Miró and the United States @ Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona + The Phillips Collection, Washington DC - A Major Exhibition

Miró and the United States

Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

10 October 2025 – 22 February 2026

The Phillips Collection, Washington 

21 March – 5 July 2026

The Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, in collaboration with The Phillips Collection in Washington, presents a new and revealing exhibition entitled Miró and the United States, which highlights the intense, bidirectional and intergenerational relationship between Joan Miró and his contemporaries in North America. While it is well known that many North American artists were inspired by Miró, it is less well known that he was also inspired by North American art, particularly gestural, action and large format painting. This exchange and creative flow spanned continents and generations and is one of the central themes of the exhibition, which is part of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Fundació Joan Miró. Coming from a Spain devastated by the Franco dictatorship, the United States represented for Joan Miró not only art, but also a country of large open horizons, hope, democracy, future and endless possibilities.

Miró and the United States brings together an outstanding selection of paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, films and archival documents from American and European collections, as well as new studies by renowned specialists on Miró’s artistic evolution.

Miró and the United States is a unique exhibition because it offers a fresh look at Miró’s place in modern art, a reading that places the North American context at its heart. In other words, rather than focusing on the French context, which is essential for understanding his work from the 1920s and 1930s onwards, the show situates the United States as a pivotal territory in the evolution of Joan Miró’s artistic language, his international recognition and his connections with other artists. The United States enabled Joan Miró to undertake large-scale public projects – such as the sculpture Moon, Sun and One Star, made for Chicago – that would have been unfeasible in Spain at the time. The open and experimental environment of the United States helped Miró to consolidate his creative freedom and international recognition.

The exhibition therefore showcases key moments in Miró’s career in the USA: his two retrospectives in New York (in 1941 and 1959), his seven visits between 1947 and 1968, and also the pivotal role played by his dealer, Pierre Matisse, as well as the support of various American institutions and collectors.

The exhibition is a unique event as it displays 138 works from American and European collections as well as those from the Fundació Joan Miró’s own holdings, including both works by Joan Miró and approximately forty other artists. The selection is based on known connections and intergenerational relationships of admiration, including the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Helen Frankenthaler, Arshile Gorky, Lee Krasner, Alice Trumbull Mason, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, among many others. This artistic conversation demonstrates how Miró’s legacy continues to live on.

Based on years of research, the exhibition re-examines the established narratives about Miró’s position in the history of art through the selection of artists who feature in it. The different sections of Miró and the United States explore this relationship between Joan Miró and forty-nine contemporary artists from different generations. The exhibition also includes many artists who, despite not being originally from the country, moved or went there temporarily to develop part of their artistic careers. Driven by immigration, exile, the search for opportunities or cultural exchange, these creators played a decisive role in shaping the diverse and international North American art scene.

Although it has become commonplace, the fact that the centre of the art world shifted from Paris to New York is historically grounded. The global upheaval of the Second World War led to many European artists and intellectuals being exiled to the United States, fostering the emergence of North American Abstract Expressionism. This geopolitical and cultural shift was examined in a pioneering manner by Serge Guilbaut in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1985), in which he argues how New York appropriated the symbolic leadership of modern art.

Joan Miró witnessed and participated in the shift of artistic capital from Paris to New York in the period immediately following the turbulent years of the Second World War. This geopolitical and cultural reconfiguration, which may have once seemed distant, now resonates with an urgency and topicality that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. One of the major attractions of Miró and the United States is the curatorial proposal, which brings together works and artists that reveal connections between Miró and the North American art scene that have never been seen before. The exhibition also offers the public an exceptional opportunity to view works that have never previously been exhibited in Spain, including Lee Krasner’s The Seasons, which is on loan from the Whitney Museum for the first time.

Another exhibition highlight is the presence of Miró's Mural Painting, 20 March 1961 (1961), a monumental work that was exhibited several times in the 1960s: in 1961 at the Galerie Maeght in Paris and the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, and in 1964 in London and Zurich as part of the Miró retrospective organised by Roland Penrose. Since then, once Josep Lluís Sert had donated the mural to the Harvard Art Museums, this is the first time they have authorised its loan for an exhibition in Europe, a fact that makes its presence in the Miró and the United States exhibition a truly exceptional event.

Moreover, in an unprecedented move, the first two works that Joan Miró exhibited in the United States are reunited for the first time: Le Renversement (1924) and Painting (1926), which were originally presented at the Brooklyn Museum.

As part of Miró and the United States, the Fundació Joan Miró is presenting 22 pochoirs on paper of Constellations, dated 1959. Like the original Constellations of 1940-1941, they were conceived by Joan Miró so that they could be viewed from both sides. While these pieces have been previously exhibited in other settings, this is the first time they have been displayed according to this original, double-sided design, exactly as the artist had intended. This unprecedented curatorial commitment recovers his original vision, offering the public a fresh look at the formal freedom and experimental spirit that define his work.

Alongside important works admired by Joan Miró, such as Jackson Pollock's Number 14, are more surprising dialogues, such as that with Janet Sobel, whose Illusion of Solidity (1945) shows her to be the precursor of the dripping technique One of the exhibition’s crowning works is Lee Krasner’s The Seasons, a piece of imposing dimensions and sublime visual and emotional impact that is travelling to Spain for the first time. The exhibition also sheds light on female artists who had to use male pseudonyms to gain recognition, such as Henrietta Myers (Peter Miller) and Corinne Michelle West (Michael West).

The Miró and the United States exhibition arrives at a particularly opportune moment, filling a clear need in Miró’s artistic story. It transports us to another time and place – full of light, curiosity and risk – when art was a bold commitment to a better future. Amidst a 20th century marked by repression and instability, contact with the United States represented a source of creative energy and openness for Joan Miró, a democratic and dynamic horizon full of artistic opportunities. Miró actively engaged in dialogue with the North American artistic community, which became a place of inspiration and transformation. This fruitful exchange not only renewed his career, but also reinforced his ability to connect with a world in motion, full of contrasts and possibilities. The exhibition therefore invites us to look back and move forward with hope, to continue taking risks and to believe in the power of art as a tool for change and expanding horizons.

