SHOWS TO SEE
New York • Los Angeles • Chicago • Dallas • San Fransisco • Washington DC
Shows to See - S/S 2026
NEW YORK
Glenn Ligon: Late at night, early in the morning, at noon
DATES January 15 – April 11, 2026
VENUE Hauser & Wirth
ADDRESS 443 West 18th Street, New York, NY 10011
ARTIST Glenn Ligon
⚠ Closes April 11 — see this week.
A two-part exhibition of new and historic works on paper, this show extends Ligon's decades-long engagement with language and abstraction through a suite of richly layered compositions meditating on the color blue. In dialogue with James Baldwin — specifically his 1964 introduction to a Beauford Delaney exhibition in Paris, where Baldwin described a light "as blue as the blues when the last light of sun departed" — Ligon's new Blue (for JB) series begins with rubbings made on Japanese Kozo paper placed atop studies for his Stranger paintings, then enlarged as silkscreens onto blue grounds with water applied to let the ink blur and drift. The second gallery presents three decades of printmaking, from Untitled (Four Etchings) (1992), drawing on Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison, to Untitled (Condition Report for Black Rage) (2015). A summation of a practice and a profound meditation on race, language, and the power of atmosphere to carry meaning.
Kwamé Azure Gomez: Set the Atmosphere
DATES March 5 – April 18, 2026
VENUE Marianne Boesky Gallery
ADDRESS 509 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
ARTIST Kwamé Azure Gomez
⚠ Closes April 18
The first solo show with the gallery for Akron-born, New Haven-based painter Kwamé Azure Gomez (b. 1999). Working in continuous layers — painting, wiping back, repeating — Gomez produces dense, atmospheric canvases that use the sensory experiences of Black worship spaces and queer nightlife as a lens for examining the manifold possibilities of identity. Human figures materialize without warning across her sweeping compositions: limbs outstretched, heads thrown back, moving across checkered dance floors, caught in something between ecstasy and dissolution. An MFA from SAIC, a recent NXTHVN residency, and a practice already commanding serious attention — this is an essential introduction to a voice that will matter.
Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination
DATES December 14, 2025 – July 25, 2026
VENUE The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
ADDRESS 11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
FEATURING Jean Depara, Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Sanlé Sory, Kwame Brathwaite, James Barnor, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Samuel Fosso, Silvia Rosi, and others
Organized by MoMA curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo, this exhibition asks a deceptively simple question: can a photographic portrait inspire a political movement? Drawing on the Jean Pigozzi gift of modern and contemporary African art, the show gathers more than 100 works by photographers who documented the energy of Bamako, Bobo-Dioulasso, and Kinshasa at the precise moment decolonization and the American Civil Rights movement were converging. The result is a meditation on Pan-African solidarity as a visual project — one in which the studio portrait, the music scene photograph, and the street image all functioned as instruments of imagination and collective self-definition. The work of Kwame Brathwaite is among the highlights, illuminating Pan-African modes of image-making across the diaspora. Contemporary voices including Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Samuel Fosso anchor the exhibition in the present, making the lineage legible across time.
Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens
DATES October 10, 2025 – May 17, 2026
VENUE Brooklyn Museum
ADDRESS 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
ARTIST Seydou Keïta
The most expansive North American presentation of Keïta's work to date, this exhibition brings together over 280 works — iconic prints, never-before-seen negatives, textiles, jewelry, and personal artifacts — to honor one of the 20th century's preeminent studio photographers. Working in Bamako from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, Keïta collaborated intimately with his sitters, sculpting pose, clothing, and self-presentation into monuments of individual selfhood. When his photographs first reached Western audiences in the early 1990s, they reshaped global conversations about portraiture, authorship, and the visual history of Africa. Guest curator Catherine E. McKinley organized the show in close partnership with Keïta's family, and it has been extended through May — a clear signal of the sustained public hunger for this work.
Deborah Roberts: Consequences of Being
DATES February 12 – April 25, 2026
VENUE The FLAG Art Foundation
ADDRESS 545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10001
ARTIST Deborah Roberts
⚠ Closes April 25
Roberts's first institutional solo exhibition in New York marks an expansion of her practice in two directions: scale and medium. The Austin-based artist's large-format collages, which fragment and reassemble Black children's faces and bodies to destabilize fixed social readings, are joined here for the first time by ceramic sculpture — two busts that ask viewers to see what is too often overlooked. The historical scope of the work has also widened, now encompassing the colonial histories of Germany, the Netherlands, and South Africa alongside the American contexts that have anchored her practice. All exhibitions and programming at FLAG are free and open to the public.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
DATES April 24 – July 31, 2026
VENUE Jack Shainman Gallery
ADDRESS 46 Lafayette Street + 513 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10013 / 10011
ARTIST Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
New work presented simultaneously across both Jack Shainman's Tribeca flagship and Chelsea space. Known for her luminous, psychologically charged portraits of imagined Black subjects — composed in a single sitting from pure invention rather than from life — Yiadom-Boakye works in a compressed timeframe that keeps her paintings alive with immediacy. Her figures occupy ambiguous interior spaces, caught in moments of quiet contemplation, leisure, or gesture that resist fixed narrative. A Turner Prize nominee and subject of a landmark Tate Modern retrospective, her presence at Shainman this summer is one of the season's most anticipated gallery shows.
