38 New Museum Shows and Biennials to See This Summer

This heady group show features 110 works by an octet of artists considering how abstract painting can communicate three-dimensionality. It’s an international and intergenerational mix led by Miyoko Ito, the 20th-century American painter whose exquisite canvases regularly featured orange forms that appeared to hover over flattened backgrounds. Her work will be presented alongside younger inheritors to her, including Gerda Scheepers, a South African painter who portrays bodily forms that move in and out of focus.

Through August 24

The Philippines is experiencing a big shake-up: its former President, Rodrigo Duterte, was arrested in March and is currently facing charges of crimes against humanity, though he may soon become mayor of his hometown of Davao, anyway. As the country reassesses its current state, this venerable Manila art museum is looking to a quotation from philosopher Boris Groys about rupture and uncertainty. While the upcoming show does not explicitly reference the Duterte era, the 13 artists included, all with connections to the Philippines, have used multiple medius to reflect on the country’s current unpredictable moment.

Through August 4

In 2015, the Tate Modern exhibition “The World Goes Pop” proved that the Pop art movement wasn’t merely a phenomenon limited to the US and Britain. The long tail of that show is evident in this expansive survey about how commercial branding, mass-reproduced images, and a contempt for capitalism were seen widely in experimental Brazilian art during the 1960s. The 100 artists featured here traverse many mediums, styles, and conceptual concerns. Paintings by Wanda Pimentel, an artist known for portraying female forms in flashy colors, will appear alongside pieces by Nelson Leirner and Carmelo Gross, who showed silkscreened flags in public spaces.

Through October 5

There’s a growing understanding that there was not one modernism but many different modernisms, each happening at their own pace across the globe. Now, the Gulf region, known as the Khaleej in Arabic, will take stock of its own strand with this survey, which charts how artists in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates collectively determined a modern aesthetic. That aesthetic was itself hardly singular: the offerings range here from representative works of the Hurufiyya movement, which derived abstraction from Islamic calligraphy, to paintings by Ibrahim Ismail, who spun scenes of daily life in his native Kuwait into prismatic tableaux formed from blasts of color.

Through October 15

Much like her brother Marcel, Suzanne Duchamp produced art that looks just as confusing now as it did when she first made it around a century ago. Many of her paintings depict pieces of machinery alongside bizarre accumulations of words that do little to contextualize the gears nearby. Her paintings look a bit like Cubism pushed to its limits or misprinted advertisements, but whichever way you view them, they never quite make sense—which was entirely Duchamp’s intention, given that she wanted to defy logic and reason, just as her other Dada colleagues did. This show, billed as her first-ever retrospective, aims to situate her as one of that movement’s most ambitious figures.

June 6–September 7

Sherrie Levine’s early output has often been boiled down to her appropriations of Great Depression–era images by Walker Evans, Edward Weston, and others, whose pictures she re-photographed and put forward as her own. These works made her one of the primary artists of the Pictures Generation, a group of New York–based artists who used photography to question authorship during the late ’70s and early ’80s. But Levine worked in a diverse array of modes during this era—and even experimented in painting, producing works such as her “Knot Paintings,” for which she blanked out the whorls of wood sheets using casein. Those paintings and many others figure in this survey, Levine’s first major museum show in the US since her 2011 Whitney Museum retrospective.

June 6–September 29

It’s been seven years since the Liverpool Biennial, one of the UK’s top recurring art shows, was organized by someone based in the British city, and that’s why this edition, organized by Marie-Anne McQuay, ought to contain a distinctly local flavor. Her exhibition, titled “BEDROCK,” responds to the sediments of history that build up slowly and over time, and will feature some 30 artists responding to that theme, including Christine Sun Kim, Cevdet Erek, Mounir Al Solh, and Widline Cadet.

June 7–September 14

Industry and geopolitics used to be topics more frequently discussed in embassies than in museums, but those economic matters have gradually become common subjects in knotty conceptual artworks seen widely in biennials these days. Curator Nav Haq takes stock of the trend in this heady group show, which he has said will expose the “poetic” side of geopolitics. Joining rising stars such as Tekla Aslanishvili and Jean Katambayi Mukendi is the Palestinian collective The Question of Funding, which will exhibit works about Dayra, a currency on the blockchain that aspires to create “a community-governed economic system,” per its description.