Miró and the United States

© Courtesy Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Miró and the United States, available in Catalan, Spanish and English. It includes texts by renowned Miró curators and specialists: Dawn Ades, Beatriz Cordero Martín, Marko Daniel, Matthew Gale, Patricia Juncosa, Robert Lubar Messeri, Teresa Montaner, Dolors Rodríguez Roig, Élisa Sclaunick, Elsa Smithgall and Anne Umland.

The Miró and the United States exhibition, co-organised with The Phillips Collection in Washington, will also be on show there from 21 March to 5 July 2026.

Curatorship: Marko Daniel, Matthew Gale and Dolors Rodríguez Roig from the Fundació Joan Miró, in collaboration with Elsa Smithgall from The Phillips Collection

FUNDACIO JOAN MIRO, BARCELONA

www.fmirobcn.org

Nick Cave: Mammoth @ Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC - The museum’s largest-ever commission by a single artist

Nick Cave: Mammoth

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

February 13, 2026 - Jananuary 3, 2027

Nick Cave, Artist in his studio

Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery 

Photograph by James Prinz

The Smithsonian American Art Museum will debut “Nick Cave: Mammoth,” a monumental new body of work by internationally acclaimed artist NICK CAVE. Commissioned by the museum, “Mammoth” marks Cave’s first solo exhibition in Washington, D.C. and represents the museum’s largest-ever commission by a single artist.  

“Mammoth” is Cave’s most personal project to date. Drawing on his childhood in Chariton County, Missouri—where his grandparents farmed and where the quilts, tools and clothing they made were a part of everyday life—Nick Cave roots this installation in family history, landscapes and craft traditions. He transforms these sources into a world animated by memory and the transformative possibilities of the imagination. Combining sculpture, video and found objects, the exhibition reflects on the artist’s own creative impulse and invites audiences to consider their relationship to the natural world and the everyday objects and histories that shape our lives.  

“‘Nick Cave: Mammoth’ builds on the museum’s commitment to present artists whose work speaks to the American experience and fosters connection,” said Jane Carpenter-Rock, acting Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “It is an honor to support a new body of work by one of today’s leading artists, the museum’s most significant commission to date by a single artist and to present it in dialogue with the sweep of American art across our galleries.”

“‘Mammoth’ is a conversation across time, a meditation on how and why we make, and how we live with what we inherit,” said Sarah Newman. “Nick Cave gathers fragments of daily life—toys, tools, keepsakes, even the remains of ancient creatures—and transforms them into a shared space of memory and imagination. His work is a powerful reminder that objects are often more than things; they carry our histories, our knowledge, and the stories that carry us forward.”

Nick Cave remakes a suite of galleries on the museum’s third floor into a series of immersive environments. Against a 60-by-20-foot hand-beaded tapestry laid over a landscape of Chariton County, Missouri, towering lifeguard chairs rise—some crowned with massive skeletal mammoth heads, others draped in hides. In the center of the space, a glowing, 700-square-foot light table holds thousands of found objects—from vintage tools, juggling balls and pie plates to his grandmother’s thimble collection—arranged like paleontological specimens. Some remain recognizable; others have been transformed into masks, creatures and contraptions that feel alive with spirit and intention.

The mammoths come alive in “Roam,” a video projected across four walls of an adjoining gallery that follows the massive creatures as they wander through present-day Chicago. In another space, Cave presents bronze sculptures from his “Amalgams” series, which fuse casts from his own body with natural forms such as flowers, birds and trees. These works, surrounded by metal tole flowers and antique cast-iron doorstops—including those from his grandparents’ home—evoke both loss and renewal, the solace of nature and the imprint of inheritance.

The installation will be activated by a site-specific performance.

Artist Nick Cave

Nick Cave (born 1959, Fulton, Missouri; lives and works in Chicago) is an artist and educator working between the visual and performing arts through a wide range of mediums including sculpture, installation, video, sound and performance. His work builds upon generations of Black artists and artisans, from quilters such as his own grandmothers to the assemblers of yard art in the American South, who imbued cast-off materials with new meaning. Nick Cave has harnessed this transformative impulse throughout his work—most famously in his series of “Soundsuits,” part sculpture and part garment, which conceal their wearers’ identities at the same time as they metamorphose into others.  

Nick Cave earned a bachelor’s degree in fine art at Kansas City Art Institute, a master’s degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and is currently director of the graduate program in fashion at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is in many museum collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Arkansas). In 2022, he completed a multi-part commission from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City for a glass mosaic and video work “Each One, Every One, Equal All” that is on view in the Times Sq-42 St Station. Other recent projects and exhibitions include the major retrospective “Nick Cave: Forothermore” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2022); “The Let Go” at Park Avenue Armory (2018); and “Nick Cave: Until” at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2016).  

Publication: A richly illustrated catalog, published in association with D. Giles Limited, will accompany the exhibition. The book offers an intimate look into Cave’s creative process, featuring found and personal objects that inspired him, annotated with his own handwritten notes and drawings. The publication includes essays by Newman, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw and Cherise Smith, and a major new poem by J Drew Lanham.

“Nick Cave: Mammoth” is organized by Sarah Newman, the James Dicke Curator of Contemporary Art, with support from Anne Hyland, curatorial associate.

SAAM - SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM 

8th and G Streets, NW, Washington, DC 20004

americanart.si.edu

Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work @ Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington + Other Venues

Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington 

October 24, 2025 - July 12, 2026

Grandma Moses 

We Are Resting, 1951 

Oil on high-density fiberboard 

Smithsonian American Art Museum, 

Gift of the Kallir Family, in Memory of Hildegard Bachert, 2019.55, 

© Grandma Moses Properties Co., NY

"Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work" repositions Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses (1860–1961) as a multidimensional force in American art, whose beloved painted recollections of rural life earned her a distinctive place in the cultural imagination of the postwar era. Drawing its name from Moses’ reflection on her own life as a “good day’s work,” the exhibition reveals how Moses’ art fused creativity, labor and memories from a century-long life. 

“Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work” is anchored by artworks from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection, including many of Moses’ most celebrated paintings. The 88 works in the exhibition are drawn from the museum’s holdings and loans from private collections and public museums and institutions. This selection of objects, primarily created between the late 1930s and the artist’s death in 1961, are woven into a narrative that explores lesser-known aspects of Moses’ life, including the years she spent living, working and raising her family in post-Reconstruction Virginia. Later sections of the exhibition probe Moses’ artistic evolution as the labor of artmaking displaced the hours once dedicated to family and farming, and her personal transformation from farmwife to famous artist in Cold War America. Photographs, ephemeral objects and Moses’ own words—drawn largely from her autobiography—illuminate artworks that were deeply connected to the artist’s life.

The exhibition is organized by Leslie Umberger, senior curator of folk and self-taught art, and Randall Griffey, head curator, with support from curatorial assistant Maria R. Eipert. The exhibition will travel following its premiere in Washington, D.C.

“Grandma Moses was instrumental in bringing self-taught art to the forefront of American consciousness,” said Jane Carpenter-Rock, Acting Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “As one of the first major museums to champion and collect works in this tradition, our museum is honored to shed new light on Grandma Moses’ practice and engage new generations by becoming a major resource for studying her art and legacy.”

“Moses was many things to many people: she was an ambassador for democratic American values, a folk hero and pop-culture celebrity, a comforting grandmotherly figure representing a bygone age, an inspiring elder reinventing herself in retirement and an untrained artist presenting what was then considered ‘modern primitivism’ as a surprisingly successful alternative to abstract art,” Leslie Umberger said. “‘A Good Day’s Work’ reconciles these disparate truths while centering on Moses’ art and the life that inspired it—one shaped by ingenuity, labor, a doggedly positive outlook and a distilled understanding of a life well lived.” 

In a lifetime that spanned the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, the artist experienced seismic historical shifts, including the post-Reconstruction and civil rights eras and two world wars. She began painting in earnest in her late 70s and was 80 when gallerist Otto Kallir introduced her to the American public with her first solo exhibition. In her artworks, Moses melded direct observation of nature and life as she saw it, resulting in idiosyncratic, yet engaging, stories of America. “Grandma Moses” as the press would indelibly dub her, quickly became a media sensation, achieving a controversial celebrity status that surpassed the female artists of her day and remains compelling today.

Through a series of gifts and pledges of 15 important paintings from Kallir’s family, along with gifts from several additional donors and select museum purchases, the museum is establishing a destination-collection of 33 works by Moses, balanced across styles, dates, themes and historical moments. A major asset within the museum’s internationally recognized collection of work by folk and self-taught artists, the Moses collection will comprise significant works, from her earliest extant painting, “Untitled (Fireboard)” (1918), to iconic pieces including “Bringing in the Maple Sugar” (1939), “Black Horses” (1942) and “Out for Christmas Trees” (1946), to her last completed painting, “The Rainbow” (1961), all of which are represented in the exhibition. Also on view will be the first painting donated to the museum by the Kallir family in 2016, “Grandma Moses Goes to the Big City” (1946), a rare work in which Moses includes herself in the depicted narrative. The museum will be a premier Moses repository for scholars and the public.

Artist Grandma Moses

Anna Mary Robertson Moses was born in Greenwich, New York, in 1860 and raised on a farm. From early in her life, she worked as a hired girl, helping neighbors and relatives with cleaning, cooking and sewing. As a child, her father had encouraged her to draw on old newsprint, and she used berry and grape juices to color her images.  

Robertson married at 27 and moved, with her new husband, Thomas Salmon Moses, to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. There, over the course of the next 18 years, the couple raised five children and worked as dairy farmers, shaping a highly successful butter-making business. Moses did not start painting until she was in her late 70s, after her children had moved on and her husband had died, looking for something, as she put it, with which “to keep busy and out of mischief.” She made paintings that merged fact with fiction and personal with national history, drawing on her own memories as well as family and local lore. She began her foray into the limelight by presenting her pictures at country fairs, alongside her prize-winning fruit preserves.  

In 1938, a collector saw her paintings in the window of a local pharmacy and bought them all. Two years later, Kallir—an art dealer and recent immigrant who had fled the Nazi regime in his native Austria—gave Moses her first solo exhibition. In the aftermath of World War II, Moses was seen as a global ambassador for democratic American values, and her unpretentious sensibilities and the scenes of family life and holidays enchanted a populace weary from conflict and rapid change. Following a press event and presentation of her paintings at Gimbels department store, the media dubbed her “Grandma Moses.” Gradually, ‘Grandma Moses’ became a household name. In 1947, Hallmark licensed the rights to reproduce her paintings on greeting cards. Reproductions on drapery fabric, china and other consumer goods followed, along with magazine features, television and radio interviews and an Academy Award-nominated documentary. Moses died at 101 in 1961, after painting more than 1,500 images.  

Publication: A richly illustrated catalog, published in association with Princeton University Press, will accompany the exhibition. It is co-edited by Umberger and Griffey, with a foreword by Carpenter-Rock and contributions by Erika Doss, Eleanor Jones Harvey, Stacy C. Hollander, Jane Kallir and Katherine Jentleson. The book will be available for purchase ($60) in the museum’s store and online.

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

8th and G Streets, NW, Washington, DC 20004

americanart.si.edu

Big Things for Big Rooms @ Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC - An Exhibition of Large-scale Artworks since the late 1960s

Big Things for Big Rooms

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

November 21, 2025 – July 4, 2027 

Sam Gilliam 

Light Depth, 1969 

Acrylic on canvas; 120 × 900 in. (304.8 × 2286 cm) 

Gift from the Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art 

(Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund), 2018

Mika Rottenberg 

Tropical Breeze (exterior), 2004.

