Perhaps you seek more at a museum this summer than just strong AC and a good permanent collection? You’re in luck. The summer, typically a slow period for institutions, is livelier this year than usual, filled with the kinds of big shows that normally mark the spring and fall seasons.
Anne Imhof, who won the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, is set to take over Austria’s Kunsthaus Bregenz with her latest creations while Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie is mounting an Andy Warhol blockbuster. I. M. Pei will get a retrospective at Hong Kong’s M+ museum, and Zanele Muholi is doing a rebooted version of their lockdown-era Tate Modern retrospective at that institution.
Well-established figures are getting fresh looks: the Art Institute of Chicago will explore Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of New York, Paul Gauguin is coming under the microscope at the National Gallery of Australia, and Lawrence Weiner is getting a Chinese museum survey. Meanwhile, new artists will be added to the canon: Neoclassicist painter Guillaume Lethière, German modernist Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Argentine-German abstractionist Gyula Kosice are all getting their due this summer.
Below, a look at 44 museum shows to see this summer.
“Tanya Lukin Linklater: Inner blades of grass (soft) inner blades of grass (cured) inner blades of grass (bruised by the weather)” at Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio
Image Credit: Rachel Topham Photography/Courtesy Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver Cryptic text is a recurring interest in Tanya Lukin Linklater’s art, and indeed, her latest show is a mysterious quotation of sorts that fuses a historical interview with the late Sugpiaq cultural worker Eunice von Scheele Neseth and poetry by Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Solider. Despite being subject to the whims of the weather, the blades of grass mentioned within persevere. Likewise, in her sculptures, videos, and installations, Lukin Linklater explores how Indigenous people have continued on in spite of great adversity and violence. Here, in addition to past works, this Sugpiaq artist will debut a new piece made in response to the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, an ancient site built by Native Americans not far from where the Wexner currently stands.
June 1–August 21, 2024
“Georgia O’Keeffe: ‘My New Yorks’” at Art Institute of Chicago
Image Credit: New Britain Museum of American Art Georgia O’Keeffe is best known today for her paintings of abstracted flowers, whose stamens and petals she abstracted into fleshy blooms. But recently there’s been an effort to expand the common conception of O’Keeffe, with a Museum of Modern Art survey focusing on her works on paper last year. This summer brings this show centered around O’Keefe’s paintings of New York, the city where the modernist lived before departing for Taos, New Mexico, in 1929. For the five-year period before that, O’Keeffe spent her time painting the Big Apple, exploring how its monolith-like skyscrapers rose into the sky, alternatively blocking out the sun or sucking in the moonlight, depending on the time of day. Her New York may not have looked much like the city itself, but her intention, after all, had been to paint Manhattan as she experienced it, not as it actually was.
June 2–September 22, 2024
Zanele Muholi at Tate Modern, London
Image Credit: ©Zanele Muholi/Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York Technically, this is Take Two for this influential South African photographer’s retrospective, since Tate initially staged it in 2020, only to see it shuttered by Covid-induced lockdowns. Three years after its final closure in 2021, the show returns, this time even bigger than before. Some 260 pictures are headed to Tate’s galleries, many featuring Muholi posing for their camera, staring with steeliness into its lens. These pictures, and many others by Muholi, are done in stark black and white, and are intended as subversions of the long-reigning white gaze that has guided images of Black people for centuries. Other photographs here document South Africa’s LGBTQIA+ community, with an eye toward its members’ daily perseverance in a country that has not always accepted them.
June 6, 2024–January 26, 2025
“Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich Bin Ich / I Am Me” at Neue Galerie, New York
Image Credit: ©Paula-Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung, Bremen/Nationalgalerie, Berlin Paula Modersohn-Becker may have only lived to be only 31, but she still shook up painting in that short span, creating what some believe to be the first nude self-portraits done by a woman. This German modernist’s subjects included pregnancy, aging, and motherhood; she brought to these images a distinctly female perspective that has continued to inspire many. Although many in Germany now agree on her importance, international recognition has come more slowly—the Neue Galerie and New York’s Museum of Modern Art only just jointly acquired their first significant Modersohn-Becker, a beloved 1907 self-portrait, in 2017. That work will now feature in this exhibition, billed as her first major museum show in the US.
