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“Jamian Juliano-Villani: It” at Gagosian
Image Credit: Robert McKeever/Courtesy Gagosian A firebrand in every way, Jamian Juliano-Villani has spent the past couple years at the helm of O’Flaherty’s, an artist-run gallery that has established itself as one of the wildest, weirdest, and most worthwhile additions to the New York art landscape in quite some time. She is making an even bigger move with her first solo show at Gagosian, a gallery that is worthwhile in very different ways. The show at Gagosian’s 24th Street location in Chelsea features some 10 new paintings and will be accompanied by the first monograph of the artist’s work, with selections dating back to 2013. All eyes are sure to be on this exhibition, and it stands to serve as a useful reminder that—for all her live-wire energy and scene-making verve—Juliano-Villani is first and foremost a very good painter who will be fun to watch develop and evolve in the years to come.
Mar. 16–Apr. 20 -
Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring
Image Credit: Courtesy HarperCollins Signs of an enduring fascination with Keith Haring can be found everywhere, from the racks of Uniqlo to the walls of museums such as the Broad in Los Angeles, where his work was recently the subject of a big survey. Now Haring is getting the big biography treatment in this book by Brad Gooch (author of tomes on figures including Rumi and Flannery O’Connor), who reexamines well-trodden subjects like his connections in the New York street art scene of the ’80s and also promises a fresh look at his identity as a queer man who died too young of AIDS-related causes.
On sale Mar. 5 -
“Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning” at the Museum of Modern Art
Image Credit: Ian Douglas/Courtesy Danspace Project, New York Joan Jonas started out making lo-fi works in the 1960s and ’70s that harnessed film and video technology to reflect on her inner states. She later branched out into larger-scale pieces involving dance and performance in her quest to understand the relationship between one’s body and the natural world. Her MoMA retrospective will feature the video installations for which she is best known, plus a new version of her 2022 work Out Takes, featuring reedited archival footage of forests and her dogs.
Mar. 17–Jul. 7 -
"Julie Mehretu. Ensemble" at Palazzo Grassi
Image Credit: Tom Powel Imaging/Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York While Julie Mehretu gets the main billing for this exhibition in Venice, it’s by no means a solo show. Some 60 of her abstract paintings and prints, many of which look like architectural plans gone berserk, will appear alongside pieces by David Hammons, Tacita Dean, Huma Bhabha, and more. The show suggests that even though Mehretu is a singular talent, her art is the result of many converging influences.
Mar. 17–Jan. 6 -
Barkley L. Hendricks: solid!
Image Credit: Courtesy SKIRA, Milan, and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York The great painter Barkley L. Hendricks gets the grand monograph treatment with this 300-page tome edited by Zoé Whitley and published by Skira and Jack Shainman Gallery. On those many pages are 200 color illustrations, covering a six-decade career during which Hendricks painted so many memorable portraits, along with visions of basketball, landscapes, and many other subjects that were transformed by his hand and eye.
On sale Mar. 12 -
Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
Image Credit: (c)KAB Inc Starting with the electronic pop he made with Yellow Magic Orchestra in the late 1970s and on through the different kinds of ambient and soundtrack music he favored later in life, Ryuichi Sakamoto was one of our most innovative musicians until his death last year at the age of 71. And his status remains, with a legacy supported by a lot of worthwhile work, including a filmed version of one of his final concerts, Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus, featuring the artist alone at a piano.
Opens Mar. 15 -
“Damien Hirst: To Live Forever (For A While)” at Museo Jumex
Damien Hirst, once a Young British Artist, is young no more. But his youthful penchant for provocation has continued to find admirers, among them collector Eugenio López Alonso, whose private museum in Mexico City has assembled 60 of his works (many from López Alonso’s own holdings). On hand will be the shocking readymades for which Hirst is best known—taxidermy animals suspended in formaldehyde— as well as series such as his “Spin Paintings,” produced by pouring paint onto rotating canvases.
Mar. 23–Aug. 25 -
Whitney Biennial
Image Credit: Ben Gancsos The 81st edition of the most closely watched biennial in the US has adopted the theme “Even Better Than the Real Thing” and handed the reins to curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli (as well as, in different capacities, a support team comprising Min Sun Jeon, Beatriz Cifuentes, Taja Cheek, Korakrit Arunanondchai, asinnajaq, Greg de Cuir Jr, and Zackary Drucker). It’s a rich mix of hearts and minds, and it’ll be interesting to see how reactions range in relation to an always-hotly-debated undertaking that regards itself as the premiere “showcase of what’s new in American art.”
Opens Mar. 20 -
“Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile inMy Dreams” at the Baltimore Museum of Art
Image Credit: Mitro Hood/Courtesy Goya Contemporary A momentous hometown fete in the form of a retrospective covering some 50 years of work, this big show for Joyce J. Scott will feature more than 120 objects—many of them brightly colored beaded sculptures, of both standalone and wearable varieties—as well as performance documentation, prints, and archival materials. There’s also a “participatory weaving and storytelling environment” and, overlapping with the show for the first month, a companion exhibition devoted to the artist’s mother, titled “Eyewinkers, Tumbleturds, and Candlebugs: The Art of Elizabeth Talford Scott.”
