There’s no shortage of amazing art exhibits to see this year, including major retrospectives and eye-opening group shows. Whether you want to be moved, to laugh, to question, or to cry, there’s a show for you. After all, as John Lukavic, the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Native Arts at Denver Art Museum (DAM), says, “We all experience art in different ways.”
This season, Lukavic curated Kent Monkman: History Is Painted by the Victors, the first major U.S. survey of the Cree artist Monkman, which opens April 20 at DAM. “What museums have the responsibility to do is to ask visitors to simply consider why they feel a certain way. What in their own lives led them to that feeling? At their core, museums help us open our eyes to better understand the world around us, and that role is timeless.” Here are eight shows opening this year that you won’t want to miss.
Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei at Seattle Art Museum
March 12–September 7
Ai Weiwei is China’s most famous living artist—and the country’s harshest critic. With Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei, Seattle Art Museum presents the provocateur’s largest-ever U.S. exhibition, gathering more than 130 works created over his 40-year career. The show will explore the intersection between Weiwei’s art and activism and showcase pieces across multiple mediums: photography, video, sculpture, and more. Included is the photo triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) and Sunflower Seeds (2010), an installation of millions of porcelain sunflower seeds that critiques conformity. In addition, Ai Weiwei: Water Lilies, the artist’s reinterpretation of Claude Monet’s famous triptych, made of 650,000 Lego bricks, will be on display at the Seattle Asian Art Museum beginning March 19, and the Olympic Sculpture Park will host Ai Weiwei: Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (Bronze), 12 giant bronze sculptures of the Chinese zodiac cycle, starting May 17.
City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris 1920s–1940s at National Gallery Singapore
April 2–August 17
From the 1920s to the 1940s, Paris was the epicenter of the art world, a magnet for anyone wielding a paintbrush or a charcoal pencil. Books and movies make it seem like one big party, with every Western artist on the guest list: Picasso and Matisse mingled with Miró and Calder, Man Ray and Duchamp toasted alongside Bonnard and Léger. But what about Liu Kang and Kanae Itakura? What was the experience like for Lê Phổ and Hamanaka Katsu? Now, a new exhibit at National Gallery Singapore explores that scene from the perspective of Asian artists living in Paris during those decades. Featuring more than 200 works—paintings, sculptures, decorative arts—the exhibit aims to show both what impact Asian migrants had on the art world and how the Paris scene shaped their work.
Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective at SFMOMA, San Francisco
At left is Untitled by Ruth Asawa; on the right is the artist during an exhibition in 1973.
Left: © 2024 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner. Right: © 2024 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner.
April 5–September 2
Ruth Asawa was a pioneering artist who didn’t receive major acclaim until after she passed, in 2013, at the age of 87. She was awarded a National Medal of Arts in 2024, had her work celebrated at the Venice Biennale in 2022, and was honored by the U.S. Postal Service in 2020 with 10 stamps featuring her wire sculptures. But while she was alive, the Japanese American artist struggled to achieve the kind of recognition afforded to peers like Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama. The first posthumous survey of her career, Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective, captures what a trailblazer she was by bringing together more than 300 works of her art over six decades, including those delicately looped wire sculptures, bronze casts, paintings, drawings, and more. The exhibit also explores what may be her true legacy: her work as a fierce advocate for arts education.
David Hockney 25 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
David Hockney’s “A Bigger Splash” from 1967 will be showing in Paris.
Courtesy of David Hockney Tate, U.K.
April 9–September 1
The largest-ever exhibition of David Hockney’s work will take over all 11 rooms at Fondation Louis Vuitton and will include more than 400 paintings, drawings, digital media pieces, and immersive video installations. As the name denotes, the majority of the show will focus on works from the past 25 years—including pieces Hockney just finished at his studio in Normandy, France. There will be some early works, too, such as Portrait of My Father (1955) and A Bigger Splash (1967). Recent highlights include his 220 for 2020 series—a visual time capsule of a Normandy landscape made entirely on an iPad over the course of a year—and The Great Wall, Hockney’s mishmash of images charting the advancements of Western art. Now 87, Hockney has been involved with every aspect of the exhibit. As he noted in the press release, “I think it’s going to be very good.”
