This year, US museums are bringing their A-game when it comes to diversity and innovation, exploring artist movements, less-celebrated creators and forms of expression. Here’s a look at a number of standout exhibitions that get away from the tried and true masters to instead offer museum-goers something closer to the true breadth of creativity that makes art such a vital and necessary part of our world.
Harold Cohen: AARON
With the sudden emergence of ChatGPT in 2023, AI-assisted creation very quickly became a hot – and extremely divisive – topic. The Whitney’s Harold Cohen: AARON is a timely exhibition of how we’ve used, and continue to use, machines to fuel our art. Centered around AARON, AI art software that’s been used since the 1960s, the exhibit showcases AARON-assisted art and delves into how the software works. The show promises to offer fresh perspectives on a debate that is likely to persist for quite a while.
Zanele Muholi: Eye Me
Since the early 2000s, the South African “visual activist” Zanele Muholi has used their camera to document the marginalization and ongoing quest for representation of LGBTQ+ individuals throughout their home country. Opening in January at SF MoMA, this “first major exhibition of Muholi’s work on the west coast” gives audiences the chance to immerse themselves in Muholi’s beautiful and challenging looks into Blackness and queer identities, as they both confront oppression and find paths of resilience.
Lee Mingwei: Rituals of Care
The Taiwanese-American artist Lee Mingwei has built his artistic practice via installations that invite audiences in, asking them to participate in aesthetic experiences that offer space to contemplate relationships and build connections with strangers. Starting in February, San Francisco’s deYoung Museum will host an exhibition of Mingwei’s installations. They include The Letter Writing Project, where museum-goers can take a moment to write a letter to a friend who’s been on their mind, as well as Guernica in Sand, in which one of Picasso’s best-known works is reinterpreted in sand, and then erased bit by bit.
Käthe Kollwitz
Known for her stark, highly expressionistic works depicting life’s deprivations, the German artist Käthe Kollwitz’s art is bracing, unmistakable and transcendent. This spring MoMA promises “the first major retrospective devoted to Kollwitz at a New York museum”, as well as the largest US exhibition of Kollwitz’s art in decades. This major show will offer pieces from collections all around the world and some of the artist’s most iconic pieces, giving audiences a bracing showcase of the traumas of political and social upheaval in a society that went tragically wrong.
Fashioning Aloha
This spring, the Honolulu Museum of Art invites audiences to ponder just what aloha stands for and how it has been translated into fashion, led by the globally famous aloha shirt. Often used as a greeting in Hawaii, aloha has far deeper cultural implications, deriving from the beliefs of native Hawaiian societies –it was even the subject of a 1986 law mandating that state officials treat individuals with compassion and mercy. This exhibit traces the beginnings of aloha fashion in the 1930s, then shows how it has evolved over the decades, drawing in influence from places like Japan and China, always projecting a sense of Hawaiian identity and ethos.
Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective
The fine line between fashion and fetish is negotiated in Christina Ramberg’s art, where she examined her fascination and revulsion at the ways society forces women to modify, contort and otherwise transform their bodies. In spring, the Art Institute of Chicago will bring welcome attention to the artist “best known for her stylized paintings of fragmented female bodies”, with the first retrospective of her work in decades. With around 100 works drawn from numerous collections, this is a valuable look and an under-appreciated artist.
Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art
This exciting exhibit in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art of northern Arkansas delves into the Indian Space Painters movement, a group of abstract artists who sought to combine Native American motifs with European modernism to create a national Indigenous style. Opening in the spring, Space Makers promises to offer new narratives and new ways of seeing the history of American art by taking into account these creative forces.
Simone Leigh
Fresh off being named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2023, Black artist Simone Leigh receives a major career retrospective hosted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the California African American Museum, starting in May 2024. This show collects 20 years of the internationally acclaimed artist’s work, giving audiences a change to see the trajectory of a creator who has pondered questions around Blackness and femininity. Leigh is known for adopting artistic practices from throughout the African diaspora, as well as for her commentary on contemporary events, such as the tragic death of Esmin Elizabeth Green, a Black woman who sat in the waiting room of a Brooklyn hospital for 24 hours, ultimately dying of blood clots
Tiff Massey: 7 Mile + Livernois
The Detroit artist Tiff Massey works primarily in metal, drawing heavily on hip-hop culture, the Detroit area and the African diaspora in order to create installations, sculptures and jewelry ranging in size from the wearable to the architectural. With 7 Mile + Livernois, the Detroit Institute of Art promises the emerging artist’s “most ambitious museum installation to date”, with new work specially commissioned for this exhibit.
Lastly, here are a few more special mentions of notable upcoming exhibitions. The Dallas Museum of Art draws on its holdings to mount a major exhibition covering the “Impressionist revolution”, starting in February. K-pop invades Boston, starting in March, as the Museum of Fine Arts Boston hosts an all-embracing look at “hallyu”, AKA the Korean Wave. In June, Art Institute Chicago offers a look at the New York cityscape through Georgia O’Keeffe’s eyes. Coming in the fall, the Guggenheim deep dives into the abstract art movement Orphism’s heyday in Paris in between the world wars.