Installation view, Sneeze to Squeeze, Magasin III, Stockholm, 2013 

Single-channel video installation; 3:45 min. 

Exterior; 96 × 96 × 240 in. (243.84 × 243.84 × 609.6 cm) 

Gift of the Berezdivin Collection, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2024 

Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden 

Photo: Christian Saltas 

Courtesy the artist, Magasin III, Stockholm; and Hauser and Wirth

Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum will open “Big Things for Big Rooms,” an exhibition tracing the development of immersive large-scale artworks since the late 1960s. The presentation of 10 artworks—five on view for the first time at the Museum—is drawn largely from the Hirshhorn’s collection. “Big Things for Big Rooms” offers a multisensorial examination of how artists create installation works that expand the boundaries of an artwork and the role of the visitor. 

“Big Things for Big Rooms” is organized into two parts. The first introduces the development of “Environments,” expansive installations by pioneering artists such as Robert Irwin, whose work defined the Light and Space movement, and Land artist Richard Long. The second half demonstrates how contemporary artists like Paul Chan, Olafur Eliasson, and Mika Rottenberg are expanding upon these foundational ideas in different ways, often using everyday materials. 

The exhibition is organized by the Hirshhorn’s head curator, Evelyn C. Hankins, with the support of curatorial assistant CJ Greenhill Caldera.

“This exhibition connects the profound creativity of the 1960s to the contemporary artists who are reshaping our sense of the world and our place in it,” said Museum Director Melissa Chiu. “Presented as a continuum from ‘Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960,’ which inaugurated our 50th-anniversary season, ‘Big Things for Big Rooms’ manifests these essential art-historical developments while demonstrating the significance of installation art in the Hirshhorn’s permanent collection.”

Rooted in artist and critic Allan Kaprow’s groundbreaking 1958 concept of “Environments,” which he defined as artworks that require visitors to actively engage with or even complete them, “Big Things for Big Rooms” begins with the Hirshhorn’s inaugural presentation of Sam Gilliam’s painting “Light Depth” (1969). Sam Gilliam experimented with dynamic, color-washed canvases, or Drapes, removing them from their stretchers and allowing their forms to change in response to each presentation. Extending 75 feet, the sweeping, frameless “Light Depth,” long considered to be Gilliam’s most important Drape, spills from the wall of the Museum’s first gallery, blurring the boundaries among painting, sculpture, and installation art.

Following “Light Depth” are other pioneering works, including Dan Flavin’s “‘monument’ for V. Tatlin” (1967), an arrangement of fluorescent fixtures that deploys light to define the space and involve the visitor. Also on view is Lygia Pape’s “Ttéia 1,A” (1979/2025), a geometric installation of shimmering metallic threads that anticipates the individual’s movement within the gallery.

As the exhibition unfolds, its focus shifts toward contemporary global artists, including Spencer Finch and Eliasson, who are envisioning immersive art for the 21st century. Highlights include recent Hirshhorn acquisitions such as Rottenberg’s “Tropical Breeze” (2004), a gallery-filling shipping container that functions as a screening room, and a recent site-responsive installation by Rashid Johnson, an assembly of objects of personal and cultural resonance (including live plants, books, ceramics, and shea butter) positioned within a minimalist sculptural framework that can be further activated by gatherings, performances, and reflection. The exhibition concludes with Chan’s “3rd Light” (2006), a mesmerizing choreography of digital projection, shadows, and objects exploring themes of transcendence, creation, and cyclical time. 

HIRSHHORN MUSEUM

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Independence Ave SW and 7th St SW, Washington, DC 20560

hirshhorn.si.edu

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen @ Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC - A Landmark Exhibition

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

Through January 3, 2027 

Portrait of Adam Pendleton

© Adam Pendleton. Photo: Matthew Septimus 

Adam Pendleton 

WE ARE NOT (Composition), 2024 

Silkscreen ink and black gesso on canvas 

19 x 15 in. (43.3 x 38.1 cm) 

© Adam Pendleton. Photo: Andy Romer

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden presents “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen,” a landmark exhibition by Adam Pendleton. The artist presents new and recent paintings as well as a single-channel video work. Pendleton’s first solo exhibition in Washington, DC, highlights his unique contributions to contemporary American painting while making use of the architecture of the Museum and the history of the National Mall.

“Introducing Adam Pendleton’s recent work in our 50th year is intentional,” said Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu. “His exhibition reflects the Hirshhorn’s mission as a 21st-century art museum that amplifies the voices of artists responding to history and place in real time. ‘Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen’ invites our almost one million annual visitors to think about the complexities of abstraction within the American experience, and its potential to forge associations among our shared past, present and future.”

“I am delighted to exhibit my work on the occasion of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary,” said Adam Pendleton. “It presents a meaningful opportunity to engage, in subtle and poetic ways, with the Museum’s architecture, position on the National Mall and legacy of showing significant abstract and conceptual work.”

Adam Pendleton is known for his visually distinct and conceptually rigorous paintings that he begins on paper with drips, splatters, sprays, geometric shapes, words and phrases, and inky fragments reminiscent of broken letters. These visual experiments are at times carefully controlled and at others freely improvised. He photographs these initial compositions and then layers them using a screen-printing process, purposefully blurring the distinctions between the act of painting, the act of drawing and the act of photography.

“Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” features Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada,” “Days,” “WE ARE NOT,” and new “Composition” and “Movement” paintings. An encounter with any of these works, typically composed of two colors on black-gessoed grounds, brings forth the immediacy of gestural abstraction, the considered execution of minimal and conceptual art, and the playfulness of concrete poetry. “Painting is as much an act of performance as it is an act of translation and transformation,” the artist has stated.

The artist also debuts “Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?),” a new video work that is projected floor to ceiling. The work makes use of still and moving images of Resurrection City, the multiday encampment erected on the National Mall in the spring and summer of 1968, which is considered to be the culmination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. Strobing in and out of darkness, the documentary material is interspersed with found footage and punctuated by flashes of geometric forms, dissolving the boundaries between abstraction and representation. The film’s score, by multi-instrumentalist composer Hahn Rowe, integrates a reading by the late poet and cultural critic Amiri Baraka with an orchestration of brass, woodwinds and drums.

