“Photography as a Way of Life” at PU Art Museum

The Princeton University Art Museum has unveiled "Photography as a Way of Life," a major exhibition running from April 19 through September 7. The show examines the interconnected careers of Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan, three titans of mid-20th-century American photography. Drawing heavily from the museum’s Minor White Archive, the exhibition features unpublished color and black-and-white prints, archival documents, and a reconstruction of White’s slide projection piece, "Slow Dance."

Review: “Canvas to Clay” at the San Antonio Museum of Art

The San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) has launched "Canvas to Clay," an exhibition that pairs the modernist paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe with the black-on-black pottery of Maria Martinez. While these two icons of the American Southwest are frequently exhibited together, this show distinguishes itself by expanding the conversation southward. It integrates Mexican earthenware from Mata Ortiz and Tonalá, highlighting the work of Juan Quezada and Hector Gallegos to showcase a broader regional tradition of abstraction and indigenous revival.

Two Maine museums will explore influence of a lesser-known Wyeth

The Farnsworth Art Museum, Colby College Museum of Art, and Brandywine Museum of Art are launching a collaborative exhibition titled "By Design: The Worlds of Betsy James Wyeth." This landmark show is the first to focus exclusively on the creative legacy of Betsy James Wyeth, the wife of Andrew Wyeth, highlighting her work as a designer of immersive environments and her role in restoring historic properties like the Olson House and Brinton’s Mill. The exhibitions will feature Andrew Wyeth’s paintings alongside Betsy’s archival materials, maps, and collected objects.

Urban Grit Meets Wild Beauty: Inside Seattle Art Museum’s Beyond Mysticism

The Seattle Art Museum has launched "Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest," an extensive exhibition featuring over 150 works that reexamine the region's contribution to Modernism. The show moves past the traditional "mystic" label associated with the Northwest School to highlight how artists engaged with Social Realism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. By placing local icons like Mark Tobey and Morris Graves alongside international figures such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Salvador Dalí, the exhibition explores the tension between the Pacific Northwest's industrial growth and its dramatic natural landscapes.

The many faces and identities of Frida Kahlo are explored in exhibition catalogue

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has released a comprehensive exhibition catalogue for 'Frida: The Making of an Icon,' which investigates the posthumous transformation of Frida Kahlo from a niche painter into a global cultural phenomenon. The publication features eleven scholarly essays that deconstruct the various identities attributed to Kahlo—from the political activist and feminist martyr to the disabled artist—while debunking common myths regarding her relationship with Surrealism and her husband, Diego Rivera.

Venice Biennale details revealed, Beatriz González and Tracey Emin in London—podcast

The 2026 Venice Biennale has unveiled the artist list and framework for its international exhibition, "In Minor Keys." The project, which was the final vision of the late curator Koyo Kouoh, is being realized by a collaborative team following her death last year. The exhibition aims to explore themes of minor histories and global narratives through a diverse roster of international artists.

Museum dedicated to the Romantic movement reopens in Paris on Valentine’s Day

The Musée de la Vie romantique in Paris has reopened on February 14th following a €3.8 million renovation. The project, funded by the City of Paris and private donors, restored the 19th-century building—once the home and studio of painter Ary Scheffer—focusing on its timber framework, roof, and façades using traditional techniques. The museum's exhibition has been completely renewed, featuring 300 works from its collection, including 70 recently restored pieces, and incorporates new multimedia elements to immerse visitors in the Romantic period.

A Nation of Artists

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has announced a major new exhibition titled "A Nation of Artists," which will showcase over 200 works of American art from its collection. The show spans from the early 19th century to the mid-20th century and features paintings, decorative arts, and folk art by artists including Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, and Stuart Davis.

Gwen John: The 'reclusive spinster' artist who shunned conformity

A major retrospective of Gwen John, one of Britain's greatest 20th-century artists, is opening at National Museum Cardiff on the 150th anniversary of her birth. The exhibition, titled 'Gwen John: Strange Beauties,' brings together works from across the UK and the USA for the first time, including a significant collection acquired from her nephew Edwin in 1976 that has never been extensively researched or exhibited. John, born in 1876 in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, was long overshadowed by her younger brother, the artist Augustus John, and was often dismissed as a 'reclusive spinster.' However, curators and biographers now challenge that myth, revealing her as a socially engaged, determined artist who pursued her own path despite Victorian-era constraints on women.

