How to Feel the Benefits of Art, According to Psychologists https://ift.tt/MSt4KZN

It’s true: Art is good for you.

A flurry of recent research has shown that viewing art can be beneficial for your physical and mental health, and several projects have been launched to delve deeper into how art improves wellbeing.

Psychologically speaking, engaging with art has been shown to alleviate symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress as well as boost cognitive functioning and social skills. If this is the case, then how can we get the most out of these benefits?

“There is no optimal or ‘correct’ way to view art or to feel or respond to a particular artwork. How you respond is unique to you and your feelings, thoughts, and actions,” said Dr. Matthew Pelowski, an associate professor in Psychology of Cognitive and Neuroaesthetics at the University of Vienna. “But, rest assured that, at rather basic psychological and physiological levels, the broad strokes of your reaction are probably shared by many others.”

Dr. Pelowski founded the ART*IS Lab in 2020 to explore “art’s potential as a transformative agent in impacting our beliefs, our behaviors, health, and our bodies”.

Encounter at the museum, 2025
Danny Leyland
CHOI&CHOI

Viewing art has also been shown to alleviate symptoms of progressive neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s. This is the particular focus of the Art Inquiry Lab at the Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands. “We are co-designing a receptive arts engagement program together with people living with Parkinson’s disease, artistic coaches, and museum partners, including the Rijksmuseum,” said Dr. Blanca T.M. Spee, head of the lab.

Dr. Ralf Cox, a professor of Psychology and Development of Aesthetics and Art Experiences at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, is part of the Interface for Measuring the Experience and Meaning of Art (iMEMA) research group. iMEMA has an interesting approach that includes digital tools and techniques to measure artistic experiences as well as the viewing of new media and digital art in its research. “Experiencing art is a fundamentally embodied and affective (and also social) sense-making process. Artworks are invitations for ‘engaging with’ and for ‘attuning to,’” he said. “They allow you to experience with the head, the heart, and the whole body.”

Here, the three psychologists offer up their tips on how best to approach art to help heal your mind and engage deeply.

1. Start by exploring what you see and feel

Looking at Looking #2, 2007
Max Hirshfeld
Hemphill Artworks

Before you try to interpret an artwork, you should begin with close observation, advises Dr. Spee. “Notice its visual elements: lines, colors, shapes, textures, and composition,” she said. “Then turn inward: what emotional or bodily response does the work evoke?”

In the field, this practice is known as perceptual and affective processing, which allows your experience to emerge from the direct encounter with an artwork rather than from prior knowledge.

“This makes the experience more grounded, personal, and open-ended,” Dr. Spee added. In this light, it’s worth reading the press release or exhibition text after engaging with the art rather than before.

2. Think about the meaning of the artwork

Thinking 2, 2021
Anna Navasardian
Ethan Cohen Gallery

Thinking it Over, 1981
William Stanisich
Andra Norris Gallery

After exploring your own response, it’s time to think about what the artist might be trying to express in the work, Dr. Spee told Artsy. Some of the questions she recommends asking are:

• How do the visual elements contribute to the expressiveness of the work?
• What themes, ideas, or contexts might be present in the artwork?
• What visual perspectives does the artist highlight by using different light variations or colors?

“A rich aesthetic experience often emerges from this back-and-forth: between personal meaning-making and interpretation,” Dr. Spee said. “Your associations—whether rooted in memory, emotion, or lived experience—remain central, while also opening space to engage with the artist’s intention.”

3. Consider how you move with the artwork

Untitled, 2025 Oil on canvas 9 x 12 in.
Elizabeth Tremante
Spinello Projects

You’ve likely never thought about how you move in front of an artwork while you’re viewing it, but Dr. Cox said this is an important part of our experience. “I’m not just talking about the large movements you make while walking through a museum or exhibition hall, or while circling around a sculpture, but also about the head movements and eye movements you make while scanning the work,” he said.

According to theoretical arguments and exploratory empirical research, the movements you make while you stand in front of a work—no matter how tiny—say a lot about how attuned you are to it and reflect your deepest emotions. “Likewise, allow yourself to be moved by movement,” Dr. Cox said. “Movement depicted in, or suggested by, the artwork—expressive, like in an abstract work, and representational, like in a figurative work—elicits movement in the viewer.”

