A screenprint by Keith Haring, titled *Untitled* (1988), is being offered for sale through Palm Beach Modern Auctions. The limited-edition work on canvas, signed and numbered 111/125, was originally printed for the marriage of Estefania Kong to Lawrence "Dr. Winkie" Lin, who owned the DV8 nightclub in San Francisco where Haring had previously painted murals. The piece has minor condition issues and comes with provenance from Clars Auction in June 2024.
San Francisco museums are navigating a mix of upcoming exhibitions and financial challenges in May 2026. SFMOMA is closing "KAWS: Family" on May 3 and opening "Matisse’s Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal" from May 16 to September 13. The Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts has suspended operations due to funding issues, and SOMArts is also facing a budget gap. Meanwhile, the Museum of Craft and Design presents "Video Craft" through August 16, and the Letterform Archive hosts "Black Memory Scholar: The Language of Storytellers" and "Piet Zwart: Brand Architect." SFMOMA has announced three SECA award winners—CrossLypka, Em Kettner, and Chanell Stone—who will exhibit from December 2026 to May 2027, and the museum continues to showcase "Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10" and new installations by Alexander Calder, Claes Oldenburg + Coosje van Bruggen, and Rose B Simpson.
The article reviews Tracey Emin's exhibition "A Second Life" at Tate Modern, describing the author's initial lack of aesthetic connection to the artworks—finding the paintings derivative and neon signs tacky—but ultimately being moved by the exhibition's emotional force and the artist's refusal to disguise pain, humiliation, and grief. The author notes the crowded galleries, the predominantly female audience responding with visceral emotion, and highlights the film "How It Feels" as the most impactful piece, in which Emin discusses her traumatic abortion and its effect on her self-perception.
The Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, presents a major double exhibition pairing Austrian artist Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) with Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944) for the first time. Featuring nearly 200 works—including paintings, works on paper, sculptures, films, and photographs—the show highlights parallels between the two artists across a half-century gap, tracing Munch’s influence on Lassnig and revealing new aspects of both oeuvres. Key works include Munch’s *Madonna* (1893–1895) and Lassnig’s *Traditionskette* (1983), with the exhibition organized into 13 chapters plus a prologue and epilogue exploring themes such as self-portraits, gender, nature, and mortality.
The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York will present "Jessica Lichtenstein: Rewilding," the artist's first solo museum exhibition, from May 30, 2026, through April 18, 2027. The immersive installation transforms the third-floor gallery into a lush, overgrown terrain featuring thousands of digitally rendered female nudes that coalesce into forests, ruins, and flowering canopies, exploring themes of femininity, ecological imagination, and bodily autonomy.
The United States is marking its 250th anniversary in 2026 with a major collaborative exhibition titled *A Nation of Artists*, presented simultaneously at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). The show features over 1,000 works—paintings, photographs, sculptures, and decorative arts—spanning from the late 18th century to the present, including more than 120 rarely seen pieces from the Middleton Family Collection, one of the country's most significant private holdings of American art. PAFA organizes the works thematically around westward expansion, industrialization, and globalization, while PMA, celebrating its 150th anniversary, presents a chronological survey from 1700 to 1960, highlighting international exchange, technological innovation, and shifting cultural economics.
The National Gallery in London presents a landmark exhibition of Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664), the first major retrospective of the Spanish Baroque master in Britain. In collaboration with the Louvre and the Art Institute of Chicago, the gallery has assembled over 40 works from institutions worldwide, including Seville and San Diego. The show features Zurbarán's electrifying religious paintings and radiant still lifes, displayed in darkened galleries that echo the chiaroscuro of his compositions. Highlights include the shattering *The Crucifixion* (1627) and *Saint Peter Nolasco's Vision of Saint Peter the Apostle* (1629), which demonstrate his hyper-real, sculptural approach to sacred subjects.
The Tucson Museum of Art will open the Arizona Biennial 2026 on May 22, featuring 31 contemporary artists from across the state. Juried by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, executive director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the exhibition runs through September 27 in the museum's James J. and Louise R. Glasser and Earl Kai Chann Galleries. The biennial showcases work across multiple media, with public programs planned throughout its run.
The Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul has opened "Inside other spaces: Environments by women artists 1956-1976," an exhibition restoring immersive artworks by 11 women artists from Asia, Europe, and South America, including Jung Kang-ja, Judy Chicago, Tsuruko Yamazaki, and Aleksandra Kasuba. The show revives pieces that were often dismantled after their original displays, such as Jung Kang-ja's "Incorporeal Exhibition," which was destroyed in 1970 after being deemed political propaganda under South Korea's authoritarian regime. Curators Andrea Lissoni and Marina Pugliese, who first organized the project at Haus Der Kunst in Munich, worked with researchers to reconstruct the works using archival materials, correspondence, and blueprints.