In its totality, “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” offers a powerful counterpoint to the Museum’s collection surveys that are concurrently presented in adjacent galleries. The exhibition is organized by Evelyn C. Hankins, the Hirshhorn’s head curator, with support from former curatorial assistant Alice Phan. “It is an honor to invite Adam Pendleton to respond to the Hirshhorn’s singular architecture and location,” said Hankins. “‘Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen’ speaks to the vision of our anniversary—a period of simultaneous reflection and forward thinking, a space in which Pendleton has been operating for almost two decades.”

“Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with scholarly essays, Studio Hirshhorn and Hirshhorn Eye videos, and free public programs.

Artist Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) is a central figure among a cross-generational group of painters redefining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. In 2024, he was honored with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

His work has been shown at major museums around the world. Recent solo and group exhibitions include “Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White, and Light,” at mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria (2023–2024); “Adam Pendleton: To Divide By,” at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (2023–2024); “Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); “Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together,” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada (2022); and “Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?,” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021–2022).

Pendleton’s work is part of numerous public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; and Tate London.

HIRSHHORN MUSEUM

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Independence Ave SW and 7th St SW, Washington, DC 20560

hirshhorn.si.edu

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC

April 4, 2025 - January 3, 2027

State Fairs: Growing American Craft @ Renwick Gallery of the SAAM, Washington

State Fairs: Growing American Craft

Renwick Gallery of the SAAM, Washington

August 22, 2025 - September 7, 2026

Liz Schreiber

State Fairs: Growing American Craft, 2024-2025

Various seeds and flower petals 

Courtesy of Liz Schreiber

State fairs have sparked the American imagination with their celebrations of agricultural bounty, mechanical innovations and skilled handcrafts since the first fair was held in 1841 in upstate New York. Craft has always been an essential element of state fairs and Native American tribal fairs, expressing the creative and practical values of handmade goods in American society. State fairs enable artists to display and sell their work and help sustain unique regional and cultural traditions.  

State Fairs: Growing American Craft will occupy both floors of the Renwick Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s branch location for contemporary craft. It is the first exhibition dedicated to artists’ contributions to the great U.S. tradition of state fairs. With more than 240 artworks on view, dating from the mid-19th century to the present, this exhibition registers the many ways the craft of state fairs has enriched the lives of artists and deepened the understanding of American art.

The exhibition is the culmination of five years of on-the-ground research involving visits to 15 state fairs across the U.S.; collaborative projects with artists in Kentucky, New Jersey, Alaska, West Virginia and Utah; and research in several state historical societies, history museums and archives. Artists and 4-H clubs from 43 states and tribal nations are represented, with all 50 states represented in a photo gallery.  

“‘State Fairs’ showcases what the team at SAAM’s Renwick Gallery does best—it is the latest in a series of exhibitions that reassess and uplift craft’s relevance to our everyday lives and American culture,” said Jane Carpenter-Rock, Acting Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “To spotlight these extraordinary and often under-sung artists is an unparalleled opportunity for audiences to deepen and expand perceptions of craft in the United States.”

Visitors will enjoy show-stopping spectacles like the iconic size 96 boots of Big Tex (a 55-foot statue known as the world’s tallest cowboy) from the State Fair of Texas, a life-size butter cow created on-site by the Iowa State Fair’s official butter sculptor Sarah Pratt and a display featuring a pyramid of 700 glass jars of preserved fruits and vegetables by canning superstar Rod Zeitler. Additional highlights include sculptor Robert Arneson’s break from functional ceramics during a pottery demonstration at the 1961 California State Fair, Lillian Colton’s groundbreaking crop-art portrait of Richard Nixon, regalia from pageants hosted by Indigenous fairs, benches commissioned from craft students at Kentucky’s Berea College, a 1965 butter-carton dress created by the Minnesota State Fair’s Princess Kay of the Milky Way (the goodwill ambassador for Minnesota’s dairy farmers) and much more.

To complement the exhibition, the museum debuts a new site-specific installation by artist Justin Favela in the Renwick Gallery’s Rubenstein Grand Salon.

“The first state fair I attended as a child was the Minnesota State Fair, which we called the Great Minnesota Get-Together,” said Mary Savig, the Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft. “While organizing this exhibition over the past several years, I experienced firsthand the collective spirit of artists getting together at state fairs across the country, sharing their talents and memories with fellow fairgoers. ‘State Fairs: Growing American Craft’ provides a long-overdue spotlight on these exceptional artists. When looking at our history from the perspective of the fairgrounds, a richer picture of American art emerges.”

Each gallery in the exhibition considers personal stories of craft found in different areas of the fairgrounds, from the art exhibits and heritage villages to the parades, dairy barns and rodeos. Ribbon-winning artworks and engaging craft demonstrations illuminate the lives of the artists—their families, memories, honors and struggles. It offers a perspective on the social power of fairgrounds across the United States and dispels stereotypes about rural communities. Many of the artworks on view directly connect the artists’ personal experiences with the experience of the fair. The exhibition also calls attention to people and communities whose experiences with fairs are entangled with histories of exclusion and displacement.  

The works in “State Fairs” are drawn from the museum’s holdings and loans from various artists and fairs, private and family collections and public museums and institutions.

“State Fairs: Growing American Craft” is organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. 

RENWICK GALLERY

Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20006

americanart.si.edu

Mary Savig: Curator-in-Charge for the Renwick Gallery of the SAAM, Washington DC

Mary Savig

Curator-in-Charge for the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Mary Savig

Photo by Libby Weiler 

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has appointed Mary Savig the Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator-in-Charge for the Renwick Gallery, home to the museum’s craft and decorative art program since 1972. Mary Savig, who has served as acting curator-in-charge since January 2024, joined the museum staff in 2020 as the Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft. During her tenure, Savig has continued to guide the direction of the Renwick Gallery’s curatorial program with a roster of acclaimed exhibitions that have contributed new scholarship to the field. As curator-in-charge, Mary Savig will oversee staff, acquire artworks for the museum’s permanent collection and present exhibitions and collection displays that advance appreciation for craft and maker culture at the Renwick Gallery. Savig’s appointment is effective immediately. 

