NEW YORK: VANESSA GERMAN

GUMBALL—there is absolutely no space between body and soul

April 3 – May 10, 2025

KASMIN GALLERY
509 West 27th Street

New York, NY

KASMIN GALLERY
514 West 28th Street

New York, NY

From kasmingallery.com:

Kasmin announces its second solo exhibition of sculptures by artist vanessa german (b. 1976), which will debut related bodies of work across two of the gallery’s exhibition spaces in New York. vanessa german: GUMBALL—there is absolutely no space between body and soul will deepen german’s singular approach to sculpture as a spiritual practice with the power to transform the lived experiences of all those who encounter it. Drawing from precolonial and African diasporic traditions, german’s sculptural technique involves assembling an expansive vocabulary of objects to create expressive figures undergirded by painted and drawn elements. The artist’s newest works for GUMBALL—there is absolutely no space between body and soul foreground german’s engagement in haptic communication, interpreting the energy and vibrations of her gemstone materials through physical touch.

In the gallery’s flagship 509 West 27th Street location, german will unveil a series of monumental heads adorned with mineral crystals, beads, and objects retaining the energy of the earth in which they originated. Each sculpture sparks reflective shimmers of rose quartz, blue lapis, chalcedony and other gemstones, which german uses to impart healing properties. Incorporating stars, words, and human and animal forms across the surfaces, german conceives of these sculptures as cosmic maps, proposing a cartography of consciousness charted through the works’ colossal presence. At 514 West 28th Street, german will present a new series of figures who are each caught in a dip, a move performed by vogue dancers and originating in ballroom culture. Capturing the drama of the pose, the figures balance on one leg as the other bends in the air. Described by the artist as an allusion to the fall of empire, the works foreground the resilient quality of the figures, inevitably poised to bounce back upward.

For more information, click here.

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HOUSTON: JOE OVERSTREET

Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight

January 24 – July 13, 2025

THE MENIL COLLECTION
1533 Sul Ross St.
Houston, TX

From menil.org: 

Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight is the first major museum exhibition in thirty years devoted to the work of this pioneering abstract painter. Renowned for his innovative approach to non-representational painting, American artist Joe Overstreet (1933–2019) consistently sought to intertwine abstraction and social politics.

This presentation will include his landmark Flight Pattern series of radially suspended paintings from the early 1970s, as well as related bodies of work from the 1960s and 1990s. Overstreet made a significant contribution to postwar art, positioning abstraction as an expansive tool for exploring the idea of freedom and the Black experience in the United States.

Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight will be accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with new scholarly texts and installation images from the exhibition, available in late spring.

Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight is organized by Natalie Dupêcher, Associate Curator of Modern Art, The Menil Collection, in collaboration with the artist’s estate.

For more information, click here.

VIDEO: KHALIF TAHIR THOMPSON

Khalif Tahir Thompson's first institutional solo exhibition in the United States features eight large-scale paintings that explore themes related to identity, memory, and emotion. Imbued with a sense of nostalgia yet charged with a contemporary energy that bridges the tangible and the imagined, Thompson creates layered compositions that invite viewers into intimate spaces, drawing from the artist's personal experiences, family archives, and broader cultural narratives. 

Cherry: Khalif Tahir Thompson is on view from January 31 - August 17, 2025, at The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture in Charlotte, NC.

Produced by the Gantt Technology & Innovation Group 

Image credits: Khalif Tahir Thompson, "Ballad of Blue and Brown," detail, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery.

For more information, click here.

CHARLOTTE: DAREMEN J.

DaRemen J.: the longest way home

March 14 - September 7, 2025

MINT MUSEUM UPTOWN
at Levine Center for the Arts
500 South Tryon Street
Charlotte, NC

From mintmuseum.org:

DaRemen J. blends the seen and unseen in his photography and filmmaking, creating visuals that reveal emotional depth and subtlety. His “method shooting” approach captures not just images, but sound and sentiment, resonating with emotional attunement. With two decades of experience shaped by afro-surrealist and futurist influences, DaRemen uses his artistry as a tool for Black liberation and world-building. Beginning his creative journey as a child experimenting with cameras, he later co-founded Dream Studios in 2019. Through his work, DaRemen intertwines his personal vision with shared Black experiences, creating imagery that both reflects and dreams of future possibilities, all while remaining deeply attuned to the present moment.