Mar. 24–July 14 -
Any Day Now: Toward a Black Aesthetic
Image Credit: Courtesy David Zwirner Books As a founding figure of the Black Arts Movement in 1960s and ’70s New York, Larry Neal advocated for art made for political purposes and for Black audiences whose experiences should figure in the subject matter at hand. He was an editor at the Harlem-based Liberator magazine, and writer Allie Biswas selected the texts published between 1964 and 1978 for this volume from David Zwirner Books (as part of its ongoing “ekphrasis” series).
On sale Mar. 12 -
Nari Ward at Pirelli HangarBicocca
Image Credit: Courtesy Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London Jamaica-born, New York–based artist Nari Ward has spent some 30 years reconstituting found and foraged materials into sculptures and performance works that commune with history from the perspective of an ever-changing present. This show in a former industrial plant in Milan will focus on performance works and collaborations, along with installation elements of video and sound.
Opens Mar. 28 -
“Brancusi” at the Centre Pompidou
Image Credit: Adam Rzepka/(c) ADAGP, Paris Nearly 200 sculptures by one of the finest artists of the 20th century will figure in this major exhibition, which is sure to be the toast (or one of the toasts, at least) of Paris. It’s touted as the first such full-scale retrospective for Constantin Brancusi since 1995, and it will feature photographs, drawings, films, archives, tools, and furniture from the artist’s workshop, which has been part of the Pompidou’s collection since its bequest to France in 1957.
Mar. 27–July 1 -
“André Masson. There is no finished world” at the Centre Pompidou-Metz
Image Credit: ©ADAGP, Paris, 2023/Photo Georges Meguerditchian, Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Dist. RMN-GP This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist Manifesto, a piece of writing that heralded an artistic turn away from reason and toward dreams and hidden desires. In tribute, many institutions are mounting Surrealism shows—including this retrospective for André Masson, a French artist most closely associated with the technique known as automatic drawing for which scrawls were supposedly dictated by his subconscious. But the show asserts that Masson was no one-trick pony and that, if anything, his figurative experiments led him to become one of the core members of the Surrealist movement.
Mar. 29–Sept. 2 -
Firelei Báez at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Image Credit: Collection Deborah Beckmann and Jacob Kotzubei/Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, New York/Photo Jackie Furtado Firelei Báez’s installations and paintings are gorgeous, so much so that it can be easy to look past their ugly content in which histories of colonialism are laid bare. Rather than representing outright the violence enacted by Westerners in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe, Báez often hints at it through abstraction, swirls of color that mask history books and maps. To these richly hued works, she sometimes adds representations of femmes borrowed from Afro-Latinx religions and traditions; she allows their images to haunt her pictures and their viewers. Her biggest US survey to date includes 40 works.
Apr. 4–Sept. 2 -
“Sandra Vásquez de la Horra: The Awake Volcanoes” at the Denver Art Museum
Image Credit: Cordia Schlegelmilch In the 2022 Venice Biennale, the Chilean-born artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra emerged as a star with drawings that displayed witchy women and deity-like figures rising toward the sun. Following the Venice presentation, she won the Käthe Kollwitz Prize, an esteemed art award in her current home country of Germany, and is now being recognized with a proper survey in Colorado featuring 193 of her paintings, prints, and drawings.
Apr. 7–Jul. 21 -
“Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art” at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Image Credit: Jason S. Ordaz Another welcome addition to the recent wave of Native American art exhibitions at US museums, this show focuses on the early- and mid-20th-century movement known as the Indian Space Painters and different kinds of art that followed in its wake. The notion of “Indigenous space” has physical as well as metaphysical connotations, and this survey curated by Christopher Green (author of a “Syllabus” on Indigenous art elsewhere in this issue) stands to teach a lot about both.
Apr. 13–Sept. 30 -
Venice Biennale
Image Credit: Photo Stefano Mazzola/Getty Images The art world’s biggest stage has historically gone heavy on American and European artists. But in a time when borders are blurring and immigration is on the rise, curator Adriano Pedrosa’s edition, titled “Foreigners Everywhere,” is likely to launch the Venice Biennale into the future, furthering work by curators such as Okwui Enwezor, whose 2015 Venice Biennale helped globalize the show. With a focus on artists who have relocated at various points in their lives, Pedrosa’s show is set to explore not just the present but also the recent past, with crossnational talents from prior centuries on hand too.
Apr. 20–Nov. 24 -
“Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective” at the Art Institute of Chicago
Image Credit: Kris Graves/(c) Estate of Christina Ramberg Trumpeted as the first comprehensive survey of Christina Ramberg’s work in 30 years, this show spotlights an intriguing painter of female forms who made her name in Chicago in the 1970s, and evolved through different stages (including a period devoted to making quilts) before her death in 1995. The retrospective will also include sketchbooks and dolls from Ramberg’s archive.