In this sense, viewing visual art is not “fundamentally different from art forms like music and dance,” he said. Don’t feel compelled to stand still while you’re looking at art, and be mindful about what your movements may tell you about your response to a work.

4. Experience art with others—if you can

The Gatekeeper, 2025
Elizabeth Tremante
Spinello Projects

Dr. Cox says that viewing art with other people can add to our personal experience. “This kind of sharing emphasizes the experiential part of viewing art rather than the meaning of a work or the artist’s message,” he said. “I think people should embrace the unconscious, uncontrolled, and nonverbal layers of the shared experience.”

Much of this, he says, is expressed through “mechanisms of synchronization at various levels,” meaning that people viewing art together often share similar bodily movements, heart rate, brain activity, and more.

While it’s impossible to track your brain activity without scientific equipment, you can take notice of whether your movements mirror those of the person you’re experiencing art with. Try to discern what emotions those around you are expressing through nonverbal cues like gestures, movement, and stance. Are their visible reactions affecting your own?

5. Talk about your experiences with an artwork

Wyoming Conversation, 2025
Frank Hyder
Ethan Cohen Gallery

If you can’t share the viewing experience with someone else in the moment, then another way to deepen your engagement with art is to discuss it later. “If you had a particular response to an artwork that you think was important, meaningful, or even weird and disconcerting, talk about it with others,” Dr. Pelowski said.

You can talk about all of the things we’ve mentioned above: the environment the work was in (whether the space itself it was busy or quiet, or the exhibition it may have been a part of); your overall impression of the work; particular details in the piece that caught your attention; and what you gleaned about the artist or artwork from the labels or catalogue; the other people who were around you at the time.

The person you’re discussing the work with may have seen it before, but in an entirely different setting, or have learned different facts about it since, which can add further perspective to your own experience.

6. Try to view artworks multiple times

Vermeer: Young Woman Seated at a Virginal/Rijksmuseum, 2025
Joe Fig
Cristin Tierney

Dr. Pelowski also notes that our responses to a particular work are bound to a specific moment: they are unique to us as individuals but also to our ever-changing situations.

As a result, multiple visits might elicit different feelings. “If you come back tomorrow, get more or less sleep, see some other things before your visit, or change as a person, you might have a different reaction,” he said.

Be aware of your own feelings outside of the art experience: Are you tired, upset, relaxed, stressed, or ill? Has recent local or world news thrown a new perspective on an artwork or your experience of going to a museum (think about COVID, for example)?

Consider whether any of these may have affected your reaction to the artworks that you liked or didn’t like. Make a (mental or physical) note of your experience of a work on different occasions—have external factors changed your perception of a work, or have you changed as a person since your last visit (grown older, changed jobs, moved to a new place, become a parent, etc.)?

Or are the overall feelings you experienced persistent over time? “Seeking out the different ways that different artworks and different moments make us feel is one of the great joys of lifelong art engagements,” said Dr. Pelowski.

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Inside LACMA’s 2026 Reopening: What to Know About the New David Geffen Galleries https://ift.tt/qmVYeur

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will reopen its new David Geffen Galleries on April 19, 2026, marking a major turning point for the largest museum in the Western United States. The opening will cap nearly 20 years of collaboration between Pritzker Prize–winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor and LACMA’s director, Michael Govan.

For visitors, the reopening promises a radically different museum experience: a new building elevated above the street, 26 galleries arranged on a single level, and a reinstallation of its extensive permanent collection designed to encourage movement across cultures and time periods rather than along a fixed chronological route.

What is the new LACMA building?

The new building, titled the David Geffen Galleries, is a 100,000-square-foot glass-and-concrete exhibition space that stretches around 900 feet across Wilshire Boulevard on Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile.

Elevated above ground on concrete supports, it reshapes LACMA’s physical footprint and how visitors move through the campus.

Rather than organizing galleries across multiple levels or wings, the new museum places its 26 galleries on a single floor. That layout is meant to flatten traditional hierarchies in museum display and allow visitors to make their own path through the collection. Works are grouped in relation to major bodies of water—the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans, as well as the Mediterranean Sea—rather than according to a strictly Western timeline.

The building also reorganizes the campus at ground level. LACMA’s education spaces, bookshop, dining areas, and a 300-seat auditorium sit below the elevated galleries, while nearly four acres of outdoor public space open around the structure.