The article reviews the exhibition 'Zurbarán' at the National Gallery in London, arguing that the show fails to capture the spiritual intensity and emotional power of the Spanish Baroque painter's work. It criticizes the curatorial choices, suggesting the display feels flat and lacks the ecstatic religious fervor that defines Zurbarán's best paintings, leaving viewers with a sense of agony rather than transcendence.
LACMA is running a 50-week series called '50 Works 50 Weeks' leading up to the 2026 opening of its new David Geffen Galleries. The fourth installment highlights Millard Sheets's 1931 painting *Angel's Flight*, which depicts a historic Los Angeles funicular and tenement life. The work was inspired by George Bellows's *Cliff Dwellers* (1913), one of the first acquisitions by LACMA's predecessor, and was painted for the 1931 Carnegie International Exhibition. Sheets's painting won a prize at the Los Angeles Museum in 1932 and is now displayed alongside Bellows's work in the new galleries.
Spanish artist Jaume Plensa has opened a major exhibition at the Denver Botanic Gardens, titled *Jaume Plensa: A New Humanism*, which includes both outdoor sculptures and indoor gallery works. The show features iconic pieces like the 11-foot-tall steel sphere "Self-Portrait with Music" and a retrospective spanning from 2002 to the present, including portrait heads, a door inscribed with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and letter-based sculptures. Plensa describes the hybrid setting as a first for him, where children interact freely with the art.
Paul Farber, founder of Monument Lab, discusses his new exhibition "Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The show moves the iconic Rocky statue inside the museum and examines how a fictional boxer's statue became Philadelphia's most famous work of art, exploring broader questions about collective memory and public commemoration. Farber also reflects on the dismantling of the Frank Rizzo statue and how unintentional monuments like the Berlin Wall shape cultural discourse.
The iconic Rocky Balboa statue, long stationed outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), is being moved indoors for a new exhibition titled "Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments." Opening this weekend, the show examines how the fictional boxer and his statue became a symbol of Philadelphia's identity, tracing over two millennia of artists' engagement with boxing and celebrity. The exhibition includes works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol alongside the bronze statue, which attracts roughly 4 million visitors annually. After the exhibit ends in August, the city's statue will be permanently relocated to the top of the museum steps, replacing a temporary loan from Sylvester Stallone's private collection. A new statue honoring legendary Philadelphia boxer "Smokin'" Joe Frazier is being built at the statue's original location.
Nick Cave's immersive solo exhibition "Mammoth" is on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through January 3, 2027. The show features a vast, illuminated table covered with hundreds of everyday objects—faux fruits, bejeweled vegetables, wooden canes, glass fish, toy trucks, and leather slippers—arranged with deliberate purpose. Alongside these collected items, Cave has constructed mammoth hides and bones, and a video projection brings the ancient creatures to life. The exhibition draws deeply on Cave's personal history growing up in Missouri, with memories of his grandparents' farm and his family's traditions of making, quilting, and craftsmanship informing the assemblage.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is opening a new exhibition titled "Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments" that brings the iconic bronze statue of fictional boxer Rocky Balboa inside the museum for the first time. Guest curator Paul Farber organized the show, which spans over 2,000 years of boxing imagery and places the statue within art history and Philadelphia's identity. The museum, which had a historically rocky relationship with the statue—initially fighting to have it removed from its steps—has now embraced it, with plans to permanently install the statue at the top of the museum's steps after the exhibition closes in August.
The exhibition 'Continuum,' curated by artist-curator Gauri Minocha at The Art Hub Gallery in Gurugram, presents over 100 artworks by South Asian artists within a refurbished house turned home gallery. Works are displayed across rooms, hallways, stairways, and terraces, moving away from the traditional white cube model to allow viewers to experience art in a domestic setting. The show spans from the 1950s to 2026, featuring modern masters like Ram Kumar, Jamini Roy, and Rubin Mondal, with each room defined by a distinct color palette and mood.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) will present "Olayami Dabls: Detroit Cosmologies," the first comprehensive museum retrospective for Detroit artist Olayami Dabls, running from April 25 to July 12, 2026. Dabls, who began his career as a curator at the Afro-American Museum in Detroit (now the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History), traces his artistic journey to a transformative moment in the 1970s when he opened a box of African masks that his colleagues feared to handle. This experience led him to investigate how Hollywood and popular culture had demonized African material culture, associating it with horror movies and voodoo, and inspired decades of work as an artist, storyteller, cultural historian, and civic champion.