June 6–September 9, 2024
“Toyin Ojih Odutola: Ilé Oriaku” at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland
Image Credit: ©Toyin Ojih Odutola/Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York At the current Venice Biennale’s Nigerian Pavilion, Toyin Ojih Odutola is showing pastel drawings that situate arrays of Black men and women in unadorned spaces whose walls are smudgy and opaque. Ojih Odutola’s imagined settings, though not entirely derived from our world, look eerily real. That’s the point: the works are intended to provide entrée to other dimensions. Now, Ojih Odutola will open new portals with similar works debuting at the Kunsthalle Basel under the title “Ilé Oriaku,” or “House of Abundance,” the latter word a reference to her grandmother’s name. “The idea was that everyone here is a flexible spirit, which is very difficult to control,” Ojih Odutola told ArtThrob of her works at the Nigerian Pavilion. Expect a similar sense of flux to be found here.
June 7–September 1, 2024
Martha Jungwirth at Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain
Image Credit: ©2024 Martha Jungwirth/Photo Auktionshaus im Kinsky GmbH, Vienna/The Nixon Collection If the Viennese Actionists of the 1960s used their bodies to explore violent tendencies latent in postwar Europe, Austrian painter Martha Jungwirth went a related but different direction, producing unruly, colorful abstractions that do not contain the same heart of darkness. Jungwirth’s paintings are still related to her body, however—her strokes act as records of the movements made by her fingers and arms. The 70 works assembled here chart how she arrived at that style and has continued to evolve it, with her recent works veering close to figuration by way of vague allusions to famed art-historical paintings.
June 7–September 22, 2024
“Avant-Garde and Liberation: Contemporary Art and Decolonial Modernism” at mumok, Vienna
Image Credit: ©Backslash, Paris/Courtesy the artist and Backslash This year’s Venice Biennale stands as strong evidence that when it comes to decolonization, many artists of the Global South have gazed backward to envision their future. This show furthers that line of thinking, presenting a couple dozen artists who’ve concerned themselves with the intersecting histories of mid-20th century Africa and Asia, where anti-colonial movements led to people’s liberation after centuries of European colonization. Tellingly, these artists often fuse past and present. The American painter Fahamu Pecou, for example, is showing the 2012 painting A.W.N. (Artist with Negritude), whose title puns the name of the ’90s rap group N.W.A. while also referring to the Négritude movement of the 1920s and ’30s, which upheld Blackness and Africanness as a decolonial gesture.
June 7–September 22, 2024
“Olafur Eliasson: Your unexpected encounter” at Istanbul Modern
Image Credit: Jens Ziehe/Courtesy of the artist, neugerriemschneider, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery Across the world, Olafur Eliasson’s visually resplendent installations composed of light and high-tech sculptural elements have found a large fan base—which is hardly surprising, considering that they look great. But his works are not just feasts for the eyes, given that many of them also come with heady ideas about the very nature of perception, particularly when it comes to the environment. Among the nearly 40 works in this show is a new one called Dusk to dawn, Bosporus, which is being teased with a picture of multicolored glass panes leaning against a wall.
June 7, 2024–February 9, 2025
“Anne Imhof: Wish You Were Gay” at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria
Image Credit: Timo Ohler/©Anne Imhof/Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Buchholz, and Sprüth Magers Anne Imhof rose to fame for grand, rollicking performance art that involves chic Germans writhing around, often in the presence bizarre props, such as live dogs and burning fire. But do not expect any of that at this show, which features work in seemingly every medium other than performance. The paintings, sculptures, stage elements, and more marshaled here are all new, and if it’s anything like this Golden Lion winner’s 2021 Palais de Tokyo show, which also didn’t feature much performance art, expect it all to feel very big. What’s on Imhof’s mind this time? “Notions of finitude, reality and artifice, chance and fate, as well as absence and presence set against a backdrop of post-apocalyptic isolation,” per the show’s description.