For more information, click here. 

NEW YORK: JENNIE C. JONES

The Roof Garden Commission: Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble

April 15 - October 19, 2025

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY

From metmuseum.org:

For the 2025 Roof Garden Commission, Jennie C. Jones (born 1968, Cincinnati, Ohio) will produce Ensemble. Only her second outdoor sculptural installation, the project will explore the sonic potential of stringed instruments as well as their formal possibilities. In the artist's unique response to modernism, these acoustic sculptures propose the line of the string as a proxy for art history, unbroken and continuous.

In her paintings, sculptures, works on paper, installations, and audio compositions, Jones uses sound to respond to the legacy of minimalism and to modernism itself. Drawing on her immersion in Black improvisation and avant-garde music, she deploys sound and listening as important conceptual elements of her practice, from the acoustic fiberglass panels she affixes to canvas, which absorb sound and affect the acoustic properties of the environment, to the lines and bars she creates through her compositions that refer to elements of musical notation. Her work across media offers new possibilities for minimalist abstraction, challenging how—and by whom—it is produced.

For more information, click here.

NEW YORK: LORNA SIMPSON

Lorna Simpson: Source Notes

May 19 - November 2, 2025

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
1000 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY

From metmuseum.org:

This presentation of work by New York–based artist Lorna Simpson is the first exhibition to consider the entirety of her painting practice to date. Simpson came to prominence in the 1980s with her pioneering approach to conceptual photography. Since then, she has produced works in multiple media that continue to probe the nature of images and how they construct meaning. Lorna Simpson: Source Notes focuses on a significant new development in her work of the last 10 years: paintings that advance her incisive explorations of gender, race, identity, representation, and history. Through more than 30 works, this focused exhibition presents a selection of Simpson’s major paintings, including examples from her acclaimed Venice Biennale debut in 2015 and her celebrated series Special Characters, along with recent sculptures and related collages.

For more information, click here.

MEMPHIS: CALIDA RAWLES

Calida Rawles: Away With the Tides

March 19 - September 7, 2025

MEMPHIS BROOKS MUSEUM OF ART
1934 Poplar Avenue
Memphis, TN

From brooksmuseum.org:

In her first solo museum presentation, Calida Rawles envisions water as a space for Black healing. Merging hyperrealism, poetic abstraction, and water's cultural and historical symbolisms, Rawles creates unique portraits of Black bodies submerged in and interacting with bright and mysterious bodies of water. The water, a sort of character within the paintings, is embodied as a vital, organic, multifaceted material and historically charged space that signifies historical trauma and racial exclusion but also physical and spiritual healing.

In this body of work, Rawles depicts members of Miami’s historically Black Overtown, a neighborhood that went from a thriving cultural and commercial hub for Black people to a community dismantled by gentrification, systemic racism, and mass displacement. Rawles partnered with members of this community and worked with them as models. In this series, Rawles takes her practice further by photographing some of her subjects in natural waters for the first time at the historic Virginia Key Beach, which was once racially segregated. By photographing Black subjects in the ocean for the first time, Rawles probes the Atlantic’s history as the site of the supremely exploitative transatlantic slave trade. The finished works critically engage with the water-entwined climate and mine the history of beauty, oppression, and resilience in the Overtown community and the diaspora.

For more information, click here.

CHICAGO: MIKE CLOUD

Circle Chat

March 7 - April 26, 2025

CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY
2156 West Fulton Street
Chicago, IL

From corbettvsdempsey.com:

In the North Gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey is delighted to present Circle Chat, an exhibition of new paintings by Mike Cloud. This is the gallery's first show with the artist.