Staff at the National Building Museum share their favorite children's books in celebration of World Book Day, as part of the exhibition 'Building Stories.' Each staff member selects a book that has influenced their imagination or professional work, ranging from century-old illustrated alphabets like C.B. Falls' 'ABC Book' to contemporary picture books such as Christian Robinson's 'Another' and Tony Hillery's 'Harlem Grown.' The selections highlight how storytelling and the built environment intersect, with books like 'Goodnight Moon,' 'Eloise,' and 'The Snowy Day' offering personal and professional insights.
The National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin is hosting the first-ever exhibition of William Blake's work in Ireland, titled "William Blake: The Age of Romantic Fantasy." The show features major works such as "The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy" (c. 1795) from Tate, and includes a life mask of Blake painted by Francis Bacon, connecting the Romantic visionary to the 20th-century Irish-born artist. The article explores Blake's radical politics, his arrest for sedition in 1803, and his enduring influence on figures like Bacon and the critic David Sylvester.
Compton Verney in Warwickshire is hosting the exhibition 'Bruegel to Rembrandt: Drawing Life, Sketching Wonder,' featuring 50 old master drawings from the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. This marks the first time these works, including pieces by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Rembrandt, and Rubens, have been shown in the UK, offering a rare glimpse into 16th and 17th-century artistic practice through intimate sketches of everyday life.
The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation has announced an exhibition titled "Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World," focusing on the German Expressionist painter Gabriele Münter. The show will explore her distinctive approach to landscape and portraiture, highlighting her role within the Blue Rider movement and her contributions to modern art.
Michael and Bernadette Monroe, an elderly couple with deep roots in the art world, have moved into the Island House senior living community on Mercer Island. They describe the community as positive and stimulating, enjoying local amenities and trips to places like the Frye Art Museum.
The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is presenting the largest retrospective in France in twenty years dedicated to photographer Lee Miller. The exhibition features nearly 250 prints, including previously unseen works, and traces her multifaceted career from model and Surrealist muse to fashion photographer and war correspondent.
The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Gwacheon has unveiled a major reorganization of its permanent collection exhibitions, "Korean Modern and Contemporary Art I & II." The highlight of the refresh is a dedicated "Artist's Room" featuring 43 works by Park Su-geun, including 20 oil paintings and 23 drawings from the 1950s and 1960s. The update also introduces a spotlight on the prodigy Lee In-sung and expands the "Modernist Women Artists" section with newly acquired and rarely seen craft works.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) has reinstalled Ernesto Neto’s monumental site-specific commission, "SunForceOceanLife," in its Cullinan Hall. The immersive installation consists of a massive, hand-woven crochet labyrinth suspended 12 feet in the air, featuring a vibrant color palette that symbolizes the cyclical relationship between the sun, sea, and earth. Visitors are invited to walk through the spiral pathways, which are filled with soft plastic balls designed to challenge their balance and induce a meditative state.
Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios is launching a major exhibition titled "Elizabeth Blackadder: Her Life in Colour" to celebrate the late artist’s 50-year collaboration with the tapestry studio. The show features over 30 tapestries and hand-tufted rugs, headlined by the debut of a newly created rug based on Blackadder’s 1975 painting, "The Red Bouquet." The exhibition also incorporates works from the Royal Scottish Academy’s collection to provide a comprehensive look at her legacy.
The High Museum of Art in Atlanta is hosting a major retrospective titled “Isamu Noguchi: ‘I am not a designer,’” featuring nearly 200 works by the Japanese-American artist. The exhibition highlights Noguchi’s philosophy that art should exist in everyday spaces, showcasing everything from his iconic midcentury furniture and floor lamps to his functional playground designs. Simultaneously, the city is preparing for 'illumine 2026,' an outdoor light-based art exhibition at the Historic Oakland Cemetery that further explores the integration of art into public life.
Theaster Gates has transformed the Smart Museum of Art into a personal sanctuary for his first major solo institutional exhibition in Chicago, titled "Unto Thee." The immersive installation features vast archives from Gates's personal collections, including African artifacts, funerary objects, and a significant vinyl record collection that provides a continuous sonic backdrop to the space. Key works on display include the monumental "Black Still Life #3" and the ongoing series "Walking Prayer," which consists of black books embossed with golden phrases that explore the complexities of Black identity and collective memory.
Abu Dhabi is celebrating World Art Day 2026 with a series of high-profile events centered in the Saadiyat Cultural District, most notably the exhibition "Picasso, the Figure" at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Running until May 31, the show features loans from the Musée National Picasso-Paris and the Musée du Louvre, exploring the artist's lifelong obsession with the human form. The festivities also include documentary screenings, olfactory art experiences, and extensive community workshops at Manarat Al Saadiyat covering ceramics, textiles, and printmaking.