June 8–September 22, 2024
“David Medalla: In Conversation with the Cosmos” at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Image Credit: Courtesy David Medalla Archive and another vacant space, Berlin If David Medalla was once considered a cult figure, prized mainly for helping to launch London’s experimental Signals gallery in 1964, he is now more widely known than he was when he was alive. Medalla, who died in 2020, is commonly associated with his “Cloud Canyons” sculptures, machines that spew soap bubbles, but in fact, his oeuvre was expansive and rarely lent itself toward big, material objects like those. This survey, the first comprehensive one ever staged in the US, showcases the avant-garde side of his oeuvre, which often sought to turn its viewers into unwitting participants. Among the works included here will be ones done as part of the Mondrian Fan Club, a duo that Medalla ran with his partner Adam Nankervis that paid homage to the modernist Piet Mondrian.
June 9–September 15, 2024
“Andy Warhol: Velvet Rage and Beauty” at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
Image Credit: ©2024 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston “Beauty is a sign of intelligence,” Andy Warhol once said, and if that is the case, this blockbuster show will have plenty of smarts on display. Rather than doing a career-spanning retrospective, the Neue Nationalgalerie’s big Warhol show is focused specifically on the notion of glamour as it infiltrated the Pop artist’s work, from his silkscreened paintings of celebrities from the ’60s to the Polaroids of himself in various get-ups shot at all stages in his career. The nearly 300 works included here will explore Warhol’s obsession with good-looking people and surfaces, which curator Klaus Biesenbach proposes was intimately related to Warhol’s queer identity. According to Biesenbach, Warhol couldn’t always express himself as a gay man. His art, then, afforded Warhol the ability to linger over the male bodies he desired—and to experiment with his sexuality along the way.
June 9–October 10, 2024
“Eva Lootz: Making as if Wondering: So What Is This?” at Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid
Image Credit: Ovidio Aldegunde/Collection of the artist and Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, Badajoz In 2002, at the Reina Sofía’s glassed-in Palacio de Cristal, Eva Lootz exhibited La lengua de los pájaros, an installation comprised of a large pile of sand, along with a ramp that allowed viewers to walk up and around it. This cryptic piece was soundtracked by the cooing of multiple species of birds, each speaking in ways that are incomprehensible to humans. She was contending with the limits of language, something that she had been mulling in her work for decades prior. Now, more than 20 years later, Lootz has returned to the Reina Sofía with a retrospective that surveys the Austrian-Spanish artist’s sculptures, conceptual artworks, and more.
June 12–September 2, 2024
“The Deep West Assembly: Cauleen Smith” at Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist For one of the most memorable New York gallery shows of the year, at 52 Walker, Cauleen Smith created a film installation about the late Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman. But the work contained no images of Coleman herself—it was mainly composed of shots of Californian freeways and night skies, all set to a dreamy musical score. It was but one example of the stunning ways that Smith is able to summon memories of Black cultural creators of all kinds, allowing the past to return to the present in all its living glory. This summer, Smith will debut a new film spanning multiple galleries at this Norwegian museum.
June 14–September 15, 2024
Guillaume Lethière at Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Image Credit: Y. Deslandes/Réunion des Musées Métropolitains Rouen Normandie/Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, France The cliché that every under-recognized artist went overlooked in their day need not apply to Guillaume Lethière, a Guadeloupean-born painter who found fame in late 18th- and early 19th-century France for his stately portraits of the elite. Herein lies a paradox: Lethière, who counted Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother among his admirers, was loved during his lifetime and now has often been discussed as a footnote in the history of Neoclassicism. This show seeks to remedy that, bringing together 100 artworks by him while also focusing on his status as a mixed-race artist in white-dominated France.
June 15–October 14, 2024
“Selma Selman. Flowers of Life” at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist The title of Selma Selman’s newest exhibition refers to a new work composed of orange peel grabs, the claw-like devices used to pick up pieces of refuse. It’s the latest exhibition by this young Bosnian artist to refer to the collection of auto parts, which her family has harvested and resold to help fund their living. For Selman, doing so is a feminist gesture, in that it reclaims and undoes the machismo of car culture, and an anti-capitalist one, too, since she upends the glossy aesthetic associated with high-end products like a Mercedes-Benz, which she once disassembled with the help of her male family members as part of a performance. Another concurrent strand in Selman’s work is her Roma family’s heritage; in a new video debuting here, she will focus on her mother’s attempts to cross a bridge during the Bosnian War.