Mike Cloud (b. 1974) is a Chicago-based artist whose complex and vibrant paintings often utilize conventional support materials organized in unconventional ways. Stretcher bars, normally brought together at perpendicular angles, are instead conjoined into star or diamond shapes, one sometimes crossing in front of another like a highway offramp; canvas may be affixed to the front of the bar, rather than stretched around it, and thin strips of canvas might cross the field like streamers or banners. Are Cloud's paintings abstract? This is a complicated question to address. Are they representational? Yes, they represent specific and concrete things in the world – people, places, objects. Do they represent these things through visual likeness? Not so much. Instead, Cloud invokes other forms of semiosis, producing meanings through a variety of means – written language, linguistic permutations, website urls, hieroglyphs, pictograms, and other symbolic imagery such as hand-birds. Again, are they abstract? Yes, Cloud's paintings are abstract in the sense that they condense vast amounts of information into a limited space. In the new works presented in Circle Chat, Cloud has included two canvases that utilize hinges to fold into floor sculptures, one hinged horizontally like a construction site sign ("Oyster Oil"), the other hinged vertically, sitting on the floor like a scrim ("Kingdom of Luang Phrabang"). Highly specific, yet mysterious and spring-loaded, these virtuosic, operatic works are ultimately meditations on the fundaments of painting – color, facture, form, speed – and the relationship between the act of interpretation and being in the world.

For more information, click here.

WEST HOLLYWOOD: CHARLES GAINES

Numbers and Trees: The Tanzania Baobabs

February 19 - May 24, 2025

HAUSER & WIRTH WEST HOLLYWOOD
8980 Santa Monica Boulevard
West Hollywood, CA

From hauserwirth.com:

For nearly six decades, pioneering conceptual artist Charles Gaines has used systems to create series of works that mine the complex relationship between perception and meaning. This February, following a major 2023 – 24 museum survey and an acclaimed public commission, Gaines returns to his hometown of Los Angeles to present a new sequence of his signature Plexiglas works at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood—the most elaborate treatment yet of his ongoing Numbers and Trees series, first conceived by the artist in 1987. Consisting of nine large-scale triptychs and a suite of new watercolor diptychs, all works are based on photographs of baobab trees the artist shot during a trip to Tanzania in 2023.

For more information, click here.

CLEVELAND: KARAMU ARTISTS INC (GROUP SHOW)

Karamu Artists Inc.: Printmaking, Race, and Community

March 23 – August 17, 2025

CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART

11150 East Boulevard

Cleveland, OH

From clevelandart.org:

The graphic arts played a groundbreaking role at Cleveland’s Karamu House, one of the nation’s preeminent Black community art centers. Initially founded as a settlement house in 1915, Karamu House became one of the best-known sites for Black American culture. Although noted today for its theater program, the institution housed a printmaking workshop beginning in the 1930s, where artists and community members alike—including a young Langston Hughes—could experiment with various techniques, playing on printmaking’s fundamental accessibility and democracy. This exploration led to the foundation of Karamu Artists Inc., a group that counted some of the most recognized Black printmakers of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) era—such as Elmer W. Brown, Hughie Lee-Smith, Charles Sallée, and William E. Smith—among its members. While a landmark 1942 traveling exhibition celebrated these printmakers’ expression of collective and personal identity, this exhibition is the first to place Karamu Artists Inc. and its innovative use of the graphic arts within the broader context of American art during the 1930s and ’40s, such as the WPA and the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance.

Karamu Artists Inc. presents more than 50 prints created by the group’s members, including works from the museum’s collection as well as important loans from local and national institutions. It is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication, featuring essays by leading scholars of Black American art.

For more information, click here. 

MEMPHIS: FLOYD NEWSUM

Floyd Newsum: House of Grace

February 9 - April 6, 2025

DIXON GALLERY AND GARDEN

4339 Park Avenue

Memphis, TN

From dixon.org:

Floyd Newsum was fond of saying: “You can delay my success, but you cannot determine it,” a variation of the well-known maxim, “success delayed is not success denied.” Newsum’s career exemplified this idea, having only achieved widespread recognition for his art relatively late in his life. The artist was well known in the art scene in Houston where he had lived and worked as a professor of art at the University of Houston-Downtown for 48 years. Newsum was also one of the founders of Project Row Houses, a work of social art created from a group of shotgun cottages located in Houston’s historically Black Third Ward that includes curated “art houses” serving as artists’ studios and exhibition spaces, residences for young single mothers, spaces for entrepreneurial businesses, and venues for events. Despite his fame in Houston, the artist viewed Floyd Newsum: House of Grace—the first major exhibition of his art in Memphis—as a homecoming. The show was an opportunity for him to demonstrate his talent and to give back to the communities where he was born, raised, and educated, first at Hamilton Elementary and Hamilton Junior and Senior High Schools, and at the Memphis Academy of Arts (later Memphis College of Art) where he was a member of the class of 1973.