“After a national search, I am delighted to welcome Mary Savig to this role,” said Jane Carpenter-Rock, acting Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “Her distinctive vision for the state of craft in the United States and dedication to championing its importance within American culture opens up new possibilities for SAAM’s contemporary craft program.” 

Mary Savig is the lead curator for “State Fairs: Growing American Craft,” opening August 22, the first exhibition dedicated to artists’ contributions to the great U.S. tradition of state fairs. Other recent exhibitions that reassess and uplift craft’s relevance to American culture include “We Gather at the Edge: Contemporary Quilts by Black Women Artists” (2025), “Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women” (2024) and “This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World” (2022). 

Previously, Mary Savig was curator of manuscripts from 2013 to 2020 at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, where she pursued collections documenting the history of American studio craft and conducted oral-history interviews with Beth Lipman, Preston Singletary and James Tanner. 

Mary Savig earned a master’s degree from The George Washington University and a doctorate in American studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her dissertation was titled “Stitches as Seeds: Crafting New Natures.” Savig’s research interests include American studio craft, contemporary craft, American art and material culture. 

RENVICK GALLERY

Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20006

americanart.si.edu

Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 @ National Gallery of Art, Washington + The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles + Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson

Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985

National Gallery of Art, Washington

September 21, 2025 – January 11, 2026

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

February 24 – May 24, 2026

Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson

July 25 – November 1, 2026

John W. Mosley

View of the crowd as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

addresses civil rights demonstrators 

at 40th Street and Lancaster Avenue, Philadelphia, August 3, 1965

Gelatin silver print

image: 24.8 x 19.7 cm (9 3/4 x 7 3/4 in.)

sheet: 25.4 x 20.3 cm (10 x 8 in.)

mat: 12 1/2 x 14 in. / frame: 13 3/8 x 14 7/8 in.

John W. Mosley Photograph Collection, 

Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, 

Temple University Libraries

Cecil J. Williams

During the summer of 1960, the elders of Orangeburg took to 

the streets as part of ongoing demonstrations and boycotts 

in support of civil rights. They are standing outside a segregated 

supermarket where they were allowed to shop 

but not sit down for lunch., 1960, printed 2024

Inkjet print

image/sheet: 37.3 x 55.9 cm (14 11/16 x 22 in.)

mat: 53.3 x 71.12 cm (21 x 28 in.)

frame: 55.6 x 73.3 cm (21 7/8 x 28 7/8 in.)

Harry Adams

Protest Car, Los Angeles, 1962, printed 2024

Inkjet print

image: 27.5 x 35.4 cm (11 x 13 15/16 in.)

sheet: 29.7 x 41.9 cm (11 11/16 x 16 1/2 in.)

mat: 16 x 20 in. / frame: 16 7/8 x 20 7/8 in.

Tom & Ethel Bradley Center, 

California State University, Northridge, Harry Adams Archive

© Harry Adams. All rights reserved and protected.

Courtesy of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center 

at California State University, Northridge

Kwame Brathwaite

Untitled (Charles Peaker Street Speaker, head of ANPM, 

after Carlos Cooks passed away, on 125th Street), c. 1968, 

printed 2016 / Inkjet print

image: 37.2 x 37.2 cm (14 5/8 x 14 5/8 in.)

mat: 15 x 15 in. / frame: 15 7/8 x 15 7/8 in.

National Gallery of Art, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund 

and Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund, 2023.129.2

The National Gallery of Art presents Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985, an exhibition exploring the work of American and Afro-Atlantic diaspora photographers in developing and fostering a distinctly Black visual culture and identity. The first presentation to investigate photography's role in the Black Arts Movement, a creative initiative comparable to the Harlem Renaissance in its scope and impact, which evolved concurrently to the civil rights and international freedom movements, the exhibition reveals how artists developed strategies to engage communities and encourage self-representation in media, laying a foundation for socially engaged art practices that continue today. 

Photography and the Black Arts Movement will be on view in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art before traveling to The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles and the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson

Doug Harris

Malcolm X speaks at a rally at Harlem's Williams Institutional 

CME Church on December 20, 1964, with Fannie Lou Hamer, 

and Professor Bill Strickland, 1964

Gelatin silver print

image: 20.32 x 25.4 cm (8 x 10 in.)

mat: 14 x 17 in. / frame: 14 7/8 x 17 7/8 in.

Collection of Doug Harris

© Doug Harris

Jeffrey Henson Scales

In a Time of Panthers 1, Chicago Summer, 1967, printed 2022

Gelatin silver print

image/sheet: 45.7 x 45.7 cm (18 x 18 in.)

mat: 26 x 26 in. / frame: 26 7/8 x 26 7/8 in.

National Gallery of Art, 

Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2024.121.1

© Jeffrey Henson Scales

Photography and the Black Arts Movement brings together approximately 150 artworks spanning photography, video, collage, painting, installation, and other photo-based media, some of which have rarely or never been on view. Among the over 100 artists included in the exhibition are Billy Abernathy (Fundi), Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Frank Bowling, Kwame Brathwaite, Roy DeCarava, Louis Draper, David C. Driskell, Charles Gaines, James E. Hinton, Danny Lyon, Gordon Parks, Adrian Piper, Nellie Mae Rowe, Betye Saar, Raymond Saunders, Jamel Shabazz, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems.

This expansive selection of work showcases the broad cultural exchange between writers, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and other visual artists of many backgrounds, who came together during the turbulent decades of the mid-20th century to grapple with social and political changes, the pursuit of civil rights, and the emergence of the Pan-African movement through art. The exhibition also includes art from Africa, the Caribbean, and Great Britain to contextualize the global engagement with the social, political, and cultural ideas that propelled the Black Arts Movement.