June 20–September 15, 2024
“Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture” at Seattle Art Museum
Image Credit: Seattle Art Museum As art historians rapidly expand the canon, the traditional narrative about postwar American art, with Abstract Expressionism leading into Pop and so on, has come to seem increasingly New York–centric and more than a bit myopic. To further underline the point, the Seattle Art Museum is organizing this survey of West Coast artists’ works from the 1960s onward. Much of that art is amiably weird and still awaiting greater recognition. Take the case of Patti Warashina, one of the many artists included here, who’s known for porcelain sculptures that reimagine the human body in impossible contortions.
June 21–September 2, 2024
Franz Gertsch at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark
Image Credit: Dominique Uldry/© Franz Gertsch AG/Ludwig Forum, Aachen Swiss hyperrealist painter Franz Gertsch took it as his edict to “paint the world,” but his world was a very specific one—that of his day’s counterculture, which he rendered in vibrant, gorgeous detail. Musician Patti Smith, performer Luciano Castelli, and artist Urs Lüthi were among those Gertsch painted, monumentalizing them at a grand scale to signify their importance. Often basing his work on photographs, Gertsch troubled the divisions between “high” art and “low” art, between the mainstream and the unconventional, and in the process injected new life into the medium of painting altogether. His Louisiana Museum was organized with Gertsch’s help, and now stands as a posthumous tribute to him two years after his death.
June 21–November 10, 2024
“Jana Euler: Oilopa” at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels
Image Credit: Giuseppe Cottini/Getty Images Amid a sea of unmemorable figurative painting, Jana Euler’s canvases stand out for being so extravagantly weird, filled as they are with flying sharks and celebrities. She shows no signs of letting up with her latest exhibition, which is loosely themed around Europe’s connection to oil painting. Bisected by a makeshift road that the artist has termed Oilopa Allee, the show will feature several bodies of paintings that pleasurably trot the line between good taste and bad taste. Among them are Euler’s “Morecorn” paintings, featuring long-nosed, unicorn-like animals that in this artist’s hands race across land and through water, bravely journeying onward, whether people find them appealing or not.
June 21–September 29, 2024
“Leilah Babirye: We Have a History” at de Young Museum, San Francisco
Image Credit: Greg Carideo/Courtesy of the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York and Gordon Robichaux, New York. At the current Venice Biennale, Leilah Babirye is showing a group of tall, blocky figures, each adorned with tossed-out materials such as bicycle tubing and nails. The Ugandan-born sculptor has enlisted these elements, she’s said, because they are deemed worthless, just as queer people are shut out of mainstream Ugandan society. And in her hands, those materials gain new worth. She will continue reclaiming refuse with new works made in response to a gender-fluid Dogon ancestral figure from the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco’s collection. Those works figure in this small show alongside ceramics contending with the history of the kingdom of Buganda.
June 22, 2024–June 22, 2025
“Carrie Mae Weems: Remember to Dream” at CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
Image Credit: ©Carrie Mae Weems/Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York As is so often the case with well-known artists, Carrie Mae Weems is largely aligned with one body of work: her 1990 “Kitchen Table Series,” a grouping of staged photographs featuring the artist herself acting out the life of a fictional woman, all within the confines of one domestic space. The series has been prized for imaging how Blackness and femininity intersect, and for dissolving the divide between fiction and nonfiction. But Weems has continued to return to those themes in ways both fascinating and oblique in the intervening decades, and this show places on the spotlight on some of her more recent work, which it places alongside a few series predating the “Kitchen Table” photographs. Among the recent works here are photographs from her 2021 series “Painting the Town,” shots of boarded-up facades in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, one of the many cities roiled by Black Lives Matter protests the year before.