Kent Monkman’s “Resurgence of the People” from 2019 will be included in the exhibition at the Denver Art Museum.
Photo courtesy of Denver Art Museum
Kent Monkman: History Is Painted by the Victors at Denver Art Museum
April 20–August 17
This is the first major survey in the United States for Canadian artist Kent Monkman, a Cree member known for his subversive, large-scale history paintings that reexamine Indigenous and colonial history. A passionate and provocative but also humorous artist, Monkman explores everything from climate change and generational trauma to the government’s impact on marginalized communities in his illustrative work. This exhibit will feature 41 pieces, including the monumental Resurgence of the People, his reimagining of Washington Crossing the Delaware, which features his two-spirit alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, in Washington’s position and which famously greeted visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Great Hall from 2019 to 2020. “The lived experiences of Indigenous and queer people Kent Monkman explores in his work have long been pushed to the peripheries and/or intentionally suppressed,” says curator Lukavic. “The title [of the show] prompts us to stop and think about whose stories, experiences, and histories we have accepted as true, complete, and unquestioned. The erasure and the suppression of more complete narratives have been going on for hundreds of years by those in power. It’s only now that, since these histories have been acknowledged broadly in recent years, they aren’t quite as easy to suppress any
longer.”
See the magic of Vermeer at the Frick.
Courtesy of Frick Museum
Vermeer’s Love Letters at The Frick Collection, New York City
June 18–September 8
After a five-year closure and $330 million renovation, The Frick will once again welcome European-art lovers to its historic Fifth Avenue mansion on April 17, unveiling restored first-floor galleries, an expanded auditorium, an enhanced garden, and new second-floor galleries—which Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick’s Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, deems “the biggest surprise.” The galleries, Salomon explains, “were originally the private living spaces of the Frick family, now a suite of smaller galleries.” Two months after the grand reopening, the museum will present Vermeer’s Love Letters in the new first-floor special exhibition galleries. The exhibit brings together three Vermeers for the first time: Mistress and Maid (owned by the Frick), Love Letter from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and Woman Writing a Letter, With Her Maid from the National Gallery of Ireland. “Visitors will have a rare opportunity not only to see these works together but to explore the artist’s fascination with letter writing,” says Salomon. “These intimate scenes capture themes of secrecy, trust, and social dynamics between women and their maidservants in 17th-century Dutch households. With two additional Vermeers on view from our collection elsewhere in the museum—and five more up the street at The Metropolitan Museum of Art—this summer presentation offers a special opportunity to admirers of the Dutch master.”
The Stars We Do Not See at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
October 18, 2025–March 1, 2026
Australian Indigenous art finally gets its moment in the U.S. with this monumental exhibit, featuring more than 200 works by more than 130 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. All on loan from the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the art spans the late 19th century to the present, and much of it hasn’t been seen outside of Australia. The exhibit is named for the Aboriginal artist Gulumbu Yunupiŋu, who was nicknamed “Star Lady” for her paintings of the night sky that featured dots to symbolize the stars we’re unable to see. Also on display will be photography by Destiny Deacon, paintings by Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Betty Muffler, installations by Brook Andrew, and many traditional works, such as bark paintings and weaving. Can’t make it to D.C.? Next year the exhibit will travel to the Denver Art Museum; the Portland Art Museum in Oregon; Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts; and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
Wes Anderson: The Exhibition at The Design Museum, London
November 21, 2025–July 26, 2026
Symmetry, pastel colors, tableau-like sets, retro fashion: Famously, Wes Anderson’s movies have a look. So it’s fitting that London’s Design Museum is putting on a retrospective exhibition of his work. Touching on all of his films—from 1996’s Bottle Rocket to 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums to last year’s Roald Dahl collection The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More—the exhibit will feature props, set designs, costumes, items from Anderson’s personal collection, and more. The exhibit comes hot on the heels of a show celebrating another visionary director, Tim Burton (running through May 26), which was the museum’s most popular ever. If the Burton show was any indication, expect Anderson-themed snacks (the courtesan au chocolat profiterole tower from The Grand Budapest Hotel, perhaps?), AR experiences, special talks, and more.