Arjan Martins: 40° 39′ 40″ N, 73° 56′ 38″ W
DATES April 2 – May 2, 2026
VENUE Olney Gleason
ADDRESS 509 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001
ARTIST Arjan Martins
The landmark first U.S. solo exhibition for Brazilian painter Arjan Martins (b. 1960, Rio de Janeiro), one of the most vital voices in contemporary Brazilian art. For more than three decades Martins has developed a singular pictorial language that uses images from collective memory to conjure a reality that transcends linear time — layering watercolor washes, drawing, and successive applications of acrylic over weeks and months so that warm earth tones remain visible beneath cooler blues and greens, paint handling moving between figurative rendering and near-abstraction within a single canvas.
Sam Gilliam: STITCHED
DATES March 12 – April 25, 2026
VENUE Pace Gallery
ADDRESS 510 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
ARTIST Sam Gilliam
⚠ Closes April 25 — final weeks.
In 1993, Sam Gilliam accepted an artist residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in rural Ireland — only to have his paints barred from shipment for containing flammable petroleum. His solution was characteristically inventive: he painted and stained a large group of monumental loose canvases in his Washington DC studio, folded them up, and shipped them instead. In Ireland, he hired a local seamstress and spent the residency cutting and stitching these pre-painted canvases into entirely new works — a painting residency during which he did no painting. The resulting pieces are three-dimensional wall works and hanging sculptures of colliding geometries and color that defy easy categorization, best understood as Constructivist objects born of improvisation.
LOS ANGELES
Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985
DATES February 24 – June 14, 2026
VENUE The J. Paul Getty Museum
ADDRESS 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90049
FEATURING Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks, Ming Smith, Carrie Mae Weems, Barkley L. Hendricks, Kwame Brathwaite, Betye Saar, Lorna Simpson, and over 100 artists
Co-curated by Philip Brookman and scholar Deborah Willis — director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at NYU's Tisch School — this is the first exhibition to investigate photography's role in the Black Arts Movement as a distinct subject of inquiry. Spanning eight thematic sections and encompassing photography, video, painting, collage, contact sheets, and print media, the show demonstrates how African American and Afro-Atlantic diaspora artists used the image not merely to document but to organize, to build community, and to insist on Black self-representation as a political act. Los Angeles icons including Harry Adams, Charles Gaines, and Bruce Talamon appear alongside canonical figures, giving the exhibition particular resonance in the city where it hangs. Admission is free; timed-entry reservations required.
Destiny Is a Rose: The Eileen Harris Norton Collection
DATES February 24 – August 16, 2026
VENUE Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles
ADDRESS 901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013
FEATURING Mark Bradford, David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Lorraine O'Grady, Betye Saar, Amy Sherald, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Alma Thomas, and others
Marking fifty years since Eileen Harris Norton made her first acquisition — a print purchased directly from Los Angeles artist and African American arts advocate Ruth Waddy in 1976 — this exhibition presents more than 80 works that together reflect one of the most consequential collecting practices in contemporary art. Taking its title from a 1990 painting by Kerry James Marshall, the show is structured in chapters that trace the evolution of Harris Norton's vision: from early acquisitions of Los Angeles-based artists to an expanding international scope, and culminating in a final section devoted to her enduring commitment to artists of African descent, with works by David Hammons, Frank Bowling, Jack Whitten, Noah Davis, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and a radiant abstraction by Alma Thomas. Co-founder with Mark Bradford and Allan DiCastro of Art + Practice in Leimert Park, Harris Norton's collecting is inseparable from her community-building — a model of patronage that ISE-DA members know well and should encounter directly here.
Raymond Saunders: Notes from LA
DATES February 24 – April 25, 2026
VENUE David Zwirner
ADDRESS 616 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90004
ARTIST Raymond Saunders
⚠ Closes April 25 — final weeks.