June 22–December 1, 2024
“Calida Rawles: Away with the Tides” at Pérez Art Museum Miami
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London Calida Rawles rose to national fame in the US when a painting of hers figured on the cover of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2019 novel The Water Dancer. That novel’s aquatically themed title could very well have applied to any of her portraits, which depict Black men, women, and children swimming through bodies of water. Her focus on oceans has led her to a new seaside community, that of Overtown, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Miami whose residents Rawles photographed and then painted in painstaking detail. She’ll debut those new paintings with this show, her first solo exhibition at a museum.
June 27, 2024–January 12, 2025
“Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya: Skinchangers: Begotten of My Flesh” at Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist Many of Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya’s sculptures look like otherworldly creatures formed from spare parts belonging to brand-name products. His sculptures explore what capitalist forces have done to the bodies of people, particularly people of color, and the results are typically more than a little horrifying. Having awarded him its Toby’s Prize, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland is hosting new works by Montoya that he terms “Nahuales,” a reference to the Nahuatl word for a human who can shapeshift into an animal. Crafted from polystyrene, a material Montoya chose because it is manmade and tough to degrade, these new sculptures are intended to represent vampiric beings able to travel through space.
June 28–December 29, 2024
“I. M. Pei: Life is Architecture” at M+, Hong Kong
Image Credit: Commissioned by M+ I. M. Pei designed some of the most iconic museum structures ever built, from the Louvre’s glass pyramid to the elegant East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and is now set to make an appearance inside institutional walls with this retrospective. The expansive show will trace Pei’s rise to international prominence, showing how he navigated bureaucratic strictures and art history alike. On hand will be sketches, photographic documentation, and models related to his buildings, which are today prized for the ways they blurred the boundary between inside and outside.
Opens June 29, 2024
“Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao” at National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Image Credit: Philadelphia Museum of Art It’s not as though critiquing Paul Gauguin is new. Back in 1990, for example, the feminist art historian Griselda Pollock found herself troubled by this French Post-Impressionist’s 1892 painting Manaò tupapaú (Spirit of the Dead Watching), which depicts a nude Tahitian girl lying on her stomach and looking back at the viewer; Pollock said it was first and foremost a painting about “economic and sexual exchange.” But as new versions of art history arise while old ones fall away, Gauguin, once held up as a master painter, has come under the microscope as a European colonialist. This show, curated by former Musée d’Orsay director Henri Loyrette, should add a lot to that discourse, with its focus on the vexed relationship between the Pacific region and Gauguin’s art.
June 29–October 7, 2024
“Beate Kuhn: Turn” at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Image Credit: Zachary Riggleman/©Kuhn Family/Carnegie Museum of Art Within the world of ceramics, Beate Kuhn’s voluptuous work is admired for the way that it imitates nature, not so much by representing it outright but by distilling it to circles, spheres, and discs. Often, Kuhn individually threw those elements, then cobbled them together to form structures that appeared to grow like plants. Though Kuhn is well-regarded in Germany, the country where she worked for decades before dying in 2015, she’s rarely been afforded much space in US art museums. That will change this summer with this show.
June 29–December 1, 2024
“Samia Halaby: Eye Witness” at MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, Michigan
Image Credit: ©Samia Halaby/Courtesy the artist Even if Samia Halaby’s abstract paintings have always been beloved for their warping cascades of richly hued forms, they weren’t the kind of works that made national headlines until earlier this year. In January, Halaby’s paintings made the pages of the world’s most notable publications after Indiana University canceled its iteration of this survey, the Palestinian artist’s first ever; she claimed her freedom of expression had been violated. The decision to cancel the show drew scrutiny, and now looks even stranger several months on, after Halaby received a special mention for her participation in Italy’s Venice Biennale. Finally, her survey has arrived this summer, bringing with it six decades of work, including more recent experiments made with the assistance of computer technology.