Floyd Newsum: House of Grace features large paintings on paper and maquettes for public sculptures that represent the artist’s interest in social practice. The works in this exhibition were made between 2002 and 2024, a period of intense artistic flowering for Newsum marked by a shift in his style towards greater abstraction. His densely layered images include paintings in oil and acrylic with collaged photo transparencies and embedded three-dimensional objects including plastic forks, doll-house-sized wooden ladders, and the remnants of artistic materials such as partially used pastels or their paper labels.

Newsum was relentlessly positive as a person and as an artist. Visually, he articulated his optimistic and upbeat attitude through fabulous pulsating color combinations and a deeply personal, whimsical, and recurring vocabulary of images that produced expressive meditations on African American history, ancestors, spirituality, and, above all, freedom, faith, joy, and hope. His unexpected and untimely death on August 14, 2024, deepens the poignancy of this exhibition, and makes it all the more necessary for the Dixon Gallery and Gardens to celebrate Newsum’s art and life in his hometown.

For more information, click here. 

VIDEO: MCARTHUR BINION

 

McArthur Binion was interviewed by Anne Pontegnie in January 2025. The interview took place at Gallery Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, Belgium. 

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025

PLEASANTVILLE: TONIKA JOHNSON

Tonika Johnson: Englewood

February 27 - April 18, 2025

THE GORDON PARKS FOUNDATION GALLERY

48 Wheeler Avenue

Pleasantville, NY

Tonika Johnson, a 2024 Gordon Parks Foundation Art Fellow, is a photographer and activist from Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood. Through her work, she explores the impact of segregation and discriminatory housing practices like redlining, while reshaping the narrative surrounding South Side communities.

Inspired by Gordon Parks’s photography as a teenager, Johnson chose the camera as a tool for social justice. Her early work focused on capturing the everyday resilience, pride, and joy of her community, challenging negative stereotypes about Englewood. Over time, her efforts grew to include collaborations, public art projects, and community-driven initiatives that have fostered policy changes, historic preservation, and neighborhood revitalization, ultimately contributing to the economic empowerment of Englewood residents.

This exhibition showcases highlights from Johnson's projects, alongside films documenting her work, a poem by local author Leslé Honoré, and historical photographs by Gordon Parks from his time in Chicago. Johnson’s approach extends Parks’s legacy, illustrating how art can drive social change and advocacy.

For more information, click here.

NEW YORK: KIANJA STROBERT

Pennies from Heaven

February 27 - April 5, 2025

MARINARO
678 Broadway, Floor 3
New York, NY

Marinaro is excited to present Pennies from Heaven, Kianja Strobert's second solo exhibition with the gallery, showcasing her innovative approach to abstraction, sculpture, and the interplay of color and texture. The exhibition features pewter benches, handmade from wood, plastic, and metal, symbolizing public spaces of leisure and contemplation. Strobert incorporates objects like bread, ladles, and rope, evoking themes of memorialization, tension, and the weight of everyday items. The exhibition also includes vibrant fabric installations and sculptures, exploring instability, transformation, and the tension between permanence and decay. Strobert’s work masterfully blends abstraction with material experimentation, inviting personal reflection and commentary on consumer culture.

For more information, click here.

NEW YORK: TYLER MITCHELL

Ghost Images

February 27 - April 5, 2025

GAGOSIAN
541 West 24th St
New York, NY

Gagosian presents Ghost Images, a new exhibition by Tyler Mitchell. This marks Mitchell’s debut solo exhibition in New York and the first since joining the gallery's global representation in late 2024. Drawing on Southern gothic themes and his Southern roots, Mitchell’s 2024 works explore the psychological space of memory, questioning how photography can capture unseen presences and document history. Shot on Jekyll and Cumberland Islands, off the coast of Georgia, his images feature veiled figures and utilize innovative techniques like printing on mirrors and fabric, exploring ephemerality and the layering of past and present. Ghost Images invites reflection on memory, history, and self-determination.

For more information, click here.