June 13–September 21

The summer’s most unusual museum show is set not within the galleries but in the Centre Pompidou’s vast, beloved library, one floor of which will be filled with Wolfgang Tillmans’s pictures. Tillmans’s show will include an array of his pictures across the years: funky shots of German youngsters, off-kilter still lifes, photographs of protests, and more. But the show is not designed as a survey, so one cannot use it to trace the arc of Tillmans’s rich career, and according to the Pompidou, it will not resemble a traditional museum show at all. It’s the last big exhibition being done by the Pompidou ahead of a five-year-long closure required for a renovation.

June 13–September 22

While Sam Gilliam is usually classified as one of the primary figures of the Washington, D.C. art scene, this show suggests that Ireland played an equal role in shaping his approach to abstraction. The show is rooted in his residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in County Mayo during the early 1990s, a period when Gilliam began producing sewn works that hung from the wall. Their undulating surfaces could be seen either as a response to the waves of the nearby Atlantic Ocean or as a means of re-translating his painted “Drape” pieces of the 1960s, some of which will also be featured in this show.

June 13–January 25

Five years ago, Berliner Zeitung reported that some 2,000 foxes lived within the city limits of Berlin. Even though the city’s official wildlife expert noted that they had “adapted quite well to city life,” the foxes have still been treated as invaders—which may explain why curator Zasha Colah has taken them as the jumping-off point for her Berlin Biennale, a show about who, or what, counts an outsider. No artist list has been released yet for her show, which she has said will “be wary of identity-labels that draw circles around minorities,” a common tendency at international biennials such as this one. Given that the Berlin Biennale has a reputation for being forward-thinking, this show may be a sign of which way the wind is blowing in that regard.

June 14–September 14

Though hardly forgotten in the history of Impressionism, Camille Pissarro is sometimes not ranked among the movement’s greats outside France: a recent New Yorker article bore a headline that suggested he went from “mediocrity to magnificence,” and he has certainly been awarded fewer blockbuster shows than, say, Monet. His international reputation may start to change this summer with this retrospective, which centers Pissarro as one of his day’s most radical innovators—and not only on account of his anarchist politics. The 100 works featured here show how Pissarro helped set painting on a new course with streetscapes and pastoral scenes that dissemble into multihued strokes, encapsulating the world not as it was seen but as it was felt. No wonder he proved so influential for Seurat, Signac, and many who followed.

June 14–September 28

Recent large-scale surveys at Tate Britain and Tate Modern have added legions of women artists to British art history, a project that will be continued by this show, whose focus is a discrete period in which gender roles were the subject of mainstream discussion in England, both at home and in public. Accordingly, the show surveys 25 artists whose work bore witness to the upheaval of both World Wars and repeated demands for suffrage. But the show may be most interesting for its stated focus on lesbian artists. One of them, Nan Hudson, repeatedly painted brushy portraits of her partner, the artist Ethel Sands, effectively ensuring that their relationship was written into the art historical record.

June 14–September 14

Retrospectives tend to follow major career achievements, and so it would make sense that Anna Maria Maiolino would have one after having taken home a lifetime achievement award last year from the Venice Biennale, where she showed a tremendous installation filled with strips of clay. But the Italian-born Brazilian artist has stated that her 100-work Musée Picasso show is not a retrospective but something else entirely. Those works act as a guide to her decades-long interest in bodily liberation and political freedom, topics she has explored in sculptures, prints, and conceptual artworks.

June 14–September 21

To date, Vija Celmins has produced just 220 paintings, something perhaps attributable to her exacting, labor-intensive aesthetic. Having begun in the ’60s with grayish paintings of lamps, heaters, and other consumer objects, she has since moved on to images of starry night skies and gently disturbed bodies of water, each rendered with such detail that they appear photographic. She’s interested in why we desire images that purport to be real or authentic—and in looking at what happens when our sense of vision misleads us. Expect your eye to be given a workout, then, in this survey, featuring 90 of her paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints.