When does LACMA reopen?

LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries officially open on April 19, 2026. That date marks the public reopening of the new building after a series of preview events, including an opening gala on April 16th.

The museum’s rollout extends beyond opening day. Members and donors will be able to see the inaugural installation from April 19th through May 3rd. After that, access expands to NexGenLA, the museum’s youth membership program for Los Angeles County residents. On April 22nd, Michael Govan and Peter Zumthor are scheduled to discuss the new building in a public conversation at LACMA’s East West Bank Commons. The museum brings its public program into high gear on June 20th, when Los Angeles gallerist Jeffrey Deitch runs his legendary Art Parade featuring artists, performers, and musicians on Wilshire Boulevard.

Perhaps most exciting to visitors and 10 million locals, though, is the opening of the Metro’s Wilshire/Fairfax station. One of three new subway stations on Wilshire Boulevard on the city’s Metro D (Purple) line, it opens on May 8th.

Who designed the new museum?

The David Geffen Galleries were designed by Peter Zumthor, the Pritzker Prize–winning Swiss architect known for stark, spare buildings that emphasize light, material, and contemplation. Though Zumthor lived in Los Angeles and briefly taught at Southern California’s SCI-Arc in the 1980s, this is his first completed building in the United States.

Zumthor is best known for projects including the Kolumba Kunstmuseum in Cologne, the Bruder Klaus Field Chapel in Germany, the Therme Vals baths in Switzerland, Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, and the 2011 Serpentine Pavilion in London. Across those projects, his designs often create a distinctly worshipful architecture for reflection and contemplation in filtered light and shadows that frame the world just outside them.

At LACMA, that approach manifests in a building defined by glass, concrete, and a strong horizontal form. The final design uses sand-colored concrete, a choice made in part to reduce cooling costs, and its shape responds partly to the neighboring La Brea Tar Pits landscape. Solar panels cover the roof, while the gallery level hovers above the street, creating a distinctive structure that is both monumental and unusually open.

What are the new LACMA commissions?

The reopening will include several new commissions and installations made for or highlighted by the new galleries. Among the artists with newly commissioned works are Todd Gray, Lauren Halsey, Do Ho Suh, and Diana Thater, each bringing a distinct approach to scale, space, and site.

The inaugural presentation will also feature major works from LACMA’s permanent collection and recent acquisitions, including Georges de la Tour’s The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame (1640), Henri Matisse’s La Gerbe (1953), Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969), Vincent van Gogh’s Tarascon Stagecoach (1888), and Diego Rivera’s Flower Day (Día de flores) (1925).

Outside, the reconfigured campus introduces a sculpture display across nearly four acres of public space. That includes Alexander Calder’s Three Quintains (Hello Girls) (1964), originally commissioned for LACMA’s Wilshire Boulevard expansion in 1965, alongside works by Tony Smith, Auguste Rodin, Liz Glynn, Shio Kusaka, and Jeff Koons’s Split-Rocker (2000).

Together, these installations connect the museum’s architecture to the outdoor public realm, making the reopening as much about the campus as about the galleries themselves.

Why has LACMA’s redevelopment been controversial?

LACMA’s redevelopment has been debated almost since the project was announced. Critics objected to the demolition of older museum buildings and raised questions about whether the new design would reduce exhibition space rather than expand it. Others focused on the project’s cost, debt, and the move of replacing a more traditional museum campus with a single elevated structure.

Those concerns coalesced in Save LACMA™, a nonprofit formed in 2020 to oppose the plan. Full-page advertisements appeared in major newspapers, including the New York Times and L.A. Times. Some critics took issue with the design, and others have argued that the project sacrificed institutional memory and architectural range for a building they saw as too idiosyncratic.

At the same time, supporters argued that the plan offered a more flexible, contemporary way to display art and a more public-facing museum campus. Over time, revisions to the design and the promise of a more open, accessible site helped soften some of the backlash, even if the project remains divisive.

What LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries mean for LA’s cultural scene

The reopening of LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries will reshape not just one museum but a key stretch of Los Angeles’s cultural geography. Positioned on Museum Row alongside the La Brea Tar Pits, the Academy Museum, the Petersen Automotive Museum, and Craft Contemporary, LACMA’s new building reinforces the area as one of the city’s most important cultural corridors.