June 29–December 15, 2024
“Erika Verzutti: The Life of Sculptures” at LUMA Arles, France
Image Credit: Eduardo Ortega Conjure a sculpture survey in your head, and it probably doesn’t look much like a typical show by Erika Verzutti, who tends to exhibit her creations in bizarre ways. Her exhibition last year at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art, for example, featured dozens of plant-like sculptures set on the floor atop a long strip at the center of a gallery. This show, the result of a residency at LUMA Arles, looks to continue that trend, with works recalling bodily appendages and European modernist structures exhibited on newspapers. More than simply providing a dose of artistic weirdness, this mode of presentation is, for this Brazilian sculptor, a means of fighting the deadening coldness of white-cube spaces.
Opens June 30, 2024
“Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson” at SITE Santa Fe
Image Credit: ©Teresita Fernández/Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London Two leading lights of land art—the latter an exponent of the capital-L 1970s movement, the former a contemporary inheritor to that tendency—come together for this show. Fernández frequently creates grand sculptures featuring burnt wood, graphite, and other natural elements, in the process making visible the scars of colonialist histories left behind on the landscape. Smithson, on the other hand, used soil and rocks in more formal ways, exploring the changing relationship between nature and industry. How much, or how little, will the two artists mesh? This show, co-curated by Fernández herself, should offer an interesting test case.
July 5–October 28, 2024
“Gyula Kosice: Intergalactic” at Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires
Image Credit: Museum of Fine Arts Houston Gyula Kosice believed that our plundered earth would not be able to host humanity forever, and he spent much of his career trying to find an alternate way of living, even approaching NASA with the idea to build something like a floating city. That metropolis never came to be, but he realized it as his 1946–72 installation The Hydrospatial City, a grouping of Plexiglas models and lightboxes that contain the kind of modernist architecture he imagined. Widely regarded as this Czech-born, Argentina-based modernist’s masterpiece, the work will travel here for this retrospective, which will focus on how Kosice looked to the cosmos to find solutions to the ills of his current moment.
July 5–November 4, 2024
“Mari Chordà… and Many Other Things” at Museu d’Art Contemporani di Barcelona
Image Credit: FotoGasull/©Mari Chordà/VEGAP, Barcelona/MACBA Although this exhibition promises to focus on a plentitude of topics, its main one is the titular Catalan artist, a pioneering feminist whose art is just as liberated as her politics. Aesthetic pleasure is a driving principle of her work: her abstractions from the 1960s onward depict vaginas, intercourse, and bodily fluids, all via sensuous blocks of color that both shock and seduce the eye. But she has also produced a range of non-visual works, from a feminist bar to poetry, and all of that also offers its own form of joy, too. Now in her 80s, Chordà is this summer getting one of her most high-profile shows to date.
July 5, 2024–January 12, 2025
“Luiz Roque: Estufa” at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
Image Credit: ©Luiz Roque/Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, and New York The KW’s survey for Luiz Roque borrows its name from his 2004 video Estufa (Greenhouse), which focuses on plants that appear to talk to one another using colored smoke. That work, like many other videos by Roque, features beings from our world that seem alien; his other subjects have included a dog that flies a plane solo and an anteater found in a Brazilian jungle. Roque depicts these creatures matter-of-factly, as though there were nothing strange about them at all, which is, in a way, his point: that “others,” whether they’re queer people or bizarre-looking mammals, live among us and deserve our attention. His KW exhibition, billed as his first-ever survey, brings this Brazilian’s art to Europe.
July 6–October 24, 2024
“Martha Diamond: Deep Time” at Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine
Image Credit: Martha Diamond Studio This survey became a memorial during its planning: its subject, the painter Martha Diamond, died at 79 this past January, leaving behind a trove of brushy paintings of New York skyscrapers. Diamond’s painterly minimalism, with her buildings rendered as long, streaky structures set against muted backgrounds, has long stood out, since it rarely fit any dominant aesthetic trends. That may explain why she has yet to receive a survey like this one until now, but thankfully, she is finally receiving her due, albeit posthumously.
