confederate statues were decommissioned than reinstated. Instead, the curators found a poetic, relevant space in today’s political quicksand. Kara Walker’s “Unmanned Drone” (2023) at The Brick stole the spotlight, but MOCA’s installation at its Geffen location is just as attention-worthy. —Claudia Ross
Huguette Caland: A Life in a Few Lines
Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany, October 24, 2025–April 26, 2026
Curated by Hannah Feldman
Caland’s life took her from Beirut to Paris to California, and her paintings, drawings, textiles, and sculptures reflect that fluidity — jagged, patterned, abstract shapes coalesce into cities, two curvaceous blobs are lovers kissing, or the buttocks and legs of a woman bending over, or two knees and thighs pressed together tightly. The show is vast and concise at once, thanks to guest curator Hannah Feldman, suitable for an artist too-long forgotten. —Aruna D’Souza
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