It also arrives at a moment when Los Angeles is rethinking how people move through the city. With the opening of the Wilshire/Fairfax Metro station, LACMA becomes more accessible by public transportation in a city long defined by car travel. That matters for a museum that receives close to 1 million visitors annually and serves a large local public as well as international tourists.

More broadly, the project signals both the ambition and the risk of major museum redevelopments today. LACMA’s new building is an attempt to rethink what an encyclopedic museum can look like, how its collection can be organized, and how its campus can function as civic space. Whether visitors see it as a bold correction or a controversial compromise, its reopening will shape conversations about museums in Los Angeles and beyond.

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Marcel Duchamp readymades show to inaugurate new Gagosian Upper East Side gallery. https://ift.tt/EKnxqQj

Mega gallery Gagosian has announced that the first exhibition in its new Upper East Side space will be dedicated to the storied French artist Marcel Duchamp.

The show brings together all of the Dada pioneers’ most celebrated readymades, and will run from April 25 through June 27 at their new gallery on 980 Madison Avenue. It runs concurrent to the Museum of Modern Art’s survey of the artist, which opened last week, marking Duchamp’s first retrospective in the United States in more than 50 years.

The move to inaugurate the space with a survey of Duchamp’s readymades holds significant historic value, as it is the very same building where the editions were first shown in New York in 1965. At the time, Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery showed in the space. The pieces in Gagosian’s show were produced in 1964 by Duchamp in collaboration with Italian gallerist Arturo Schwarz.

Many of the originals were produced in the 1910s but had been lost or destroyed in years past, including Fountain (1964, after 1917 lost original), L.H.O.O.Q. (1964, after 1919 original), Porte-bouteilles (Bottle Dryer) (1964, after 1914 lost original), and Boîte-en-valise (1935–49; contents 1935–41). Also included in the show is Roue de bicyclette (Bicycle Wheel) (1964, after 1913 lost original), which is the only surviving example of these works that does not belong to a major international institution.

“It all started with Duchamp, I couldn’t imagine a better artist or a more critical body of work to be the first exhibited in our new gallery at 980 Madison, a building he showed in just over sixty years ago,” shared gallery founder Larry Gagosian in a press statement.

Gagosian’s new ground-floor space at 980 Madison Avenue is a stone’s throw from the gallery’s former Upper East Side exhibition space and headquarters upstairs, which they vacated last April, after Bloomberg Philanthropies bought out the building in 2024.

With the new gallery, however, Gagosian was able to stay in the building by securing a ground-floor lease, thus keeping the same address that has been their flagship for the last 35 years.

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How Entertainment Exec Hassan Smith Built an Art Collection Championing Black Artists https://ift.tt/EiPW16U

The first thing visitors to Hassan Smith’s home notice is the Jean-Michel Basquiat–style crown beneath their feet.

The doormat of Smith’s North Atlanta home signals what awaits inside: a house where art is not just displayed, but lived with. Works from Gordon Parks’s iconic “Harlem” series line the hall outside his children’s bedrooms; in the kitchen, a small Rembrandt drawing, Canal with a Large Boat and a Bridge (1650), presides over the breakfast table. Smith, an entertainment executive best known as the senior advisor for John Legend and the founder of private equity firm Ellaby Holdings LLC, has built a collection steeped in cultural history that balances the canonical with the personal.

Smith sees his collection as a long-term investment, but not in purely market terms. He invests in people and perspectives. “I collect for legacy,” he told me in his home office, where photos of Smith with the likes of President Barack Obama sit on the bookshelf, and a monumental Tony Lewis painting anchors the wall. “I always had my children in mind…that I wanted to create something for them to grow up around.”

That long view runs through everything that Smith does. He met Legend in 2004, just before the Grammy Award–winning singer released his debut album, Get Lifted, and has remained his trusted right hand ever since. He approaches collecting with the same instinct for what will last, building personal relationships with artists, including Patrick Eugène and Rashid Johnson, along the way.

How Hassan Smith made the leap from art lover to collector

Smith traces his love of art back to his parents’ record collection and childhood museum visits. But he points to a Yoruba mask he bought in Lagos in 2000—now sitting on his desk—as his first “collecting” purchase. When friends who collected art praised the mask, he said, “it gave me my confidence that I was selecting great, great works.”