NEW YORK: AMANDA WILLIAMS

Run, Together and Look Ugly After the First Rain

February 28 - April 26, 2025

CASEY KAPLAN
121 West 27th St
New York, NY

From caseykaplangallery.com: 

Amanda Williams’ debut exhibition at Casey Kaplan, Run Together and Look Ugly After the First Rain, reimagines George Washington Carver’s 1927 Prussian Blue pigment formula, bringing it to life as "Innovation Blue." In collaboration with chemistry students at The University of Chicago and Xavier University, Williams revives Carver’s use of local Alabaman red clay to create a new blue pigment, exploring the intersections of color, Black identity, and social significance. Her works, including paintings and collages, use the pigment to create abstracted shadows and corporeal impressions, reflecting on history, memory, and the power of color as a marker of liberatory space.

For more information, click here.

NEW YORK: MYRLANDE CONSTANT

Myrlande Constant: The Spiritual World of Haiti

February 28, 2025 – April 26, 2025

FORT GANSEVOORT
5 Ninth Avenue
New York, NY

From fortgansevoort.com:

Fort Gansevoort presents an exhibition celebrating the evolution of internationally renowned Haitian artist Myrlande Constant’s groundbreaking textile artistry. Since the 1990s, Constant has redefined drapo Vodou—a traditionally male-dominated Haitian art form—through her intricate hand-beaded and sequin-embroidered works. Trained in tambour embroidery while working alongside her mother in a Port-au-Prince wedding dress factory, she has elevated this technique to fine art, breaking gender barriers and honoring the overlooked craftsmanship of Haitian women. Her signature style, marked by rich textures and vibrant colors, transforms fabric into resplendent, painterly compositions of striking optical impact.

For more information, click here.

LOS ANGELES: BLACK IN EVERY COLOR, ART IN EVERY FORM (GROUP SHOW)

Black in Every Color, Art in Every Form

February 21 - 23, 2025

THE LINE HOTEL

3515 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA

From thelinehotel.com:

Black in Every Color, Art in Every Form is a three-day exhibition running from February 21–23, 2025, during Frieze Week. This showcase celebrates the multifaceted expressions of Black artistry through a convergence of installations and performances. The event aims to raise funds for cultural exchange programs, artist residencies, collector concierge services, and international exhibitions, amplifying and connecting the diaspora through the arts.

Curated by Josiah David Jones (Valence Projects), Nakeyta Moore (ARTLOUDLA), and actor Kofi Siriboe (Tola), the exhibition features artists including JOJO ABOT, Láolú Senbanjo, Adrienne Muse, Autumn Breon, and Langston Allston, alongside emerging talents shaping the future of Black art. Panels and performances throughout the event will delve into evolving conversations around identity, heritage, and the power of creative expression, affirming the enduring resonance of Black art in shaping culture, forging community, and sparking transformative dialogue.

For more information, click here.

VIDEO: STANLEY WHITNEY

Meet the artists by Art Basel: Stanley Whitney

"It wasn't really until Basquiat that things changed [for Black artists]. I don't even think he even knew how he changed it, but he changed it totally."

WASHINGTON DC: ELIZABETH CATLETT

Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist

March 9 – July 6, 2025

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
West Building
6th St and Constitution Ave NW

East Building
4th St and Constitution Ave NW

From nga.gov:

Committed to both craft and causes, this visionary artist-activist continues to inspire us today.

One of the defining artists of the 20th century, Elizabeth Catlett addressed the injustices she witnessed and experienced in America and Mexico through her bold prints and dynamic sculptures. See more than 150 of her creations in this exhibition, including rarely seen paintings and drawings.

Trace the career of this cultural force—from her roots in Washington, DC, Chicago, and New York to the remarkable body of work she made during some 60 years in Mexico. In striving to make art for the people, Catlett put justice at the very center of her work.

Other venues
Brooklyn Museum of Art, September 13, 2024–January 19, 2025
Art Institute of Chicago, August 30, 2025–January 4, 2026

For more information, click here.