"Working on many fronts—literature, poetry, jazz and new music, painting, sculpture, performance, film, and photography—African American artists associated with the Black Arts Movement expressed and exchanged their ideas through publications, organizations, museums, galleries, community centers, theaters, murals, street art, and emerging academic programs. While focusing on African American photography in the United States, the exhibition also includes works by artists from many communities to consider the extensive interchange between North American artists and the African diaspora. The exhibition looks at the important connections between America's focus on civil rights and the emerging cultural movements that enriched the dialog," said Philip Brookman, cocurator of the exhibition and consulting curator of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art.

"Photography and photographic images were crucial in defining and giving expression to the Black Arts Movement and the civil rights movement. By merging the social concerns and aesthetics of the period, Black artists and photographers were defining a Black aesthetic while expanding conversations around community building and public history," said Deborah Willis, visiting cocurator, university professor and chair of the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts and founding director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University. "The artists and their subjects helped to preserve compelling visual responses to this turbulent time and their images reflect their pride and determination."

 

Isaac Sutton

Photograph of Etta Moten Barnett gazing at a painting, c. 1960

Gelatin silver print

overall: 26.5 x 26.5 cm (10 7/16 x 10 7/16 in.)

Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum 

of African American History and Culture, 

courtesy J. Paul Getty Trust and Smithsonian National Museum 

of African American History and Culture

© Johnson Publishing Company Archive. 

Courtesy J. Paul Getty Trust and Smithsonian National Museum 

of African American History and Culture

Roy Lewis

Nina Simone on a Sunday morning visit to the Wall of Respect 

mural at 43rd and Langley in Chicago's

Black Belt (Nina's Prayer), 1967, printed 2025

Inkjet print

sheet: 48.3 x 33.0 cm (19 x 13 in.) / mat: 18 x 24 in.

frame: 18 7/8 x 24 7/8 in.

National Gallery of Art, Alfred H. Moses 

and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2025.34.2

Bruce W. Talamon

David Hammons, Creating a Body Print, 

Slauson Avenue Studio, Los Angeles, 1974, printed 2025

Gelatin silver print

image: 61 x 50.8 cm (24 x 20 in.)

Bruce W. Talamon

Photo © 2018 Bruce W. Talamon All Rights Reserved

 

Drawing in part from the National Gallery's collection—with many newly acquired works—and from lenders in the US, Great Britain, and Canada, the exhibition presents the cultural and political titans of the era spanning 1955–1985, including civil rights leaders, artists, and musicians, as well as everyday people, scenes of daily life, and fashion and commercial photography. Structured around nine thematic sections—including explorations of the self, community, fashion and beauty, the media, and ritual—the exhibition weaves a holistic vision of the period and its cultural impact.

Ralph Arnold

Above This Earth, Games, Games, 1968

Collage and acrylic on canvas

overall: 114.3 x 114.3 cm (45 x 45 in.)

framed: 114.3 x 114.3 x 7.62 cm (45 x 45 x 3 in.)

Collection of Museum of Contemporary Photography 

at Columbia College, Chicago

Photo: P.D. Young / Spektra Imaging

David C. Driskell

Woman with Flowers, 1972

Oil and collage on canvas

overall: 95.3 x 97.8 cm (37 1/2 x 38 1/2 in.)

Art Bridges

© Estate of David C. Driskell, 

Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York

Betye Saar

Let Me Entertain You, 1972

Wooden window frame with cut and pasted printed 

and painted paper, photocopy transparency, 

and wood veneer with found object

overall: 96.52 x 154.94 x 10.16 cm, 4.21 lb. (38 x 61 x 4 in., 1.91 kg)

On loan from National Afro-American Museum 

and Cultural Center, Wilberforce, Ohio

© Betye Saar

Courtesy of the Artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles

Roland Charles

Untitled, 1978, printed 2024

Inkjet print

image: 26 x 38.1 cm (10 1/4 x 15 in.)

sheet: 29.7 x 41.9 cm (11 11/16 x 16 1/2 in.)

mat: 16 x 21 in. / frame: 16 7/8 x 21 7/8 in.

Tom & Ethel Bradley Center, 

California State University, Northridge

Courtesy of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center 

at California State University, Northridge

Among the works in the first section of the exhibition is a collage by Romare Bearden, 110th Street Harlem Blues (1972). A dynamic mixture of painted paper and photographs, the work illustrates the ongoing vitality of Harlem's community, echoing the vibrancy and social content of the Harlem Renaissance, which Romare Bearden was exposed to in his early life. Moving into the section titled Picturing the Self / Picturing the Movement, self-portraits by Coreen Simpson, Alex Harsley, and Barkley L. Hendricks underscore a central theme of the exhibition: artists asserting their presence within the broader narrative of the movement and the era, along with the importance of self-representation in their art. A highlight of Representing the Community—a section filled with everyday scenes of people at work and at rest—is Ralph Arnold's Soul Box (1969), a mixed-media assemblage of found objects and collage, serving as a time capsule that captures stories of the Black Arts Movement.

Photographs were a crucial tool used to communicate the events of the civil rights movement to a national audience. Artists and news media understood the power of photographs to address inequality and advocate for civil and human rights, and some works in the exhibition are by photojournalists who captured the speeches, marches, and sit-ins that defined the era. A rarely seen 1965 photograph by Frank Dandridge captures Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. watching President Lyndon B. Johnson's televised address following the Selma, Alabama, marches—events that would ultimately lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Depicting Dr. King in a private, domestic moment, the image underscores not just the personal gravity of the moment but the television's growing role in shaping public understanding of the era's historic events. One of several works featured in the In the News section, it reflects how photographers responded to the shifting landscape of news media—from still photography to the rise of television.

