As the city plays host to the major fairs and auctions, galleries, art spaces and museums are mounting their strongest shows of the year, anchored by a slate of highly anticipated institutional exhibitions, making this month an ideal moment to be in New York. While some have suggested that just one gallery has all but commandeered the institutional calendar this season, museums are offering a more nuanced picture, with a range that spans established names, tightly curated group shows and compelling new talent.
Must-see exhibitions in NYC
Jack Whitten’s “The Messenger”
MoMA
Through August 2, 2025
Following the exhibition the Met mounted during its brief tenure in the Breuer Building in 2017, this new survey at MoMA offers an even more expansive and rigorous account of Jack Whitten’s practice. Bringing together more than 175 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, the show traces Whitten’s singular artistic trajectory—one that fuses a deep investigation of painterly materiality with themes of race, technology, jazz, love and war. Whitten began his career during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, with the clear intention of creating directly representational art that functioned as a tool of activism, blending memory, history and social consciousness. As the exhibition unfolds and Whitten’s aesthetics shift further into abstraction, it becomes evident that his inquiry remained both aesthetic and political, rooted in the physicality of materials and their power to hold memory, enact resistance and embody monumentality. Drawing from a wide-ranging repertoire of references, from African and ancient Mediterranean art to the cultural legacy of the American South, Whitten’s work speaks to memory, migration, family and place through a transhistorical, transnational lens that feels sharply relevant amid the current resurgence of nationalist ideologies. Particularly striking are his eclectic assemblages of vibrant tassels and found fragments, which emerge as potent metaphors for a universal, “created commons” culture.
Jack Whitten, Black Monolith VII, Du Bois Legacy: For W.E. Burghardt, 2014; Acrylic on canvas. 84 × 63 × 4″ (213.4 × 160 × 10.2 cm). Collection of Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III.
© Jack Whitten Estate. Courtesy the Estate and Hauser and Wirth. Photographer: Genevieve Hanson
Rashid Johnson’s “A Poem For Deep Thinkers”
The Guggenheim
Through January 18, 2026
For his highly anticipated survey at the Guggenheim in New York, Rashid Johnson takes over the museum’s iconic rotunda with a dense poem in objects—a powerful testament to the layered complexity of his work, rich with both political and philosophical meaning. Featuring nearly ninety works spanning more than three decades, from his iconic Anxious Men, altar shelves and soap paintings to more experimental performance-based photography and video, the exhibition charts Johnson’s sustained engagement with materials as a system of thought, a personal symbolic language through which he embarks on profound reflection. His work confronts collective questions of vulnerability in a moment that feels both overwhelmingly complex and acutely fragile. What emerges is a deeper, more multifaceted understanding of Johnson’s practice—not just as an artist, but as a thinker and philosopher wrestling with the political and spiritual dimensions of the human condition. “My practice has, over time, inherited a different kind of existential quality,” Johnson told Observer. “There’s an investigation of the interior world—an investment in and engagement with interiority and deep thinking.”
Installation view: “Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” April 18 – January 18, 2026, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Photo : David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York
Rosa Barba’s “The Ocean of One’s Pause”
MoMA
Through July 6, 2025
For her major U.S. institutional presentation on MoMA’s fourth floor, Italian-born and Berlin-based artist Rosa Barba unveils a complex multimedia choreography that engages with the language and history of cinema and video to explore its expansion beyond conventional narrative structures. Seemingly blending historical memories, archival documents and personal footage, Barba’s cinema “allows time and space to vibrate, collapse, overlap and extend.” Endlessly deconstructing, reassembling and distilling the medium’s essential components, the artist exposes both the fictional and the deeply physical nature of the cinematic device in a striking experimental installation that stands as a powerful testament to 15 years of her practice spanning film, kinetic sculpture and sound. Here, technology converges with ecology as Barba foregrounds the organic and tactile essence of cinema, rooted in light’s interaction with celluloid film. At the heart of the presentation is a newly commissioned work, Charge, which investigates light as a force of scientific advancement, technological innovation and ecological transformation. This landmark museum show follows a pivotal year for Barba, who recently presented her work at Tate Modern and Centre Pompidou, and coincides with presentations at Frieze New York with Esther Schipper and at Independent with Luhring Augustine.
Installation view: “Rosa Barba: The Ocean of One’s Pause,” on view in the Kravis Studio at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Amy Sherald’s “American Sublime”
The Whitney Museum of American Art
Through August 10, 2025
Another highly anticipated institutional survey this season is Amy Sherald’s much-lauded show at the Whitney, which arrives in New York following its debut at SFMOMA last year. A storyteller through paint, Sherald distills both the psychological depth and aesthetic essence of her subjects, crafting portraits marked by profound humanity and striking style. Positioned within the lineage of American Realism while asserting her virtuosity as a colorist, Sherald centers everyday Black Americans, rendered extraordinary in their ordinariness, celebrated for their individuality, taste and agency, as the artist often indulges in the precise rendering of their clothing. In doing so, she expands the canon of American Realism to include a parallel lineage rooted in the art departments and galleries of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, where she first trained, and aligned with overlooked figures such as William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley and Laura Wheeler Waring. Her subjects, often portrayed as if caught in a mirror, confront the viewer with unflinching self-possession: aware, composed and commanding in their performance of self, echoing the grandeur and authority of the Western portrait tradition at its finest.