Even so, Smith said he did not feel truly exposed to contemporary Black artists until he entered the music industry. Until then, his knowledge of the art world had been shaped largely by Old Masters. That changed when he began visiting friends’ homes, including those of cultural figures like Jay-Z and Swizz Beatz, both known for championing Black artists. “I got to see that there are artists who create at this level that look like me,” he said.

A decade after purchasing the Yoruba mask, Smith stepped more fully into the art world. He attended an auction at the Gordon Parks Foundation, where he bid on works from Parks’s “Harlem” series of portraits taken in the New York district. Some 16 photographs by Parks—including a portrait of Malcolm X and scenes of the Civil Rights Movement—line the upstairs hallway near the children’s bedrooms. “I put it upstairs purposefully, where their rooms are, so they can see it every day, and they can understand some of the things that are going on in this world today are subjects and works that were going on in the ’50s and ’60s,” Smith said.

Because living with the art is central to Smith’s philosophy, it feels especially fitting that South African artist Esther Mahlangu’s massive, four-panel geometric painting Untitled (2024) hangs in the living room. Smith is among the artist’s most vocal advocates and owns 30 of her works. What drew him in, beyond the work’s “vibrancy,” was its connection to Mahlangu’s ancestry. “The history of where that practice comes from was astounding to me,” he said.

A collection that champions Black artists across generations

Curiosity, more than anything, drives Smith’s collecting. It is also what compels him to meet as many artists as he can. “I like to live with my works, and most artists that are in this home, if they’re living, I have a robust relationship with,” Smith said. Eugene, for instance, came onto Smith’s radar when a friend urged the collector to meet the artist, his cousin.

Before he considered acquiring a work, he wanted to make a personal connection. They clicked immediately. Today, two of Eugene’s works live in Smith’s house: a portrait in the living room and a giant commission, Untitled (2024), in the collector’s sunroom, an airy, gallery-like space where Smith hosts parties and fundraisers.

That sunroom, in many ways, captures the intergenerational dialogue and community-building that define his collection. Lined with windows and hovering above the driveway, the room brings together works that span from Betye Saar’s Lovers with Twilight Birds (1964) to Hank Willis Thomas’s The Only Bond Worth Anything Between Human Beings is Their Humanness (2024). “I love having the contemporaries of today with the legacy artists of tomorrow,” he said. Just as important are his children, who are growing up surrounded by art. “I’m proud that they’re growing up with…and really engaging with art throughout their entire life.”

The home gallery also doubles as a meeting place. As an active board member at museums, including the High Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum, Smith regularly hosts parties and fundraising events there.

Community is central to his work, which is why he co-founded Collector X, a convening platform with private equity businessman Dale Burnett that creates space for Black collectors at art fairs. “We were trying to connect with our great friend group…and we just found it super hard to connect and convene…in the VIP lounge, just trying to pull chairs together,” he explained.

Ultimately, Smith hopes to pass on not just his love for art, but a way of looking: one rooted in education, personal connection, and care. He leads by example. For Smith, collecting is less about acquisition than legacy and preserving lived experience through art.

“The energy is carried within the work,” Smith said. “That’s what people feel when they love something, or they don’t like something. It’s the energy out of the work—where and how it was created.”

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Painter Celeste Dupuy-Spencer dies at 46. https://ift.tt/vR8oTFQ

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, the American painter whose work captured an unflinching portrayal of contemporary America, died at her home in Los Angeles on Friday. She was 46. The news was announced by her gallery, Jeffrey Deitch, who is set to open a solo show of the artist’s recent work on April 17 at their Los Angeles outpost. No cause of death was specified.

“An artist of remarkable talent and sensibility, Dupuy-Spencer was beloved by her fellow artists and members of the creative community in Los Angeles and New York,” the gallery shared in an Instagram post. “I spent time in Los Angeles with her, at her house and in her studio, talking talking talking,” wrote Nina MacLaughlin, a writer who worked with the artist on her forthcoming Monocelli monograph, in a Substack post. “Her voice was low. Her smile was wide. She was ferocious and funny and lonely and deeply kind. She had a mind like no one has had a mind. Working on the project, I spent months living inside her brain, living inside her paintings. It was not comfortable. It was dangerous there and I felt the danger…‘What a tiny chunk of time we have,’ she said to me at one point. ‘This is our one opportunity and we spend it being afraid to find out how big we are psychologically.’”

