The High Museum of Art in Atlanta will host the final stop of the national tour for 'Amy Sherald: American Sublime,' a retrospective featuring over 35 paintings by the Georgia-born artist, spanning from 2007 to 2024. The exhibition runs from May 15 to September 27, 2026, and includes Sherald's widely recognized portraits as well as lesser-seen works, with timed tickets required for entry.
The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, announced an upcoming exhibition titled “An Exquisite Eye: Introducing the Aso O. Tavitian Collection,” on view from June 13, 2025, through February 21, 2027. The show features approximately 150 works from the Tavitian Collection, a major private collection of European art assembled by the late collector and philanthropist Aso O. Tavitian. Spanning c. 1450–1850, the exhibition includes paintings, sculpture, drawings, and decorative arts by artists such as Jan van Eyck, Jean-Antoine Houdon, and Elizabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun. The collection, comprising 331 objects, was donated to the Clark and will eventually be housed in a new wing designed by Selldorf Architects, set to open in 2028.
Tate Britain is hosting a major exhibition of James McNeill Whistler, exploring his mastery of light and atmosphere across paintings, etchings, and pastels. The show traces Whistler's career from his early realist works to his iconic nocturnes and portraits, emphasizing his radical approach to composition and color.
The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds presents 'Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age,' a major group exhibition exploring how digital technologies are reshaping contemporary sculpture. The show features works by artists including Joey Holder, Jürgen Baumann, and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, who fuse ancient folklore, occult practices, and modern digital tools such as AI, 3D printing, and video game mechanics. Highlights include Holder's immersive installation 'The Woosphere' with arcade-style consoles and Brathwaite-Shirley's interactive boat sculpture 'PIRATING BLACKNESS/BLACKTRANSSEA.COM.' The exhibition draws on the historical concept of phantasmagoria—18th-century theatrical spectacles using smoke and light—to critique the seductive illusions of digital capitalism.
The Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) is opening 'Geestgrond', the largest solo exhibition by British sculptor Antony Gormley ever staged on the European mainland. Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the show spans all of the museum's modern galleries and extends to the roof, Museumplein, and Antwerp quays, featuring over 100 works including sculptures, installations, early sketches, notebooks, and new pieces. Highlights include 'The Heart', an intimate Wunderkammer of Gormley's process, and 'Cave', a monumental walk-in steel installation.
Photographer and storyteller Giles Duley has opened a two-week exhibition titled “Distortion / Memory / Resilience” at Sutton Tower on the Upper East Side of New York. The show features his powerful images documenting life during war, alongside artistic touches such as wooden school desks filled with artwork by Ukrainian children. Duley, who lost two legs and one arm after an I.E.D. injury in Afghanistan in 2011, continues to work actively in war zones including Sudan, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. Proceeds from the exhibition support his NGO, the Legacy of War Foundation, which has raised over $4 million since 2017 to help communities rebuild after conflict.
American artist Lorna Simpson has opened a major solo exhibition titled 'Third Person' at Punta della Dogana in Venice, featuring over 50 works across painting, collage, sculpture, installation, and film. The show surveys her practice from the last decade, including new works created in response to the venue, and runs through November 22. Curated by Emma Lavigne of the Pinault Collection, the exhibition also includes pieces from her 2015 Venice Biennale participation and series such as 'Ice,' 'Special Characters,' and 'Earth and Sky.'
Elisa Contemporary Art Riverdale Gallery will open a new group exhibition titled "People and places" on May 20, 2026, running through September 2. The show features works by six artists: Betty Ball, Carol Bennett, Sherry Karver, Mitch McGee, Dean Moore, and Jeffrey Palladini, with a focus on uplifting summer themes including water scenes, poolside figures, and bright yellow elements. The exhibition includes new works from Ball's Land & Sea series and introduces Sherry Karver as a new gallery artist.
A new exhibition titled 'Francis Picabia. Expanding Horizons' has opened at Hauser & Wirth London, showcasing five decades of the artist's experimental work. The show includes dense, layered postwar paintings from his return to Paris with his wife Olga, as well as earlier pieces spanning Impressionism, Dada, and his Transparencies series. Organized with the Comité Picabia, the exhibition features works such as 'Composition abstraite' (1947) and 'Le Zèbre' (c. 1909-1933), highlighting Picabia's habit of revisiting and painting over canvases across decades.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) is hosting "Picasso-Klee-Matisse: Masterpieces from the Museum Berggruen" from May 20 to September 13, 2026. The exhibition features dozens of works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Henri Matisse from the private collection of dealer and collector Heinz Berggruen, on loan from the Museum Berggruen – Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The show is organized thematically—portraits, landscapes, still life, and the human figure—and includes paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, and archival materials, alongside pieces from MFAH's own collection. It has already attracted over 1 million visitors on its international tour.