Curated by Ebony L. Haynes, this is the first exhibition in Los Angeles devoted to Saunders's work in more than a decade and his third solo presentation with David Zwirner — arriving after the artist's death in 2025, at 90. Celebrating Saunders's deep ties to California, where he lived and worked in Oakland for most of his adult life, the show presents paintings and works on paper that embody the material and conceptual concerns of his decades-long practice: assemblage-style canvases beginning with a monochromatic black ground elaborated with white chalk — a reversal of traditional figure-ground and a nod to his decades as a teacher — to which he added expressionistic paint, found objects, signs, and doors from his urban environment. Archival materials from his Oakland studio are displayed in vitrines throughout. Toni Morrison wrote of his work in 1993: "From an environment of the lost, the discarded, Saunders creates another wholly inscribed world of found things." A necessary show.
sister dreamer, lauren halsey's architectural ode to tha surge n splurge of south central los angeles
DATES March 14, 2026 – November 1, 2027
VENUE Corner of Western Avenue and 76th Street, South Central Los Angeles
ADDRESS Western Avenue & 76th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90047
ARTIST Lauren Halsey
Presented by Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) and co-produced and curated by Christine Y. Kim, this is Lauren Halsey's most personal project to date — a permanent outdoor sculpture park and monument to South Central Los Angeles, the neighborhood where her family has lived for generations. Beginning in architecture school, when Halsey rode the bus along Western Avenue and observed its vacant lots, she envisioned what it could hold. What she has built is a site of community, love, and joy: columns, sphinxes, cladding, and structures honoring South Central's businesses, its pageantry, its material culture, its car culture, and a pantheon of both nationally and hyperlocally significant Black leaders. The cladding draws on Egyptian iconography filtered through the visual lexicon of South Central signage — Halsey's own ongoing project of conflating the past and present with aspirations for a transcendent future. The first Black artist to receive the Met Roof Garden Commission (2023), Halsey now builds at the scale of the community itself. Free and open to the public.
DALLAS / FORT WORTH
Dallas Art Fair
DATES April 16–19, 2026 · VIP Preview: April 16 · Public: April 17–19
VENUE Fashion Industry Gallery
ADDRESS 1807 Ross Avenue, Dallas, TX 75201
FEATURING 85 galleries including Galerie Lelong, Nina Johnson, Pencil on Paper Gallery, Erin Cluley Gallery, and others
⚠ Opens April 16 — this week.
Now in its 18th year, the Dallas Art Fair brings together 85 galleries — national and international — in a 74,000-square-foot mid-century modern space at the heart of the Dallas Arts District. Galleries with strong rosters of Black and diasporic artists include Galerie Lelong (New York), Nina Johnson (Miami), Pencil on Paper Gallery, and Erin Cluley Gallery (both Dallas). A VIP preview on April 16 benefits the Dallas Museum of Art, Nasher Sculpture Center, and Dallas Contemporary. The Dallas Art Fair Foundation's acquisition fund has placed more than 75 works into the DMA's permanent collection to date — an important model for the kind of institutional-collector relationship that sustains a field. Tickets from $40.
Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers
DATES March 8 – September 27, 2026
VENUE Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
ADDRESS 3200 Darnell Street, Fort Worth, TX 76107
ARTIST Rashid Johnson
Johnson's largest exhibition to date and his first major museum survey in over a decade, arriving in Fort Worth after its celebrated run at the Guggenheim. Nearly 90 works span three decades of his multidisciplinary practice — black-soap paintings, spray-painted text, mosaic tile assemblages, monumental sculpture, film, and installation. The exhibition takes its title from an Amiri Baraka poem and uses it as an organizing proposition: a space for thinking hard about history, identity, masculinity, parenthood, and self-care. Antoine's Organ — a 28-foot steel structure housing live plants, shea butter, books, and a working piano — anchors one gallery and is activated by live performance on select dates through September. Co-curated by Naomi Beckwith of the Guggenheim and Andrea Karnes of the Modern. Note: The Modern is in Fort Worth, approximately 35 miles west of Dallas — well worth the drive during Art Fair week.
CHICAGO
Firelei Báez
DATES November 15, 2025 – May 31, 2026
VENUE Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
ADDRESS 220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611
ARTIST Firelei Báez
The first mid-career survey of Báez's work in North America spans two decades of paintings, drawings, and large-scale installations that construct entirely new worlds out of the materials of colonial history. Born in the Dominican Republic to a Dominican mother and a Haitian father, Báez has developed a visual language dense with Afro-Caribbean folklore, science fiction, mythology, and architectural intervention — layering bodies, maps, and archival documents to suggest alternate histories and refused erasures. Her immersive installation A Drexcyen Chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways) (2019) occupies an entire gallery at the MCA. With her work now commanding seven-figure sums at auction and representation at Hauser & Wirth, this survey arrives at a critical inflection point in her trajectory. One of the essential shows of the year.