Dupuy-Spencer was known for making electrically charged tableaus that soberly addressed political tensions and power structures—and depicted tender intimacies and displays of solidarity in equal measure. She worked primarily with oil paint, sweeping energetic brushstrokes across large-scale canvases. Her often-figurative paintings are layered with rich, intersecting narratives that construct an honest view of an ever-evolving America. The artist is best known for works that capture crucial moments in contemporary history, including Durham, August 14, 2017 (2017) which features a toppled confederate monument, and Don’t You See That I Am Burning (2021), a portrayal of the January 6th insurrection in which thousands stormed the U.S. Capitol. In other works, Dupuy-Spencer painted mundane moments, in the bedroom or at the family table.

The artist was born in New York in 1979 to a prominent New Orleans family. Her father was the novelist Scott Spencer, and her mother, Coco Dupuy, dabbled in painting. She grew up in Rhinebeck, New York, and for a period studied art at Bard College under painters including Nicole Eisenman and Amy Sillman. Dupuy-Spencer was one of the few painters to be included in the sculpture-heavy 2017 Whitney Biennial, and she also participated in the Hammer Museum’s 2018 Made in L.A. biennial, which earned her acclaim.

Dupuy-Spencer’s upcoming presentation at Jeffrey Deitch in L.A. marks the artist’s first solo presentation in five years. Monacelli is set to publish her first monograph, entitled Burning in the Eyes of the Maker, this June. Past solo exhibitions include presentations at Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles, Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin, and Marlborough Contemporary in New York. Dupuy-Spencer’s work is held in collections including the Hirschhorn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the San Francisco Museum of American Art (SFMOMA).

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10 Must-See Museum Exhibitions This Spring https://ift.tt/NWcfFSA

This spring, museums across the globe are reconsidering the frameworks that have shaped art history.

MoMA’s Marcel Duchamp show celebrates the father of conceptual art, while the Guggenheim considers the long legacy of mid-century Pop art art. Shows devoted to Frida Kahlo and Agnes Martin complicate our ideas of the art “icon,” while in Beijing, a Duan Jianyu survey at UCCA Beijing showcases how Chinese painting has both engaged with and evolved outside of Western narratives.

These exhibitions, which open as major biennials launch in Venice; Lyon, France; and Gwangju, South Korea, are part of a larger conversation that moves between past and present, what we see and why we see it.

Arthur Jafa & Richard Prince

“Helter Skelter”

Fondazione Prada, Venice, Italy

May 9–Sep. 23

“Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa & Richard Prince,” curated by Nancy Spector, brings together two American icons born a decade apart. The pair share a lawless approach to authorship as they repurpose the visual detritus of American culture: Across disparate genres, both artists draw from film, advertising, music, literature, and social media as they mine the contradictions and excesses of popular culture.

Jafa’s work reflects his identity as an African American man and his mission to invigorate the language of Black cinema and art. Prince, by contrast, hovers between critique and complicity, probing white masculinity and the undercurrents of the American psyche. Together, the artists will present more than 50 works across photography, video, installation, sculpture, and painting, including new works by each. They have also collaborated on a zine composed of images they exchanged during the show’s making.

The exhibition will open in Venice during the Biennale and offer a charged conversation about appropriation as both strategy and worldview.

Frida Kahlo

“Frida: The Making of an Icon”

Tate Modern, London

Jun. 25–Jan. 3, 2027

Following its debut at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, “Frida: The Making of an Icon” will arrive at Tate Modern to chart how Frida Kahlo went from a relatively unknown painter to a global cultural phenomenon.

More than 30 of Kahlo’s works, particularly her defining self-portraits including Self-Portrait (With Velvet Dress) (1926), will appear alongside photographs, personal artifacts, and works by a constellation of artists who have drawn from her singular visual language.

The show highlights how Kahlo became a master of self-construction. Through painting, dress, and the performance of identity, she fashioned a series of selves at once intimate, political, and symbolic. These carefully constructed images will unfold in dialogue with works by her contemporaries, including her husband Diego Rivera, and by later generations of artists, such as Nahúm B. Zenil and Georgina Quintana, who similarly repurposed Mexican imagery and popular traditions to undermine nationalism, patriarchy, and gender norms.