July 13–October 13, 2024
“Where I Learned to Look: Art from the Yard” at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
Image Credit: Mario Esquivel When it comes to the summer, yards are most often associated with outdoor drinking and barbecues, but this exhibition proposes that we may as well think of these spaces as being fodder for experimental art as well. Art historian Josh T. Franco, who curated the show, has here focused on the phenomenon of what he calls “yard art,” which he has said “demonstrates a persistent world-building impulse across diverse spaces, makers, and audiences,” per a statement accompanying the show. The methods by the artists included vary widely: Jeff Koons is showing a “Gazing Ball” sculpture featuring a chintzy birdbath, while Finnegan Shannon will debut a new piece that can be used a site for playing cornhole.
July 13–December 1, 2024
Lawrence Weiner at UCCA Contemporary Art Center, Beijing
Image Credit: Getty Images In 2007, when the UCCA Contemporary Art Center opened, one of the biggest works on view was Lawrence Weiner’s TO ALLOW THE LIGHT, which arrayed that text, along with its Chinese-language equivalent, along a vast wall of the museum. That work was one of many done by the American Conceptualist via instructions: he merely offered specifications for how to make the work, then allowed others to execute it, in essence removing himself from the process at a point. Seventeen years on, the museum is honoring Weiner once more with this survey, which focuses specifically on how the late artist used words to upend grammar and the very rules of art institutions.
July 20–October 20, 2024
“Tapta: Flexible Forms” at Muzeum Susch, Switzerland
Image Credit: ©Lola Pertsowsky/Private Collection, Brussels Between 1976 and 1990, the Polish-Belgian artist Tapta operated a textile workshop called Flexible Sculpture, its name a reference to the broad-mindedness that she aspired to instill within her students. That unconventional method of teaching, geared less around passing down age-old concepts than inspiring curiosity, mirrored an openness seen in her own sculptures. With their woven and knotted elements, and often containing holes and other gaping areas, these sculptures seemed deliberately incomplete, as though the viewer were being asked to fill them in. Tapta’s work has largely been seen in bulk only in Belgium, the country where her Flexible Sculpture workshop was; the Muzeum Susch retrospective is this late artist’s first major show outside that country.
July 20–November 3, 2024
“Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent” at Whitechapel Gallery, London
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Richard Saltoun Gallery Peter Kennard is one of those artists more famous for having his works appear outside institutional walls rather than within them—his antiwar photomontages, printed as posters, count among the forceful calls against nuclear power and mass killing. But the Whitechapel Gallery has now endeavored to take stock of this British artist and activist’s achievements, charting how he remixed clipped images of Prime Ministers and celebrities in service of hotly political statements. Alongside the past works on view, there will be a new one, The People’s University of the East End (2024), which Kennard has described as a summation of 50 years of art that “rails at the waste of lives caused by the trillions spent on manufacturing weapons and the vast profits made by arms companies.”
July 23, 2024–January 19, 2025
“The Life and Art of Tokio Ueyama” at Denver Art Museum, Colorado
Image Credit: ©Estate of Tokyio Ueyama/Japanese American National Museum The State of Colorado and Tokio Ueyama, who died in 1954, occupy an uneasy relationship, given that the state was where this artist and his wife Suye were interned for several years, making them two of many Japanese Americans placed in government-run prison camps following the attack on Pearl Harbor. But now, to begin to rectify a historical wrong, the Denver Art Museum has sought to tell Ueyama’s story through several dozen paintings done in a realist style. Some works assembled here attest to what the Ueyamas experienced while they were incarcerated: his seemingly placid painting The Evacuee (1942), featuring a cross-legged Suye knitting away, has for a background a set of single-floor structures that confined other Japanese Americans.
July 28, 2024–June 1, 2025
“Walter Price: Pearl Lines” at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Image Credit: Elisabeth Bernstein/Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York Fast-rising painter Walter Price has made a name for himself by creating intense, gorgeous paintings that seem deliberately indecipherable, with figures that fade away into abstract backgrounds. Sometimes, in Price’s paintings, there are some clues to what’s represented—sparsely rendered trees appear, as do vaguely represented brick walls. But more often than not, his paintings are unknowable, a sensibility underlined by the fact that Price routinely titles his exhibitions under the same name, “Pearl Lines,” a phrase with no obvious meaning. The mysteriousness of Price’s paintings is part of their charm, however, and now, this young artist is a comprehensive survey that will include new works.