June 15–September 21

Just about any show staged by the Muzeum Susch is worthy of note, given that this museum has repeatedly afforded under-known European women due attention in the form of in-depth retrospectives. That’s why this Jadwiga Maziarska exhibition merits a look, even though her name is hardly a household one outside her native Poland. During the postwar era, Maziarska innovatively used collage, textile, and painting to consider how one’s identity is assembled. Much of the work was highly experimental, and therefore flew in the face of the state’s taste for social realism. Now, it is being given a chance at canonization. Barbara Piwowarska, an art historian who previously organized other shows of Maziarska’s work, has returned to the artist once more for this retrospective, which she co-curated with Rhea Anastas, a founder of New York’s legendary Orchard gallery.

June 15–November 2

The number of works in a show is only sometimes telling, but in the case of this epic survey, the fact that its checklist is so long, with more than 300 works on it, is partly the point. The exhibition aims to stump for the outsize importance of art-making in Yirrkala, a small Australian town populated largely by members of the Aboriginal Yolŋu peoples. The works span many mediums, from prints to paintings, and contain a variety of conceptual concerns, but all the pieces are bound by an interest in what curator Cara Pinchbeck has called “cultural diplomacy,” or “a respectful assertion of power.” Among those featured will be Djambawa Marawili, a leader of the Madarrpa clan who has painted sacred designs to suggest an intimate connection between his people and the land and sea they hold dear.

June 21–October 6

When it comes to history, facts are facts, and what happened, happened. But Stan Douglas’s video installations don’t view the historical record as being set in stone. He frequently reconstructs the events of the past, then amends their details—as in the case of Luanda-Kinshasa (2013), his famed six-hour piece featuring a remade 1970s-era version of New York’s Columbia 30th Street Studio as inhabited by the members of a made-up band. That work will appear in Douglas’s first-ever US survey, which fittingly burrows deep into film history and modifies it. The show will culminate in a new work that takes up D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, whose racist depiction of an encounter between a white woman and a Black Union soldier Douglas dissembles and then restages, with the original 1915 footage running alongside his newly produced images.

June 21–November 30

Deservedly, Lubaina Himid has gained acclaim for her art, which won her the Turner Prize in 2017. But her curating, an equally important part of her practice, remains less widely known, something that may change with this exhibition surveying some of her shows. A few of those exhibitions have even acquired legendary status within the British art world: “The Thin Black Line,” the 1985 ICA show that lent this survey its name, helped put Black women artists based in England on the radar of mainstream critics.

June 24–September 7

When most artists have surveys, they typically don’t alter old works before returning them to view. Not so for Barbara Kruger, whose practice has involved repeatedly revisiting and re-editing old photographic and video projections every time they are shown. For that reason, her Guggenheim Bilbao survey is likely to feature fresh versions of beloved pieces that pair text with images in a way that suggests advertising, without any objects peddled in the process. Her art is about how anyone and anything can be commodified; no surprise her work has enjoyed mass consumption, its popularity extending far beyond the art world.

June 24–November 9

Earlier this month, New York’s Guggenheim Museum put on view a famed 1988 Faith Ringgold quilt showing a family dining on a Harlem rooftop while a little girl soars through the air above. It’s a work related to her 1991 children’s book Tar Beach, and though the museum has owned the quilt for 35 years, it did not show it until now. This is itself revealing: it suggests that museums have not always treated Ringgold’s award-winning children’s books and her related art as being as serious as her figurative paintings, which forcefully took up racism and misogyny. And now, here comes an exhibition looking to change all that, with some 100 works showing how and why Ringgold picked children as one of her main audiences.

June 27–October 12

Three years after organizing a well-regarded edition of the Venice Biennale, the imaginative curator Cecilia Alemani returns with another high-profile biennial. Her SITE Santa Fe is appropriately themed around the very notion of the American Southwest, with 20 figures from the region forming the core focus of this sprawling show. The exhibition is steeped in Santa Fe lore, reaching back to the recent past with under-sung figures like Helen Cordero, whose clay figures embodied elements of Pueblo culture. Alongside her will be internationally known artists such as Saodat Ismailova, Mire Lee, Ali Cherri, and Amol K. Patil.