LACMA sets opening date for highly anticipated David Geffen Galleries

LACMA has announced that its David Geffen Galleries, the centerpiece of a two-decade campus transformation, will open to the public on April 19, 2025, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and priority member access, followed by general admission starting May 4. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor, the $720-million Brutalist building spans Wilshire Boulevard and houses 110,000 square feet of exhibition space across 90 galleries, organized thematically rather than by medium or chronology. The inaugural installation will use global bodies of water as an organizing framework, featuring works such as Georges de La Tour's "The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame," Vincent van Gogh's "Tarascon Stagecoach," and Henri Matisse's "La Gerbe." The project was funded largely by private donors, including a record $150-million donation from David Geffen, with $125 million from L.A. County.

Women of Abstract Expressionism Featured in Muscarelle Museum of Art Exhibition

The Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg, VA, has opened “Abstract Expressionists: The Women,” an exhibition featuring nearly 50 paintings by 32 women artists who were pivotal to the Abstract Expressionist movement. Running from January 23 through April 26, 2026, the show draws from the Christian Levett Collection and the FAMM (Female Artists of the Mougins Museum), France, and is organized by the American Federation of Arts. It spans the movement’s development from the late 1930s to 1977, with works by artists such as Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Grace Hartigan, and is structured around four thematic sections covering New York, San Francisco, Paris, and the artists’ own voices.

Drawn to home: how landscape and locals inspired Alberto Giacometti

A new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in St. Moritz, titled "Alberto Giacometti: Faces and Landscapes of Home," explores the Swiss artist's deep connection to his birthplace, the Alpine village of Stampa. Curated by Tobia Bezzola, the show features around 20 paintings, sculptures, and drawings from 1918 through the 1960s, including portraits of Giacometti's family and depictions of the local landscape. It highlights how Giacometti, after initially escaping to Paris in 1922, returned increasingly to the Engadine valley from the 1950s onward, working in his father's studio and producing works distinct from his Parisian output.

Self-portraits, Surrealism and sanitary pads: what to expect from Tate Modern's Frida Kahlo show

Tate Modern has announced details for its upcoming blockbuster exhibition "Frida: the Making of an Icon" (25 June–3 January 2027), featuring more than 30 works by Frida Kahlo alongside photographs and personal artefacts. Co-curator Tobias Ostrander revealed that the show highlights Kahlo's impact on women artists across Mexico, the Americas, and Europe from 1970 to today, including highly personal works reflecting her suffering after a miscarriage and her complex relationship with the United States. The exhibition includes paintings such as "My Dress Hangs There" (1933-38), "Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird" (1940), and "The Frame" (1938), and examines Kahlo's links to Surrealism following her 1939 Paris exhibition. The show also features portraits of contemporary artists who have imitated Kahlo, such as Tracey Emin and Yasumasa Morimura, and a final section on "Fridamania" exploring how her image dominates popular culture on toys, dolls, and even branded sanitary pads by Saba.

The road to ‘Fridamania’: how Frida Kahlo became a global phenomenon

A major exhibition titled "Frida: The Making of an Icon" opens at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, tracing how Frida Kahlo evolved from a little-known artist in Diego Rivera's shadow into a global phenomenon and brand. Curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez, the show examines Kahlo's posthumous rise to fame from the 1970s through influential biographies, Chicano and feminist reinterpretations, and her complex relationship with race, ethnicity, gender, and politics. It features 35 Kahlo works including "The Broken Column" (1944), alongside pieces by 80 artists influenced by her, and explores "Fridamania" through 200 objects. The exhibition will travel to Tate Modern in London this summer.

MoMA explores how African studio portraits offered a new vision of freedom

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has opened a new exhibition, 'Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination,' surveying West and Central African studio portrait photography from the 1950s and 60s. The show features works by photographers including James Barnor, Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Jean Depara, Sanlé Sory, Kwame Brathwaite, Samuel Fosso, Silvia Rosi, and the collective Air Afrique, alongside a reading room exploring print culture. Curated by Oluremi C. Onabanjo, the exhibition presents these portraits not as documentary records but as imaginative acts of self-definition and political expression.