A new exhibition titled "Vistas: From Takao Tanabe’s Travels" has opened at the Audain Art Museum in British Columbia, featuring works by Japanese-Canadian artist Takao Tanabe. The show highlights landscapes from his travels across British Columbia, North America, the Arctic, and Europe, translated into paintings that blend observation with poetic reflection. Curated by Kiriko Watanabe, the exhibition runs until Sept. 21 and coincides with Tanabe’s upcoming 100th birthday on Sept. 16, as well as a related exhibition "Takao Tanabe: Inside Passage" opening June 13.
Wallace Chan will present "Vessels of Other Worlds," a monumental dual-site exhibition across Venice and Shanghai in 2026, coinciding with his 70th birthday and the 61st Venice Biennale. The exhibition premieres on May 8, 2026, at the Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà in Venice, featuring a new series of titanium sculptures inspired by the three sacred oils of the Catholic Church, with a parallel exhibition opening on July 18, 2026, at the Long Museum (West Bund) in Shanghai, where the sculptures will be displayed at a dramatically larger scale. Curated by James Putnam, the project also includes a complementary site-specific exhibition, "Mythos," at Scala Contarini del Bovolo in Venice from April to October 2026.
The Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) has opened its largest-ever retrospective of pioneering Korean abstract painter Yoo Young-kuk, titled "Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me," marking the 110th anniversary of his birth. Running through Oct. 25 at SeMA's Seosomun branch, the exhibition brings together 178 works, including 115 oil paintings, drawings, photographs, archival materials, and previously unseen pieces, as well as BTS RM's collection "Mountain." Rather than a chronological format, the show begins in 1964—the year of Yoo's first solo exhibition—and moves backward and forward through time, highlighting his geometric compositions and bold primary colors inspired by the mountains and sea of his hometown Uljin.
The University of Stirling's Art Collection has been designated a Collection of National Significance by Museums Galleries Scotland, joining four other collections receiving the honor on International Museums Day. The collection comprises over 800 prints, paintings, and sculptures, many displayed across the campus, particularly in the A-listed Pathfoot Building. Founded on a policy set by Principal Dr Tom Cottrell in 1967 to allocate 1% of building costs for art, the collection has grown through purchases and donations, including 14 works by Scottish Colourist J.D. Fergusson gifted by Margaret Morris. The collection team runs exhibitions, workshops, and an Artist in Residence programme to integrate art into university life.
Keith Tyson, the Turner Prize-winning British artist, returns to Los Angeles with his first exhibition in the city since 2009, titled “The Generative Universe,” on view at Hauser & Wirth from May 28 to August 16. The show spans 30 years of his career, featuring paintings, sculptures, drawings, and mixed media works that explore generative systems—artworks created through rule-based structures shaped by mathematics, technology, nature, and the artist's own choices. Central to the exhibition is Tyson's early computer program “Artmachine,” which he developed in the 1990s to generate prompts for his own creative process, contrasting with today's AI image generators that respond to human prompts.
Kunstmuseum Basel has opened a major exhibition of Helen Frankenthaler's work, running from April 18 to August 23, 2026, featuring over 50 large-format pieces spanning six decades. The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation loaned 37 works for the show. The article also notes recent auction results, including Christie's offering of 'The Last Minute in April' (1974) for an estimated $2–3 million, and Sotheby's sales of 'St. John' (1971) for $2.1085 million and 'Perseus' (1983) for $2.804 million. Previous European exhibitions of Frankenthaler's work are listed, including shows at Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Museum Folkwang, Palazzo Strozzi, and Museum Reinhard Ernst.
The Parrish Art Museum and The FLAG Art Foundation are hosting a talk on May 23, 2026, featuring artist Tschabalala Self and writer Camille Okhio to celebrate the exhibition "FRESH PAINT: Tschabalala Self." The event includes a conversation about Self’s painting "Adam and Eve" (2025), which is being shown for the first time in the U.S. as part of the FRESH PAINT series, a rotating single-artwork exhibition program that highlights new or rarely seen works.
India has returned to the Venice Art Biennale with a national pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition, after a seven-year hiatus. The pavilion, titled "Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home," is presented by India's Ministry of Culture in partnership with the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre and Serendipity Arts Foundation, curated by Amin Jaffer. It features five artists—Alwar Balasubramaniam, Sumakshi Singh, Ranjani Shettar, Skarma Sonam Tashi, and Asim Waqif—whose works explore themes of home, loss, displacement, and cultural memory through materials like soil, thread, bamboo, and clay.
The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in Delhi has partnered with the Drents Museum in the Netherlands to present a landmark exhibition of works by modernist painter Amrita Sher-Gil. Titled "Amrita Sher-Gil – Europe Belongs to Picasso, India Belongs to Me," the show marks the first time her art has been displayed in the Netherlands. NGMA Director General Dr. Sanjeev Kishor Goutam loaned 48 masterpieces for the exhibition, which includes nearly 60 paintings and photographs exploring Sher-Gil’s life and philosophy. The exhibition runs from May 14 to September 20, 2026, at the Drents Museum in Assen.