June 27–January 12

In the traditional telling of 20th-century art history, nearly all the aesthetic convulsions of the modern era were initiated by Western Europeans. That’s why this sprawling show, with its focus on the cities of Guangzhou and Hong Kong, looks to add a significant chapter to the canon. The exhibition surveys a pivotal period, charting how painters such as Guan Shanyue revised tradition and photographers such as Sha Fei helped create a new national image. The exhibition suggests that all these artists did a lot to unsettle Chinese art history—and that the aftershocks of their experimentation are still being felt today. To underscore the point, M+ has brought on self-taught artist Dai Guangyu to remake a 29-and-a-half-foot-long landscape painting from 1959 by Guan and Fu Baoshi.

June 28–October 5

Few New York painters of the postwar era produced art as weird as that of Harold Stevenson, whose masterpiece, The New Adam (1962), is a 40-foot-long painting of a male nude claustrophobically squashed into his wide canvases. The painting could be related to traditional styles such as Mannerism or to a growing interest in figuration among the avant-garde of his day, but both assertions defang Stevenson’s art, which sought to envision new bodies for a new era. Unsurprisingly, Stevenson has proven hard for scholars to classify, which is why this show—the late artist’s first New York museum exhibition, remarkably—ranks among the season’s most exciting offerings.

June 28–October 26

With this show, Fiona Tan becomes the first artist to curate a show at the Rijksmuseum in its 227-year history. But rather than a conventional survey or even a solo exhibition, Tan is cooking up something less traditional: an exploration of the birth of modern psychiatry during the 19th century as charted through objects belonging to the Rijksmuseum, works on loan (including a Théodore Géricault painting from a Belgian museum), and a new video installation by Tan that aspires to reorient its viewer’s sense of perception. The exhibition, Tan has said, will be guided by one mystifying question: “To what extent is it possible to see from the outside of a person what is happening on the inside?”

July 4–September 14

Even in a Venice Biennale stuffed with more than 300 artists, Santiago Yahuarcani, a leader of the Aimeni clan of the Uitoto people in Peru, stood out. His paintings, done on llanchama bark and featuring cosmologies rife with animals that dance and soar, were unforgettable when they appeared in the Arsenale, and they will be tough to shake here, in his first international survey, featuring around 25 of his grandly scaled images and staged as part of the Manchester International Festival.

July 4–January 4

Life’s a stage in the whimsical, off-kilter work of Liliana Porter, an Argentina-born artist now based in New York who is known best for her installations composed of tiny trinkets. Her tableaux formed from tchotchkes and figurines often appear to tell stories, just as actors in a theatrical production might, except that here, they are small, with their viewers allowed to tower over them. Porter has repeatedly pondered what those shifts in scale do to one’s vision, something she began exploring in prints and photographic works during the 1960s and has continued more recently in performance art. Fittingly, this retrospective in her hometown appears not just in MALBA’s galleries but also in its theater.

July 12–October 13

Mavis Pusey, a painter who died in 2019, was the unlikely star of last year’s Whitney Biennial, which featured one of her canvases showing shuttered windows beneath unevenly placed pieces of plywood. Made in response to the impoverished neighborhoods that the Jamaican-born artist saw firsthand in New York, the painting evinces an interest in dispossession and opacity, themes that currently interest a host of younger artists today. Pusey’s rich art—both her abstract paintings and her semi-figurative ones—is finally the subject of the survey it has long deserved with this 60-work show, featuring long-unseen pieces that have recently been restored.

July 12–December 7

Ojibwe painter George Morrison has been marginalized within the history of postwar abstraction in New York, but there are abundant signs he’s finally moved inward: the National Gallery of Art acquired a painting by him in 2020, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum recently hung his work alongside pieces by Joan Mitchell and Clyfford Still. Now, the Met is shining a light on his early-career period with this small but significant show, which explores how New York’s urban landscape informed his mosaic-like abstractions made from interlocking planes of color.

July 17–May 31

By the time she died at age 64 in 2022, Brigitte Kowanz had already ranked among the most famous contemporary Austrian artists, with her sculptures reliant upon neon lighting tubes appearing in many of Vienna’s top museums. Until now, however, there has never been a comprehensive retrospective to see the full range of her sculptures. Often made using mirrored glass and set within darkened rooms, her sculptures pondered an array of ideas: methods of communications (she innovatively turned Morse code into dots and dashes of light), the connections between people and their surroundings, and the limits of vision.