Amy Sherald, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, 2018; Oil on linen, 72 1/8 × 60 1/8 × 2.5 in. (183.1 × 152.718 × 6.3 cm).
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Luana Vitra’s “Amulets”
SculptureCenter
Through July 28, 2025
There is something profoundly alchemical—almost shamanic—in the way Brazilian artist Luana Vitra engages minerals and organic materials as the core medium of her practice. For her New York institutional debut, Vitra has transformed SculptureCenter into the site of a ritual, where enigmatic totemic forms channel ancestral energies and infuse the space with an uncanny, sacred charge. These auratic sculptures appear suspended in a dialectic of ascension and descent, animated by a tension between transcendence and rootedness, while mineral sedimentations spread across the floor like devotional offerings: “amulets” and ritual acts that mark the threshold between the physical and the spiritual. Vitra’s practice is deeply rooted in her native Minas Gerais, a mineral-rich region historically shaped by the violent extraction of gold through forced labor and, today, dominated by the iron mining industry. Drawing on the metallurgical symbolism and transformative potential of minerals, Vitra evokes a vision of perpetual flux—matter and energy in constant states of becoming, dissolving and reconstitution. Seeking the “spirit in matter,” she activates minerals as vessels for receiving, storing and transmitting energy, a medium for spiritual communication and metaphysical presence.
Luana Vitra’s “Amulets” is on view at SculptureCenter through July 28, 2025.
Courtesy the artist and Mitre Galeria, Minas Gerais and São Paulo. © 2025. Photo by Léo Mitre
“The Gatherers”
MoMA PS1
Through October 6, 2025
While many recent exhibitions have sought to address the ecological emergency, this show at MoMA PS1 offers a notably regenerative and refreshing approach—rejecting catastrophism and nihilism in favor of affirming the artist’s ability to respond creatively to the climate crisis and the despair saturating today’s seemingly post-apocalyptic landscape. Rather than collapsing into hopelessness, the exhibition foregrounds the inventive repurposing of detritus and relics left in the wake of capitalist collapse. Across global contexts, these artists—gatherers of the residues of a corrupted civilization—offer glimmers of hope, revealing how the imaginative force of the human mind can catalyze reflection, envision alternative systems and construct meaning within the endless cycles of consumption and disposal that shape our political and social realities. While some works retain apocalyptic or posthuman undertones, the exhibition ultimately underscores humanity’s enduring capacity for reinvention and regeneration alongside nature’s own resilience, even in a world where waste and decay accumulate in the shadow of extremism, war and environmental collapse.
Emilija Škarnulyté, Burial, 2022; Single-channel video (color, sound), 60 min.
Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Kris Graves
Candida Alvarez’s “Circle, Point, Hoop”
El Museo Del Barrio
Through August 3, 2025
Puerto Rican-American artist Candida Alvarez is having her moment with a major mid-career survey at El Museo del Barrio that traces her continuously evolving five-decade practice and inquiry. For years, Alvarez has defied the conventional boundaries between abstraction and figuration, treating her work as both a projection of selfhood and a reflection of the collective body, interlaced through a system of dynamic, often complementary relations. Shaped by an endlessly resourceful impulse toward experimentation, her art is vivid and multilayered, anchored in personal and shared memory as she weaves cultural influences with meditations on embodiment and the slippages of lived experience. Over time, her chameleonic compositions have become increasingly abstract, yet remain charged with emotional resonance and autobiographical depth, unfolding as mutable midscapes of memory, migration, identity and place. The survey coincides with an exhibition at GRAY gallery, which compellingly pairs Alvarez’s work with the bold, chromatic narratives of Bob Thompson. Together, the two shows illuminate her sustained, fertile dialogue with the entire history of art and visual communication, as she subverts the canons of traditional painting, overcoming the binary of figuration and abstraction to freely deploy color and form as storytelling agents.
Candida Alvarez, Clear, 2023.
Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. Photograph by Tom Van Eynde
Louise Bonnet and Elizabeth King’s “De Anima”
The Swiss Institute
Through September 7, 2025
This month, the Swiss Institute in New York opens an intriguing intergenerational dialogue between fast-rising painter Louise Bonnet (b. 1970) and Elizabeth King (b. 1950), two artists who have long interrogated the body and its representation across history: between flesh and machine, fiction and physicality, individuality and social construct. The grotesque corporeality of Bonnet’s intricate painterly compositions finds a compelling counterpoint in King’s uncanny sculptures and animations of humanoid figures inspired by 16th-century automata, commercial mannequins and stand-ins once used in place of live models. Both artists confront the evolving definition of the human—symbolically and materially—embracing its fluidity and hybridity in response to technological, scientific and societal transformation. Debuting in the exhibition is a new series of Bonnet’s works, following her recent surge in market attention after her inclusion in the 2022 Venice Biennale and her high-profile addition to Gagosian’s roster. Here, her contorted figures toy with embodiment and disembodiment, reanimating historical gestures while subverting canonical ideals in a continuous dialogue between past, present and future.
“De Anima” brings together, for
the first time, the work of Louise Bonnet (b. 1970, Geneva) and Elizabeth King (b. 1950, Ann Arbor).
Swiss Institute