Smithsonian American Art Museum presents blockbuster Grandma Moses exhibition

The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., will present "Grandma Moses: A Good Day's Work" from November 25, 2025, through July 12, 2026. The exhibition features 88 works by Anna Mary Robertson "Grandma" Moses (1860–1961), drawn from the museum's collection, private collections, and public institutions. It repositions Moses as a multidimensional force in American art, exploring her artistic evolution from farmwife to famous artist in Cold War America, and includes photographs, ephemera, and excerpts from her autobiography. The show is organized by Leslie Umberger, senior curator of folk and self-taught art, and former Randall Griffey, with support from curatorial assistant Maria R. Eipert.

Smithsonian American Art Museum presents blockbuster Grandma Moses exhibition

The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. will present the exhibition “Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work,” opening November 25, 2025, and running through July 12, 2026. The show features 88 works drawn from the museum’s collection, private collections, and public institutions, primarily created between the late 1930s and the artist’s death in 1961. It repositions Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses as a multidimensional force in American art, exploring her evolution from farmwife to famous artist, her life in post-Reconstruction Virginia, and her fusion of creativity, labor, and memory. The exhibition is organized by Leslie Umberger and former Randall Griffey, with support from Maria R. Eipert, and will travel after its premiere.

Camille Pissarro show at Denver Art Museum is both ambitious and exhaustive

The Denver Art Museum has opened "The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism," a comprehensive retrospective of the Impressionist painter featuring over 100 works from nearly 50 international museums and private collections. Co-organized with the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, the exhibition is the first major U.S. museum survey of Pissarro in 30 years, curated by Clarisse Fava-Piz, Claire Durand-Ruel, and Nerina Santorius.

Comment | As the US’s 250th anniversary approaches, museums must keep pushing the American story forward

The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, is launching a new strategic plan and an upcoming exhibition titled "Out of Many: Reframing an American Art Collection," timed to the US's 250th anniversary. The museum's director reflects on founder Duncan Phillips's original vision of the museum as a space for civic dialogue and shared inquiry, arguing that this model is urgently needed amid current political pressures, loss of federal funding, and debates over historical narrative.

Exhibition explores two transformative decades of innovative art created in Japan, for the world

The exhibition "Prism of the Real: Making Art in Japan 1989-2010" at the National Art Center, Tokyo, examines two transformative decades of Japanese art framed by the death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989 and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima disaster. It features works by artists such as Yasumasa Morimura, Tadasu Takamine, Lieko Shiga, and Shimabuku, alongside international figures like Pierre Huyghe and Rirkrit Tiravanija, challenging fixed notions of national identity and highlighting global exchanges.

James Turrell’s New Skyspace Is Opening in Denmark—and It’s Monumental

James Turrell's largest Skyspace to date, titled "As Seen Below – The Dome," will open at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark on June 19, 2026, timed for the summer solstice. The dome-shaped underground chamber, over 50 feet high and 130 feet in diameter, frames the sky and is housed within a grassy mound as part of the museum's subterranean expansion, The Next Level. The project, first announced in 2015, faced financial and technical delays, including a supplier bankruptcy, and required additional funding of 6.7 million kroner this year.

Comment | Frieze galleries have committed to climate donations—now it's time for the art world to pack in its private jets

A new initiative called 10% Of launches at Frieze London and Frieze Masters, inviting galleries to donate 10% of the sale price of designated works to the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC), an international art world environmental charity. Nearly thirty galleries have signed up, including Gagosian, White Cube, David Zwirner, and Lisson, with works priced from £3,000 to £150,000. The scheme aims to reframe a standard art market gesture into collective climate action, with participating galleries displaying their GCC membership status on booth signs.

Comment | Frieze galleries have committed to climate donations—now it's time for the art world to pack in its private jets

A new initiative called 10% Of launches at Frieze London and Frieze Masters, inviting galleries to donate 10% of the sale price of designated works to the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC). Nearly thirty galleries have signed up, including Gagosian, White Cube, David Zwirner, and Lisson, with works priced from £3,000 to £150,000. The scheme reframes a standard market gesture into an act of giving, offering extra visibility at the fair while supporting sector-wide climate action.