August 8–December 15, 2024
“Walid Raad: Cotton under my feet: The Zurich Chapter” at Kunsthaus Zurich
Image Credit: Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich Since 2012, the collection of Emil Bührle, a Swiss industrialist who made his fortune by selling weapons to the Nazis, has been a fixture at this Swiss museum, which has faced quite a few controversies over it. In the past few years alone, Miriam Cahn threatened to pull works from the museum because it continued to steward the collection, and a committee appointed to determine how the art in it was obtained came apart last year after experts couldn’t agree whether to provide material on the works’ original Jewish owners. Enter Walid Raad, who, this summer, will show his art beside works from the Bührle collection. As in the past, his goal is to expose the secret histories contained within institutional walls, laying them bare for the public to see, whether they want to acknowledge them or not.
August 16–November 3, 2024
“Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: The Finest Disregard” at Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Image Credit: ©Museum Associates/LACMA/©Magdalena Suarez Frimkess/Collection of Karin Gulbran This Venezuelan-born, Los Angeles–based artist has for decades been making ceramic objects that allude to pop culture in ways both ironic and genuine. Minnie Mouse, Vicks VapoRub, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, comic books, lions, flowers, and more have counted among the subjects in her creations, many of which are small in scale. She didn’t receive her first solo exhibition until 2013, when she was 84, and now, in her mid-90s, she is finally set to have her first museum exhibition, which will feature ceramics produced by both her and her husband, the artist Michael Frimkess.
August 18, 2024–January 5, 2025
“Leonilson: Now and Opportunity” at Museu de Arte de São Paulo
Image Credit: Eduardo Ortega/MASP This show, part of MASP’s ongoing “Queer Histories” series, focuses specifically on the final few years of Leonilson’s career, which was cut short in 1993 when the Brazilian artist died of AIDS-related causes. The 150 artworks assembled attest to a creator who viewed people as containing multitudes, with their bodies revealing the many factors that guided their lives. One painting in this show features a tower of figures set against a white background, their necks and shoulders fusing together. Another work is scrawled with a telling phrase: “I’m only one man, I’m two.”
August 23–November 27, 2024
Tau Lewis at Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Image Credit: ©Tau Lewis/Courtesy the artist/Private Collection Many of Tau Lewis’s sculptures enlist pieces of used clothing, materials that the artist recycles and rearranges to form otherworldly beings. That the clothing has been worn by someone else is important to her—she seeks to find life in others’ objects and to enlist the production of her sculptures in her own spiritual quest, rooting herself in worlds far away from our own. The fast-rising, Canadian-born artist is set to debut a new body of work in this exhibition, her first at a museum in the United States, the country where she is now based.
August 29, 2024–January 26, 2025
“Sandra Mujinga: Time as a Shield” at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland
Image Credit: Photo Giuseppe Cottini/Getty Images Many of Sandra Mujinga’s figures hover between visibility and invisibility, as in her 2021 video Pervasive Light, in which the musician Mariama Ndure emerges from and disappears into a void. That video’s booming soundtrack, plus its clever use of computer-generated effects, adds to its eeriness, a quality that pervades much of this young artist’s work, which has memorably appeared in venues ranging from the Guggenheim Museum to the Venice Biennale in recent years. Her latest project is this show at the closely watched Kunsthalle Basel, where she will debut a new installation featuring more spectral people that contend with the quandary of how not to be seen.
August 30, 2024–November 10, 2024
“Melvin Edwards: Some Bright Morning” at Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany
Image Credit: Dan Bradica/©Melvin Edwards/Courtesy the artist; Alexander Gray Associates, New York; and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London Sculptor Melvin Edwards has long implied violence without representing it, most notably doing so in his 1960s series “Lynch Fragments,” welded accumulations of steel that look like machinery gone rogue. Those sculptures, along with his installations formed from forbidding strips of barbed wire, count among their era’s most potent artworks contending with racist carnage, both past and present, and they are now set to gain a new audience in Europe with this 50-work show, billed as his most comprehensive one staged on the continent to date.
August 31, 2024–January 12, 2025