Apr. 20–Aug. 11 -
The New Television
Image Credit: Courtesy MIT Press Any fan of video art considers the 1974 MoMA conference “Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television” a milestone. But despite its reputation as the first institutional gathering of its kind, the texts that accompanied the conference have been notoriously hard to come by. Now they are being printed in this book—edited by Rachel Churner, Rebecca Cleman, and Tyler Maxin, and published by no place press—along with new essays ruminating on the role that video art continues to play in museums today.
On sale Apr. 23 -
Theaster Gates at the Mori Art Museum
The polymathic Chicago artist Theaster Gates has worked in most media (sculpture, sound, architecture, social practice, and so on), and this show stands to be his biggest yet in Japan. At least part of it will revolve around what the Mori Art Museum says is a “question he calls ‘Afro-Mingei,’” describing a philosophy “rooted in the cultural possibilities of fusing the Japanese Mingei folk art movement with movements centering Black beauty and aesthetics.
Apr. 24–Sept. 1 -
A Look at My Life
Image Credit: Courtesy Thames & Hudson “Why do I now write my life story?” artist Eileen Agar asked in this 1988 autobiography. “Perhaps I do it for myself.” It’s an appropriately self-reflective start for a book penned by a Surrealist artist whose paintings and photographs burrowed deep into her own subconscious to access other worlds. Long out of print in the US, Agar’s autobiography now makes its glorious return as the Surrealist movement turns 100.
On sale May 7 -
Steve McQueen at Dia:Beacon
Following renovation of a basement floor, the postindustrial art haven in Upstate New York provides storied filmmaker Steve McQueen 30,000 square feet for a presentation described as “an immersive installation, journeying through the complete spectrum of visible light in concert with a sonic component that responds to the space.” The work was commissioned by Dia Art Foundation and Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland, where it will be headed in June 2025.
May 12–April 2025 -
Ana Lupas at the Stedelijk Museum
Image Credit: Courtesy P420, Bologna Garments in their many forms recur throughout Ana Lupas’s oeuvre, sometimes distressed to a point where they are virtually unwearable or, in other cases, worn by some in her personal circle and then turned into installations. In the Romanian artist’s eyes, trading clothes could inspire networking at a time when collectivity was not necessarily encouraged. As institutions have grown increasingly attentive to art of the Eastern bloc, Lupas’s work, which has also taken the form of happenings and large-scale sculptures, has come to seem ever more crucial. At last, she is getting her first major retrospective, in Amsterdam.
May 9–Sept. 15 -
Reynaldo Rivera at MoMA PS1
Image Credit: Courtesy Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York The first solo museum show for Reynaldo Rivera will feature storytelling photographs dating back to the 1980s (many in black-and-white, others in color) and a newly edited film. Among the artist’s touchstones are old Hollywood glamour and Golden Age Mexican cinema, which he put into play in his own fashion in work he began while growing up in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park.
Opens May 16 -
“Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520–1920” at Tate Britain
Image Credit: Courtesy Tate, London Furthering a female-focused form of revisionism that was evident in Tate Britain’s rehung collection galleries last year, this 150-work show focuses on women artists who have worked in Britain for centuries in spite of male critics who might have thought their output unworthy. Among those getting their due are Mary Beale, whose 17th-century portraits earned her a following, and Laura Knight, a realist painter who, in 1936, became the first woman elected to London’s Royal Academy of Arts.
May 16–Oct. 13 -
“Jenny Holzer: Light Line” at the Guggenheim Museum
Image Credit: David Heald/Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Thirty-five years after the fact, the bold wordslinging artist Jenny Holzer will revisit a hallmark 1989 installation she mounted in the famed rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum, which will give over its six ramps to “scrolling texts from her earliest series of truisms and aphorisms” and newer “experiments with language generated by artificial intelligence.”
May 17–Sept. 29 -
The Art of Remembering: Essays on African American Art and History
Image Credit: Courtesy Duke University Press History is alive and well in this book of recent writings by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, a renowned scholar who has focused on how happenings of the past—slavery, for one— manifest in art of the present. Among the topics considered are Barbara Chase-Riboud’s sculptural homages to Malcolm X, Deana Lawson’s photographs of Black Americans, and Hurricane Katrina’s impact on art of the last couple decades. Across all her essays, Shaw shows that figures from years ago hardly need reanimating since, for many artists, their spirits never died.
On sale May 17 -
“Miguel Ángel Payano Jr.: Woo-Woo” at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist The up-and-coming Miguel Ángel Payano Jr. creates what he calls “heavy collages,” works that from afar seem like paintings and then reveal themselves to include sculpted elements resembling things like hands and peaches. His dreamy images of wavy seas and fantastical beings implode binaries: they are neither entirely flat nor three-dimensional, neither entirely of this world nor one totally unlike ours. In that way, he views his work as a response to his identity as a Dominican American New Yorker formerly based in Beijing, where he is showing new works.
May 18–Sept. 8 -
Fair Game
As the annual calendar of art fairs continues to play out, the next several months will see notable convenings across the globe. A selective inventory, for the fairest of the major fairs:
Art Dubai, Mar. 1–3
Frieze Los Angeles, Mar. 1–3
Art Basel Hong Kong, Mar. 28–30
SP-Arte (São Paulo), Apr. 3–7
Expo Chicago, Apr. 12–14
Frieze New York, May 1–5