Jess Atieno: Sightlines, Ghosts, and Other Stories of the Impossible
DATES March 26 – July 25, 2026
VENUE Arts + Public Life, Arts Incubator
ADDRESS 301 East Garfield Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60615
ARTIST Jess Atieno
Kenya-born Jess Atieno's first solo show in Chicago marks a significant shift in her practice — from photographic archival work toward sound and sculpture. The exhibition centers on the afterlives of independence-era Brutalist architecture across the African continent: buildings once heralded as symbols of decolonial self-determination, now weathered and transformed. Rather than replicating their forms, Atieno considers architecture as an atmospheric and felt condition, embedding sonic elements into sculptural works made from concrete and materials of replication, with sound operating as presence. A 2023 Arts + Public Life Artist-in-Residence and founder of the Nairobi Print Project, Atieno holds an MFA from SAIC; her work is in the collections of the Rockefeller Collection and the African Arts Trust. Admission is free.
Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas
DATES March 24 – July 5, 2026
VENUE Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago
ADDRESS 5550 South Greenwood Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637
ARTIST Alma Thomas
Organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and drawn from SAAM's extensive holdings, this exhibition offers an intimate view of Thomas's practice during her most prolific period, from 1959 to 1978. Organized around three thematic frames — gardens and nature, outer space, and sound — it illuminates how Thomas built her luminous, mosaic-like abstractions. She closely observed the Apollo Program, listened to music constantly as she worked, and produced her most significant work in her seventies: all of it visible in the finished canvases, which pulse with a distinctive rhythm her peers in the Washington Color School came to call the 'Alma Stripe.' The Smart Museum is always free and open to all.
SAN FRANCISCO
Leilah Babirye: We Have a History
DATES June 22, 2024 – May 3, 2026
VENUE de Young Museum
ADDRESS 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, CA 94118
ARTIST Leilah Babirye
⚠ Closes May 3
The first solo museum show in the United States for Ugandan sculptor Leilah Babirye brings twelve sculptures into direct conversation with the de Young's permanent African art collection. Born in Kampala and based in New York, Babirye is known for her highly expressive, ambiguously gendered sculptures in ceramic, wood, and discarded objects — reclaiming ceramic and wood-carving traditions from western and central Africa. Each figure is named after members of the Bugandan royal clan structure, and the work as a whole functions as a portrait series of her LGBTQ+ community, invoking the history of the openly bisexual 19th-century Bugandan king Mwanga II to push back against the anti-homosexuality legislation that prompted Babirye's departure from Uganda. Her use of discarded street materials is intentional: the Luganda word for a gay person, abasiyazi, means 'sugarcane husk' — the part you throw out. Babirye reclaims this as an act of liberation. This exhibition closes May 3.
WASHINGTON DC
Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen
DATES April 4, 2025 – January 3, 2027
VENUE Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
ADDRESS Independence Avenue & 7th Street SW, Washington, DC 20560
ARTIST Adam Pendleton
Pendleton's first solo exhibition in Washington — and the Hirshhorn's landmark presentation for its 50th anniversary — fills the museum's second-floor inner-ring galleries with nearly 40 new and recent paintings and a debut video work. His paintings, typically composed of two colors on black-gessoed grounds, begin as paper experiments layering drips, spray paint, geometric shapes, and fragmentary text, which Pendleton then photographs and silkscreens back onto canvas — deliberately collapsing the distinction between painting, drawing, and photography. The result is a practice of rigorous abstraction that Pendleton has been defining since 2008 as Black Dada: a framework for exploring the relationship between Blackness, abstraction, and the historical avant-gardes. The companion video, Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?) (2024–25), projects floor-to-ceiling still and moving images of Resurrection City — the 1968 encampment on the National Mall that was the culmination of MLK's Poor People's Campaign — just steps from where it stood. Free admission.
Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art
DATES January 23 – August 23, 2026
VENUE Smithsonian National Museum of African Art
ADDRESS 950 Independence Avenue SW, Washington, DC 20560
FEATURING Zanele Muholi, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Leilah Babirye, Jim Chuchu, Ṣọlá Olúlòde, and others
The largest exhibition on this subject to date — and one that almost didn't happen, having been postponed from a planned WorldPride opening amid the current political climate — Here brings together nearly 60 works by LGBTQ+ artists from across Africa and its diaspora. Co-curated by Kevin D. Dumouchelle and Serubiri Moses, the show is the result of years of close dialogue with artists and their communities, spanning photography, painting, tapestry, collage, sculpture, installation, video, and digital art. The roster is extraordinary: Zanele Muholi, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, and Leilah Babirye alongside artists making their first appearance in an American museum. Worth noting for members who have seen or plan to see Babirye's show at the de Young in San Francisco: the same artist appears here in a very different institutional context and scale. The fact that this show exists at all, in this political moment, is itself significant. Free admission.