July 18–November 9

“I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure,” said Jean Dubuffet, a painter who often imitated the naïve stylings of art done by kids. As this survey shows, a range of artists have one-upped Dubuffet and enlisted children as their collaborators. Reprising ideas mined in a Turbine Hall project for Tate Modern last year, Ei Arakawa-Nash will have children scrawl directly onto the Haus der Kunst’s floor, while Koo Jeong A is making what’s described as a “skateable sculpture.” Meanhwile, Agus Nur Amal PMTOH is intriguingly seeking small toys for a work of his own. Also presented here will be works by Rachel Rose, Basim Magdy, Ernesto Neto, and more.

July 18–February 1

Pipilotti Rist has covered gigantic walls, expansive gallery spaces, and entire facades in vast video projections that typically feature gloriously colored bodies and woozy shots of nature. Her approach has made bodies feel expansive, underscoring that the notion that the external environment is intimately related to what takes place in one’s insides. Her bodies will grow ever more expansive with a new commission for this exhibition, which will set a newly commissioned work within the UCCA’s 107,000-square-foot Great Hall.

July 19–October 19

Liz Collins was a star of prior iterations of the traveling survey “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” which formerly featured a dress formed from a worn-down American flag whose shreds have been sewn back together. (That work, made with Gary Graham, is sadly not in the current MoMA version of this show, though others Collins pieces are.) It’s a piece that neatly encapsulates Collins’s practice, which has shown how weaving can be a form of care, with stitches acting as metaphors for healing, specifically in feminist and queer contexts. Though her work has sometimes been considered craft, and not art, in some circles, this has finally begun to change—as evidenced by this retrospective and her recent inclusion in last year’s Venice Biennale.

July 19–January 11

Whereas most painters stick to abstraction, figuration, or some mixture of the two for the whole of their career, Janet Dawson dabbled in multiple modes, beginning with hard-edge forms in the 1960s before veering toward realism. Within Australia, she remains best known for winning the Archibald Prize, an esteemed award for portraiture, in 1973 with a picture of her husband—not for the abstractions that initially gained her fame in her home country. The 90-year-old artist’s first-ever retrospective will provide an opportunity to see her oeuvre in all its complexity.

July 19–January 18

Many of Andy Goldsworthy’s most memorable works have taken the form of site-specific interventions set within the natural landscape: long fences made from gently balanced rocks, a home-like dwelling situated into hills, and trees outlined in differently colored leaves. What does Goldworthy’s art look like when it’s surveyed in blockbuster form and set within museum walls? An answer will arrive with this 200-work retrospective for Goldsworthy, widely considered to be a pioneer of Land art.

July 26–November 2

Lee ShinJa’s weavings are so glorious that it’s easy to forget she never even studied her chosen medium: the Korean artist trained as a painter before resorting to recycled fabrics and clothes during a time of scarcity in the postwar era. She has gone on to weave unforgettable abstractions, some featuring recognizable images of the seaside county of Uljin, where she was raised, and though these works were initially disparaged by some reigning Korean critics, they have now been fully embraced in her home country. The US will now get its chance to survey Lee’s work, which lured fiber into the field of art long before that was common practice in Korea.

August 6–February 1

Between 1970 and 2021, the year he died, Kim Tschang-yeul repeatedly painted images of water droplets that appear above monochrome backgrounds, with highly naturalistic shadowing to create the illusion of three-dimensionality. Kim said he was looking to visualize “nothingness” with these works, which became his calling card. But this retrospective’s value will lie in its ability to chart how Kim arrived at that “nothingness,” working first in a style that more closely recalled the Art Informel tendency.

August 22–January 4

Portia Zvavahera’s hallucinatory canvases flit between this world and other ones that can only be imagined—ones that involve human-like animals, figures garbed in flowy dresses, and large wings that float disembodied. Her paintings are partly inspired by her dreams, partly by her Christian Pentecostal upbringing, and partly by the textiles of Zimbabwe, where she was born and is still based. Having captured the attention of critics in locales ranging from South Africa to Venice, Zvavahera will here debut new works in her first US museum outing.

August 28–January 25