A final section devoted to “Fridamania” will explore the proliferation of Kahlo’s image across fashion, media, and consumer culture through more than 200 objects. Part biography, part cultural archaeology, the exhibition positions Kahlo as a constantly shifting figure, reimagined across time.

Pierre Huyghe

Fondation Beyeler, Basel

May 24–Sep. 13

A new Pierre Huyghe show, conceived especially for the Fondation Beyeler, unites new and recent work within an environment that feels like a system in motion. Across galleries, boundaries blur: between natural and artificial, real and constructed, human and nonhuman. Images, objects, and living elements coexist, responding to one another with both precision and instability.

Huyghe’s practice resists easy categorization. His works often combine film, technology, biology, and architecture, creating situations that evolve over time rather than settle into fixed forms. What you encounter on one visit may not be quite the same on the next. As many exhibitions look backwards, this one considers the future of art.

“Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón”

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago

Apr. 14–Sep. 20

At MCA Chicago, “Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón” will turn the museum into a sonic and social landscape where music, movement, and image converge.

The exhibition will bring together work by more than 35 artists who use disparate genres to bring the sounds of Kingston, San Juan, and beyond to a global audience. They include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Isaac Julien, Alberta Whittle, and Carolina Caycedo, who celebrate the bass-driven heart of dancehall culture and promote the notion that movement is power.

The exhibition will spotlight San Juan’s 2019 “perreo combativo,” in which reggaetón dance spilled into the streets as a form of political protest. A newly commissioned mixtape by artist Juan Rivera will deepen this atmosphere, blurring the line between exhibition and experience.

More than anything, “Dancing the Revolution” will suggest that these cultural forms cannot be contained. They carry histories of struggle and celebration, shaped by the Black Atlantic and reimagined across generations.

Jasper Johns

“Night Driver”

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain

May 29–Oct. 12

“Jasper Johns: Night Driver” reflects on seven decades of work by one of postwar art’s most influential figures. It brings together around 100 pieces from public and private collections worldwide.

The exhibition opens with the paintings that changed everything: Johns’s flags, targets, numbers, and maps of the 1950s, which broke decisively with Abstract Expressionism, replacing gesture with immediately recognizable motifs, as in Flag (1954–55) and Target with Four Faces (1955). From there, it moves through the 1990s, following how these images are destabilized, disappear, and return in altered form.

The fractured, layered surfaces of the 1960s give way to the structured crosshatch paintings of the 1970s, exemplified by Corpse and Mirror (1974), before the 1980s reintroduce imagery in a more personal, fragmented register, as in The Four Seasons (1985–86).

The final section turns to Johns’s later work, where imagery becomes quieter and more elusive. Faded, ghostly motifs, such as flags, surface within muted, often gray fields. This restraint carries into the Catenary series, in which a real string arcs across the canvas, introducing a subtle sense of tension, gravity, and time.

Altogether, “Night Driver” shows how Johns continually reworked familiar forms, shifting them from fixed symbols into something more unstable, and ultimately more reflective, over time.

Marcel Duchamp

Museum of Modern Art, New York (also traveling to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, and the Grand Palais, Paris)

Apr. 12–Aug. 22

This spring, MoMA will present the first North American retrospective of Marcel Duchamp in over 50 years. The expansive exhibition brings together nearly 300 works across six decades, proving why Duchamp, the progenitor of conceptual art, was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

The exhibition will unfold chronologically, beginning with early paintings like Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912), a fractured, almost cinematic depiction of movement. Next, the show focuses on Duchamp’s radical invention of “readymades,” ordinary objects presented as sculpture. In 1961, the artist described these as “the most important single idea to come out of my work.”

While several of the original readymades are now lost, such as the world-famous urinal Fountain (1917), the exhibition will include replicas alongside those still in existence. Created concurrently with the “readymades,” The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23), a monumental, enigmatic painting on glass that explores desire and mechanics, will appear alongside its preparatory studies.

A subsequent, Dada-focused section will include the painting L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), Duchamp’s irreverent reworking of a Mona Lisa reproduction. The central gallery will be devoted to the most extensive presentation of Box in a Valise (1935–41) to date. To make this “portable museum,” the artist painstakingly reproduced, in miniature, his life’s work before 1941. Viewers will reach the end of the show with a greater understanding of how Duchamp forever changed conversations about what art could be.