The High Museum of Art in Atlanta is presenting an exhibition titled "American Sublime" featuring works by artist Amy Sherald, including her portrait of Breonna Taylor and the painting "She Always Believed the Good about Those She Loved," which used a model who stood in for the late Breonna Taylor. The exhibition opened on Friday, May 15, 2026, and draws visitors to view Sherald's distinctive figurative works.
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice has opened "Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector," the first major museum exhibition focused on Guggenheim's brief but influential 18-month tenure as a gallerist in pre-war London. From January 1938 to June 1939, her gallery Guggenheim Jeune at 30 Cork Street mounted twenty exhibitions, including Vasily Kandinsky's first UK solo show, the first British group collage exhibition, and a controversial sculpture show debated in Parliament. Organized by Gražina Subelytė and guest curator Simon Grant, the show brings together approximately one hundred works—paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, puppets, and archival material—many reunited for the first time since their original presentation.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) is hosting the U.S. debut of a major collection of masterworks by Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Henri Matisse, assembled by the Berggruen family. The exhibition brings together iconic paintings, drawings, and sculptures from one of the most renowned private collections of modern art, offering American audiences a first look at works that have rarely been seen outside Europe.
The Jacquemart-André Museum in Paris is hosting a major retrospective dedicated to the Venetian painter Jacopo Robusti, known as Tintoretto, running from September 11, 2026 to January 24, 2027. The exhibition features around forty paintings and graphic works, organized thematically to cover the artist's entire career, including religious scenes, portraits, and mythological depictions, highlighting his bold compositions, vivid colors, and dramatic lighting.
The article reviews the first-ever British exhibition dedicated to Spanish Baroque painter Francisco de Zurbarán, held at the National Gallery in London. The show brings together 40 works from collections spanning Seville to San Diego, featuring his hyper-real religious paintings and radiant still lifes, described as a 'magnificently choreographed' trawl through his oeuvre. Critics praise the exhibition for its dramatic lighting and revelatory presentation, though some note uneven quality in his later works.
An exhibition of Edward Hopper's work at the Seoul Museum of Art has broken attendance records, drawing 330,000 visitors—the highest for any exhibition that year. The show marks the first solo exhibition of the American painter in South Korea, where Hopper was virtually unknown until the 1990s. The article traces Hopper's growing recognition in the country, from his first appearance in Korean media in 2002 to the 2011 co-hosted exhibition 'This Is American Art' at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, which introduced his work 'Railroad Sunset' (1929) to local audiences.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has received a major donation from the Lauder family: a historic townhouse gallery on the Upper East Side and Gustav Klimt's 1907 portrait "Adele Bloch-Bauer II," valued at $135 million. The gift comes from the estate of Estée Lauder heir Ronald S. Lauder, a longtime museum trustee and collector, and includes the former Neue Galerie building at 1048 Fifth Avenue, which will be renovated to expand the Met's modern and contemporary art exhibition space.
The Memorial Art Gallery (MAG) in Rochester, New York, announced on May 13 that admission will become free for all visitors starting in 2027, eliminating its current $20 entry fee permanently. The museum, part of the University of Rochester, raised over $9 million through its "Free for All, Forever" campaign, surpassing its original target faster than expected. Key donations included a $1 million gift from Dr. Alexander A. Levitan and his wife Lucy K. Levitan, a $3 million donation from UR trustee Doug Bennett, his wife Abby, and the Sands Family Foundation, and $2 million from Mary Ellen Burris. Additional support came from anonymous donors, Kitty and Nick Jospé, and Sandy Hawks Lloyd and Justin Hawks Lloyd.
The Grand Rapids Art Museum (GRAM) has announced its summer exhibition 'Decadent Spirit: French Art at the Turn of the Century,' on view from May 29 to September 6. Featuring over 130 works spanning 1880 to 1910, the show highlights artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, Jules Chéret, Hector Guimard, and Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, alongside early film pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière, Georges Méliès, and Alice Guy-Blaché. The exhibition includes works on paper, painting, sculpture, metalwork, interior and urban design, and early film, exploring the cafés, streets, theaters, and domestic scenes of fin-de-siècle Paris. It closes with an 1899 French motorcar, symbolizing the era's new mobility.
In 2026, Frida Kahlo has become a global cultural obsession, with museums, opera houses, and cinemas worldwide celebrating her legacy. The Metropolitan Opera in New York City will premiere Gabriela Lena Frank's Spanish-sung opera *El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego* on May 14, which imagines Diego Rivera summoning Kahlo back to life three years after her death. Set and costume designer Jon Bausor drew inspiration from the trees, veins, and cracked imagery in Kahlo's paintings.
The Buffalo AKG Art Museum will present "Ali Banisadr: Temple of the Mind," a solo exhibition running from June 26 to November 8, 2026. The show occupies the Hemicycle Gallery and, for the first time, the Wilmers Galleries, where Banisadr's works will be installed alongside Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist pieces from the museum's permanent collection. The exhibition includes an installation exploring the artist's influences, featuring works by Andō Hiroshige and Francisco de Goya, as well as studio materials, a new etching created with Mirabo Press, and an audio journey narrated by Banisadr.