Visual art has always been a thing to behold. Whether it is painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media or the like, the aesthetic of each piece tells a story that can resonate in unique ways depending on the viewer. This summer, Black art has a heavy presence across the country, so you can enjoy a powerful exhibition or two regardless of your location.
Hollywood is a hotbed for creativity. With establishments such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the California African American Museum, Gagosian, The Broad and more, artists from all over the world have exhibited their work in this iconic city. For the next few months, travelers as well as locals can check out Mickalene Thomas’ All About Love, Simone Leigh’s self-titled show, and Those Were the Days, a collection of art from Blitz Bazawule.
On the East coast, galleries such as Pace and the Brooklyn Museum host exhibits featuring Adam Pendleton and The Dean Collection from Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, bringing together the many mediums that art consists of. With Washington DC being a hub of history, the Smithsonian is also a great place to view some thought-provoking pieces from some of the most revered artists in the world.
If you’re looking for some great art, here are 14 must-see exhibitions to check out this summer.
The first major exhibition of the Dean Collection, Giants showcases a focused selection from the couple’s world-class holdings. The Brooklyn Museum’s presentation spotlights works by Black diasporic artists, part of our ongoing efforts to expand the art-historical narrative. Expansive in their collecting habits, Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys—both born and raised in New York, champion a philosophy of “artists supporting artists.” This exhibition is on view at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City through July 7, 2024.
Those Were the Days is a presentation of new paintings and site specific installation by multidisciplinary artist Blitz Bazawule. The genesis of the series was inspired by Bazawule’s memories of the faded black-and-white photos that lined the walls of his childhood home in Accra, Ghana – images of his family elegantly dressed in their Sunday best that stirred a deep sense of nostalgia, which then grew into a strong desire to bring those moments back to life. This exhibition is on view at UTA Artist Space in Los Angeles in San Francisco from June 15 – July 13.
A self-described visual activist, Zanele Muholi uses the camera to explore issues of gender identity, representation, and race. Often photographing their own body or members of their LGBTQ+ community in South Africa, Muholi calls attention to the trauma and violence enacted on queer people while celebrating their beauty and resilience. Activism is central to Muholi’s artistic practice, from their early work contending with the dangers of being queer in South Africa to their more recent work embracing their own blackness and gender expression. This exhibition brings together photographs from 2002 to the present alongside the artist’s latest explorations in painting and sculpture. This exhibition is one view at SFMOMA in San Francisco through August 11, 2024.
Pendleton’s first solo show at Pace’s New York gallery in ten years, An Abstraction follows a series of significant solo exhibitions by the artist at museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2021; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2022; and mumok – Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna in 2023. The return to his home city marks a continuation of his career-long project of creating spaces of engagement and “fighting for the right to exist in and through abstraction.” The exhibition is on view at Pace Gallery’s 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York through August 16, 2024.
With over 90 works made by the artist over the last 20 years, Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is the first major international tour of this pioneering artist’s work. The exhibition highlights how Mickalene Thomas has mastered and innovated within several disciplines, from mixed-media painting and collage to installation and photography. The exhibition shares its title and several of its themes with the pivotal text by feminist author bell hooks, in which love is an active process rooted in healing, carving a path away from domination and towards collective liberation. The exhibition is on view at The Broad in Los Angeles through September 29, 2024.
Simone Leigh is the first comprehensive survey of the richly layered work of this celebrated artist. CAAM’s presentation, which includes works from her 2022 Venice Biennale presentation, features nearly twenty years of Leigh’s practice in ceramics, bronze, video, installation, and social activation. Together, these works index a web of Black feminist theory, archival excavation, infrastructures for mutual care, and African art and architecture. Accompanied by a major monograph, this exhibition offers visitors a timely opportunity to gaze at Leigh’s artistic, scholarly, and social contributions, inspired by legacies of creativity, survival, and documentation by Black femmes throughout the world. This exhibition is on view at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles through January 20, 2025.
Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage is the first large-scale exhibition dedicated to exploring collage by contemporary Black American artists such as Mark Bradford, Nina Chanel Abney, Kerry James Marshall, Tschabalala Self, and Kara Walker. Featuring nearly 60 works by 49 artists, this exhibition celebrates the broad variety and complexity of Black identity in art. This exhibition is on view at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC from July 6 – September 24, 2024.
This summer, the High will present a major exhibition featuring Tyler Mitchell’s seamless blend of fine art and fashion photography, along with a new photo-sculptural artwork. In his practice, he centers Black self-determination and empowerment with affirmative images of people who are often shown enjoying the freedom of leisure, play, and recreation. This homecoming exhibition will feature more than thirty photographs considering his examination of themes such as masculinity, motherhood, domesticity, rest, and the natural world. This exhibition is on view at The High Museum in Atlanta from June 21 – December 1, 2024.
Celebrated Nigerian sculptor and printmaker Bruce Onobrakpeya began creating works depicting Christian iconography in 1966, when Catholic priests petitioned the artist to interpret the Passion of Christ. The resulting body of work, titled Fourteen Stations of the Cross, was well received, and Onobrakpeya continued to produce relief, print, and mural commissions for Catholic priests and parishes through 1978. Originally presented by the High Museum of Art, The Mask and the Cross showcases the earliest of these commissions, from the late 1960s, with the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art’s special presentation foregrounding the artist’s commissions in print. This exhibition is on view at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC from June 21, 2024 – January 21, 2025.
The seven moving-image makers featured in Screens share the planetary hopes of Pan-Africanism, a set of bold visions first developed before 1900 that have galvanized global struggles for freedom and solidarity ever since. The films underscore the great attention paid by African and African diasporic contemporary artists to legacies of the 1950s and ’60s. In those decades, people of African descent worldwide achieved unprecedented gains in national sovereignty, cultural expression, and political recognition. This exhibition is on view at Art Institute Chicago in Chicago, IL from August 10, 2024 – January 6, 2025.
Arthur Jafa: Works from the MCA Collection surveys the artist’s output over roughly the last ten years through a selection of artworks held in the MCA’s collection, including his videos APEX (2013), Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016), The White Album (2018), and Akingdoncomethas (2018). Accompanying the videos are a few key sculptural and photographic works that further underscore Jafa’s unique approach to visual culture and image making, in which the lines between popular and high culture blur and the personal collides with the political. This exhibition is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in Chicago, IL through March 2, 2025.
This Morning, This Evening, So Soon is guest curated by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hilton Als. It is titled after a short story the writer, essayist, playwright, and activist published in The Atlantic. The show relies on portraiture and ephemera to explore the interwoven lives of Baldwin; Lorraine Hansberry, Barbara Jordan, Bayard Rustin, Essex Hemphill, and Marlon Riggs. Well-known portraits by Beauford Delany and Bernard Gotfryd are shown alongside works by artists such as Richard Avedon, Glenn Ligon, Donald Moffett, Faith Ringgold, Lorna Simpson and Jack Whitten. This exhibition is on view at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC from July 12, 2024 – April 20, 2025.
Born in Kampala, Uganda, and based in New York, Leilah Babirye is known for her highly expressive, ambiguously gendered sculptures in ceramic, wood, and discarded objects.We Have a History, the artist’s first solo museum show in the United States, highlights the connection between past and present that is at the heart of de Young’s Contemporary African Art program. This exhibition is on view at de Young Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco from June 22, 2024 – June 22, 2025.
Kara Walker has long been recognized for her incisive examinations of the dynamics of power and the exploitation of race and sexuality. Walker’s new commission, Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine), considers the memorialization of trauma, the objectives of technology, and the possibilities of transforming the negative energies that plague contemporary society. This exhibition is on view at SFMOMA in San Francisco from July 1, 2024–May 2026.