Agnes Martin

“Painting Is Not Making Paintings”

Dia Beacon, New York

From Apr. 4 (long-term view)

After many years, Agnes Martin’s paintings will return to Dia Beacon: a quiet, expansive, and light-filled space ideal for the meditative work. Spanning nearly five decades, “Painting Is Not Making Paintings” gathers canvases full of pale grids, faint pencil lines, and soft washes of color. Stay with them, and lines begin to waver, colors warm or cool, and surfaces breathe. What initially reads as restraint opens into something more emotional, less about the minimalism of Martin’s day than about perception itself.

The exhibition will move from Martin’s early works of the late 1950s, where geometry starts to take hold, to the serene, rhythmic compositions of her later years. Along the way, her signature grids give way to horizontal bands and luminous fields. Each variation is subtle but deliberate. Martin herself believed that painting was not about producing objects, but about reaching a particular state of mind.

“Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now”

The Guggenheim, New York

Jun. 5–Jan. 10, 2027

Few works sum up the strange afterlife of Pop quite like Comedian (2019), Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana: absurd, instantly legible, and endlessly reproduced. At the Guggenheim, “Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now” traces how this sensibility and a desire to work with the imagery of everyday life took hold.

Early works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg exemplify how artists began lifting images from advertising, comics, and consumer goods in the mid-century. Via repetition and shifts in scale, they transformed the ordinary into sharp, strange new styles. More recent, pop-inspired works by artists including Cattelan, Lucía Hierro, Josh Kline, Martine Gutierrez, Lauren Halsey, and Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim will also be on view. A Yayoi Kusama “Infinity Room” rounds out the greatest hits.

Across the Guggenheim’s tower galleries, the exhibition will unfold as a kind of visual echo chamber, where images of consumer culture bounce between past and present, gaining new meanings along the way.

Keith Haring

“Keith Haring in 3D”

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas

Jun. 6–Jan. 25, 2027

“Keith Haring in 3D” asks what happens when Keith Haring’s bold, looping, instantly recognizable lines leave the wall. It’s the first-ever show to highlight Haring’s work in three dimensions.

At Crystal Bridges, the artist’s unmistakable visual language spills into space, wraps around surfaces, and invites viewers to move through the artist’s unique universe. The show unites Haring’s early experiments, in which he painted found objects pulled from the street, with large-scale sculptures in wood and metal.

For the artist, everything was a potential canvas. Haring worked with totems, masks, skateboards, clothing, and boomboxes; he even painted a 1963 Buick Special. Haring was often credited with shaping the visual culture of the 1980s, and he anticipated a world where art moves fluidly across media, surfaces, and public space. He fluctuated between subway drawings, murals, sculpture, and commercial objects, collapsing distinctions between fine art and mass culture.

By focusing on a lesser-known aspect of Haring’s practice, the exhibition highlights just how expansive and imaginative the artist really was.

Duan Jianyu

UCCA Beijing, Beijing

May 1–Aug. 30

Duan Jianyu is one of the most distinctive painters working in China today. She draws on sources as varied as Socialist Realism, literature, folk imagery, and contemporary subcultures, combining everyday rural scenes with surreal, often dissonant elements. This exhibition at UCCA, her first institutional solo presentation in Beijing, brings together key works from the past decade alongside new paintings.

At the center of the exhibition, curated by Chelsea Qianxi Liu, is Sharp, Sharp, Smart (2014–16). The series crystallized Duan’s move away from structured narrative toward a looser, more fragmented, and associative approach to painting. The title references shamate, a youth subculture in rural China known for their exaggerated, hybrid style. Rather than depict its members directly, Duan obliquely explores tensions between rural life and rapid modernization. In Sharp, Sharp, Smart No. 1 (2014), for example, two peasant women appear in a stark, geometric style that echoes early modernism and evokes a contemporary rural context. Throughout Duan’s work, figures often appear doubled or distorted, introducing a subtle sense of unease.

Later works in the series introduce a recurring, monkey-like figure that moves through fragmented vignettes, linking disparate scenes and references. Throughout, Duan loosens her brushwork and pushes her compositions toward excess and dissonance, creating images that resist stable interpretation while reflecting the contradictions of contemporary Chinese society.

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