TRANSITION: ALONZO DAVIS (1942 - 2025)

Alonzo Davis, Artist Who Founded One of America’s First Black-Owned Galleries, Dies at 82 (via ARTnews)

Alonzo Davis (1942–2025) (via artforum.com)

Alonzo Davis, 82, Whose L.A. Gallery Became a Hub for Black Art, Dies (via nytimes.com)

Remembering Alonzo Davis (1942–2025) (via unframed.lacma.org)

SPOTLIGHT: ALLIE MCGHEE

 An Oral History with Allie McGhee

The Detroit-based painter’s artwork responds to the ongoing crises of racism and disenfranchisement through satire and unexpected creative tools. (via BOMBmagazine.org)

LOS ANGELES: DAVID HAMMONS

Concerto in Black and Blue 

February 18 – June 1, 2025 

HAUSER & WIRTH

Downtown Los Angeles, North A & B Galleries 

901 East 3rd Street

Los Angeles, CA

From artdaily.com: 

Presented for the first time since its debut over twenty years ago, artist David Hammons’ acclaimed installation work Concerto in Black and Blue will be reprised at Hauser & Wirth’s Downtown Los Angeles Arts District complex. 

Coinciding with this presentation of Hammons’ work, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will launch a new publication, created entirely under the artist’s direction, that chronicles his major 2019 exhibition at the gallery, the most expansive of his career to date.

For more information, click here.

WTF: MIA'S GIANT CONTRADICTION

Portraits of music icons Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, by artist Kehinde Wiley, flanked the entrance of the Giants exhibit at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA.
(Photo: blackartistnews.) 

Is the Minneapolis Institute of Art Missing in Action on Its Own Standards?

The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) recently announced it will host Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, an exhibition celebrating contemporary Black artists. Given the prestige of the collection and the influence of its collectors, this should be an exciting moment for the museum. However, Mia’s decision feels oddly contradictory—especially in light of its recent cancellation of a Kehinde Wiley exhibition due to harassment allegations against him.

This contradiction becomes even more glaring when considering that Giants prominently features Wiley’s work. His portraits of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys were a major part of the exhibit’s previous presentations at the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, where they were displayed at the entrance like guardian figures overseeing and protecting the space. Additionally, his painting Femme Piquée par un Serpent (2008) was included in both venues. Femme reinterprets the classical European motif of a woman in distress, based on Auguste Clésinger’s 19th-century sculpture of the same name, by replacing the woman with a young Black man dressed in contemporary urban fashion. This creates a striking contrast to the original work, with the figure's confident pose and vibrant, intricate background challenging traditional notions of victimhood and offering a modern reinterpretation of power, race, and identity.

In various interviews and conversations, Beatz has discussed how he acquired the painting, its significance to the Dean Collection and that he and Keys consider Wiley a "close friend." Wiley even appeared in a national news feature to promote Giants at the Brooklyn Museum. Unless Mia plans to edit these pieces out—an alteration that would fundamentally change the collection’s presentation—Wiley’s work will now be on view at a museum that, just months ago, deemed his solo exhibition unacceptable.

So, what changed? If the allegations were reason enough to cancel one show, why is it acceptable to display his work in another context? If the museum is taking a principled stand, this move weakens its position. If the decision was about optics, this only makes the inconsistency more apparent. Either way, the message is unclear.

Museums shape cultural narratives through the choices they make, and those choices should be consistent. By canceling Wiley’s solo show while still displaying his work in Giants, Mia leaves us with more questions than answers.

Visitors study Kehinde Wiley's portraits of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys in Giants at the Brooklyn Museum, where the powerful imagery of the artists takes center stage in the exhibition.
(Photo: blackartistnews) 

Installation  view of Kehinde Wiley's Femme Piuée par un Serpent in Giants at High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA. 
(Photo: blackartistnews) 

MINNEAPOLIS: THE DEAN COLLECTION OF SWIZZ BEATZ & ALICIA KEYS

Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys

March 8, 2025 - July 13, 2025

MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ART

2400 Third Avenue South

Minneapolis, MN

From new.artsmia.org: 

Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys is a groundbreaking exhibition that marks the first major showcase of the Dean Collection, owned by renowned musicians and cultural icons Swizz Beatz (Kasseem Dean) and Alicia Keys.

Organized by the Brooklyn Museum, Giants highlights nearly one hundred significant works by Black diasporic artists, including Gordon Parks, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lorna Simpson, Amy Sherald, and more. The exhibition reflects the Deans’ passion for supporting established and emerging artists while fostering important dialogues about art, culture, and identity.

Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys is organized by Kimberli Gant, Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, and Indira A. Abiskaroon, Curatorial Assistant, Modern and Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum.

For more information, click here. 