Comment | Frieze galleries have committed to climate donations—now it's time for the art world to pack in its private jets

A new initiative called 10% Of launches at Frieze London and Frieze Masters, inviting galleries to donate 10% of the sale price of designated works to the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC), an international art world environmental charity. Nearly thirty galleries have signed up, including major names like Gagosian, White Cube, David Zwirner, and Lisson, as well as smaller venues. The scheme aims to reframe a standard art market gesture into collective climate action, with participating works ranging from £3,000 to £150,000 and including pieces by artists such as Cy Twombly, Jean Dubuffet, Cornelia Parker, and Ugo Rondinone.

Tate Britain’s Lee Miller exhibition seeks to go beyond her mythology

Tate Britain is opening a major survey of American photographer Lee Miller (1907-77), running from 2 October 2025 to 15 February 2026. Curated by Hilary Floe, the exhibition aims to refocus attention on Miller’s artistic output rather than her storied personal life—her roles as a Surrealist, fashion photographer, war correspondent, and muse to figures like Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau. The show presents the UK’s largest survey of her work, deliberately selecting images based on artistic merit rather than biographical illustration.

Humans, Machines, and Possible Futures: The Last 100 Years at New Museum

HUMANS MACHINES AND POSSIBLE FUTURES THE LAST 100 YEARS AT NEW MUSEUM

The New Museum has launched "New Humans: Memories of the Future," a massive exhibition spanning its entire building and featuring over 200 international contributors. The show traces a century of artistic, scientific, and social evolution, pairing 20th-century masters like Constantin Brâncuși and Salvador Dalí with contemporary commissions from artists such as Hito Steyerl and Wangechi Mutu. By exploring themes of automated labor, artificial intelligence, and mechanized warfare, the exhibition frames the relationship between humanity and technology as a series of cyclical leaps and reversals rather than linear progress.

LEONORA CARRINGTON THE VITRUVIAN WOMAN IN LUXEMBOURG

The Musée du Luxembourg in Paris has opened the first major exhibition in France dedicated solely to the work of surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. Titled 'The Vitruvian Woman,' the show presents 126 works and frames Carrington as a model of innovation and harmony, a deliberate counterpoint to Leonardo da Vinci's 'Vitruvian Man.' It explores her artistic journey from her Celtic origins and discovery of Italian Renaissance art to her pivotal involvement with Surrealism in France and her final years in Mexico.

Lee Miller at the Musée d’Art Moderne: The Future Great Photographer Who Went from Rebel Child to Vogue Model

Lee Miller au musée d’Art moderne : la futur grande photographe passée de l’enfant rebelle au mannequin Vogue

The Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris is hosting a major retrospective dedicated to Lee Miller, tracing her evolution from a rebellious child in upstate New York to a celebrated Vogue model and pioneering surrealist photographer. The exhibition highlights her early life under the influence of her father, Theodore Miller, an amateur photographer who introduced her to the technical aspects of the darkroom, and her subsequent move to Paris in 1930 where she transitioned from being a muse for photographers like George Hoyningen-Huene to a formidable artist in her own right.

The West as Witness: Langston Hughes Reimagined

The California African American Museum (CAAM) has launched 'A New Song: Langston Hughes in the West,' an exhibition that reframes the legendary Harlem Renaissance poet through his travels and political work in California and Nevada during the 1930s. By blending archival materials with contemporary artistic responses, the show moves beyond the traditional East Coast narrative to highlight Hughes as a diasporic thinker shaped by movement, labor, and the diverse landscapes of the American West.

The Big Art Loop is transforming SF into an open air gallery over the next three years.

The Big Art Loop has transformed San Francisco into an open-air gallery with nearly 100 sculptures installed along a 34-mile walkable and bikeable path through the city. The project, funded by the Sijbrandij Foundation and founded by Sid and Karen Sijbrandij, features works including R-Evolution at the Ferry Building, Echoes: A Voice from Uncharted Waters by Masaki Omor, Coralée by BJB, Got Framed, Desert Shark, and a double feature by Betsabeé Romero. The loop is designed to be encountered spontaneously in daily life, with no fixed starting point, and has support from Mayor Daniel Lurie.