BASQUIAT REIMAGINED: A CRITERION COLLECTION RELEASE

 Criterion Honors Basquiat Biopic with Stunning 4K Remaster

From criterion.com:

The Criterion Collection is proud to announce the 4K UHD + Blu-ray release of Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat on April 29, 2025. Originally released theatrically in 1996, this impressionistic tribute to visionary artist Jean-Michel Basquiat captures the 1980s downtown Manhattan art scene with Jeffrey Wright delivering a breakout performance as the trailblazing painter. Featuring an ensemble cast, including David Bowie as Andy Warhol, Schnabel’s profoundly expressive directorial debut is presented in the filmmaker’s own luminous black-and-white remastering. This special edition includes director-approved features, offering an immersive experience of this elegiac portrait of an extraordinary life.

For more information, click here.

FORT WORTH: AUBREY WILLIAMS & FRANK BOWLING

Feeling Color: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling

March 15 - July 27, 2025

MODERN ART MUSEUM OF FORT WORTH
3200 Darnell Street
Fort Worth, Texas

From themodern.org: 

Feeling Color: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling, organized by the Modern and Curator María Elena Ortiz, celebrates the work of these two artists and their contributions to the story of abstract painting in the late twentieth century. Williams (1926–90) and Bowling (b. 1934) migrated from British Guiana (now Guyana) in South America to European and American cities in the 1950s, escaping social upheavals in their native country. Expanding on the international legacies of abstraction that are among the Modern’s central concerns, these artists’ works show that, even in moments of despair, art creates a space for refuge, reckoning, and imagination. This exhibition puts both artists in conversation, illustrating Williams’s powerful commitment to investigating abstract forms and Bowling’s painterly and experimental approach. Williams was Bowling’s elder, and together their works provide an opportunity to reflect on the power of art and abstraction in the twentieth century.

Feeling Color presents Bowling’s influential Map series, 1967–71, and his later poured paintings, which evidence sociopolitical concerns and explore the materiality of paint. Williams’s works include examples from two painting series, Shostakovich, 1969–81, and The Olmec-Maya and Now, 1981–85, alongside other paintings and drawings. These works reflect the artists’ histories by combining modernist abstraction with imagery derived from African diasporic dwellings and the Indigenous cultures of South America, each pointing to the complexity of their postcolonial heritage. These are works that embrace color, movement, experimentation, and abstraction to convey human emotion.

For more information, click here.

SPOTLIGHT: JOHN H. WHITE

Photojournalist John H. White doesn't fear death

IN PRINT: BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD | HARPER'S BAZAAR | DEC 2024/JAN 2025

Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Epic Vision

With a monumental new exhibition in Paris, the influential artist looks back on a creative life spent thinking big

Story by Soraya Nadia McDonald with photographs by Joshua Woods

Also worth reading: 

An American in Paris, Honored Like Nobody Before 

(New York Times, October 24, 2924)

CHICAGO: COSMO WHYTE

The Mother’s Tongue, Pressed to the Grinding Stone

January 23–April 2, 2025

THE ARTS CLUB OF CHICAGO
201 East Ontario Street
Chicago, IL

From artsclubchicago.org:

In his first solo exhibition in Chicago, Los Angeles-based and Jamaican-born artist Cosmo Whyte situates the architectural archives of his late father as the structural ground for an intervention and interrogation into the spaces and forms of diasporic protest, spectacle, and witnessing. Presented by The Arts Club of Chicago, in The Mother’s Tongue, Pressed to the Grinding Stone the artist reformulates photojournalistic images onto materials ranging from drawings to hand-painted beaded curtains and steel framings of unrealized structures. In so doing, Whyte poetically asks “what makes a witness? And what does it mean to have become one?”

For more information, click here.

CHICAGO: BETYE SAAR

Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar

January 30 – April 27, 2025

NEUBAUER COLLEGIUM FOR CULTURE AND SOCIETY
5701 S. Woodlawn Ave.
Chicago, IL 

From Neubauer Collegium e-blast: 

This exhibition offers the first sustained look at a pivotal moment in Betye Saar’s career, when a visit to Chicago’s Field Museum in 1974 transformed the way she conceived of herself as an artist. A display of more than 60 objects—including a ceremonial robe from Cameroon, costumes and jewelry designed by Saar, drawings, photos, archival materials, and more—casts new light on the way Saar’s early career in costume design informed her pioneering work in assemblage and installation.

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete.

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