The Black Arts Movement was instrumental in reshaping fashion, advertising, and media as tools of self-representation and cultural empowerment. A Kraft Foods advertisement (1977), photographed by Barbara DuMetz and featuring a young Black girl holding her doll, illustrates how the movement prompted advertisers to engage Black audiences more thoughtfully by hiring Black photographers and models in their campaigns. It is among the highlights of the Fashioning the Self section, along with an editorial photograph by Kwame Brathwaite, the photographer who helped coin the "Black is Beautiful" movement, and many depictions of women in beauty shops, showing the importance of these spaces to forming identity and community.

The exhibition's concluding section, Transformations in Art and Culture, reflects a shift in the Black Arts Movement's purpose—from its earlier focus on civil rights to a younger generation's engagement with more historical and conceptual ideas, while still drawing on the movement's visual language. Highlights include multimedia and time-based works by Ulysses Jenkins, Charles Gaines, and Lorna Simpson, which explore new and experimental ways to explore Black identity.

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 - Curators

The exhibition is cocurated by Philip Brookman, consulting curator of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, and Deborah Willis, university professor and chair of the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts and director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University.

Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 

Exhibition Publication

Book Cover Courtesy of the Yale University Press

Artwork by James E. Hinton

Mahalia Jackson Singing at Rally, Soldier Field, Chicago, 1963

Gelatin silver print

support: 47.63 x 36.83 cm (18 3/4 x 14 1/2 in.)

framed: 63.5 x 53.3 x 3.2 cm (25 x 21 x 1 1/4 in.)

High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 

Purchase with funds from Jan P. and Warren J. Adelson

© James E. Hinton

Published in association with Yale University Press, the fully illustrated catalog accompanying the exhibition examines the vital role photography played in the evolution of the Black Arts Movement, which brought together writers, filmmakers, and artists as they explored ways of using art to advance civil rights and Black self-determination. Edited by Philip Brookman and Deborah Willis, with a preface by Angela Y. Davis and contributions by Makeda Best, Margo Natalie Crawford, Romi Crawford, Cheryl Finley, Sarah Lewis, and Audrey Sands, this book reveals how photographs operated across art, community building, journalism, and political messaging to contribute to the development of a distinctly Black art and culture. Essays by these distinguished scholars focus on topics such as women and the movement, community, activism, and Black photojournalism, and consider the complex connections between American artists and the African diaspora, and the dynamic interchange of Pan-African ideas that propelled the movement.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

West Building, 6th St and Constitution Ave NW, Washington, DC 20565

www.nga.gov

Shahzia Sikander: The Last Post @ SAAM - Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Shahzia Sikander: The Last Post

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington

July 3, 2025 – July 12, 2026

Shahzia Sikander 

The Last Post, 2010

Single-channel HD digital animation, color,

5.1 surround sound; 10:00 minutes 

Music: Du Yun 

Smithsonian American Art Museum, 

Museum purchase through the 

Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment,

 in partnership with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, 2025.11

© 2025, Shahzia Sikander. 

Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles

Shahzia Sikander’s iconoclastic multimedia explorations encompass drawing and painting, mosaics, sculpture and video. She initially trained in an illustration tradition—classical Indo-Persian miniature painting—that was bounded by frames, borders and precise architecture. From this, she developed her unique, disruptive style.  

Through precisely inked and animated scenes, Sikander’s video animation “The Last Post” (2010) critically considers the legacy of British colonialism in Asia, using her signature approach of infusing Indo-Persian manuscript compositions with a contemporary perspective. “The Last Post” centers a European gentleman in a red waistcoat, a symbol of British imperial power, based on miniature paintings from the late 18th century depicting British East India Company officials. Indian court architecture, Chinese cut-paper silhouettes and a watercolor map of South Asia all dissolve and reconfigure around him as electronic beats by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun explode on the soundtrack.  

“The Last Post” was acquired in 2025 by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The work is presented in a dedicated gallery for immersive media art installations that opened in 2023 on the museum’s third floor. The 10-minute film runs continuously and can be entered at any time. The presentation is organized by Saisha Grayson, curator of time-based media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

SAAM - Smithsonian American Art Museum

8th and G Streets, NW, Washington, DC 20004

americanart.si.edu

Josh Faught: Sanctuary @ Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle

Josh Faught: Sanctuary

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle 

Through August 3, 2025

JOSH FAUGHT (U.S., b. 1979)

Sanctuary [detail], 2017

Hand-woven, hand-dyed cotton, hemp,

and gold lamé, scrapbooking stikers;

the entire 1999 season of the soap opera

Passions (DVD); the sheet music for 

Peter Hallock's "A Song of Deliverance";

advertisements for The Monastory 

(The Sanctuary); issue six of Pot Pourri,

a sexual questionnaire for the "new age";

an adverstisement for The Date-Record;

giant clothespins, nail polish, and pins.

Henry Art Gallery, Gift of William and 

Ruth True, originally commissioned in 2016 

for Saint Mark's Cathedral, Seattle, WA, 2020.5 

Image courtesy of the artist

JOSH FAUGHT (U.S., b. 1979)

Sanctuary, 2017

Installation view: 

Saint Mark's Cathedral, Seattle, WA, 2017

Image courtesy of the artist

The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington presents an exhibition featuring the work of JOSH FAUGHT (born 1979, Missouri, based in San Francisco, CA). Know for his evocative multimedia creations that blend weaving found objects, and ephemera, Josh Faught examines craft traditions, queer culture, and personal history in ways that challenge systems of classification and highlight structures of support, visibility, and identity.

This exhibition highlights Sanctuary (2017), a monumental tapestry commissioned by Western Bridge for Seattle’s Saint Mark’s Cathedral and now part of the Henry’s collection. Drawing from Faught’s personal collections and local Seattle archives, Sanctuary reflects on how queer communities have created spaces of safety and connection, and how these practices intersect with themes of faith, devotion, and desire. The tapestry features a rich array of found and archival materials, weaving together spirituality, history, and pop culture. These references evoke stories of connection and isolation in queer history as a means to address ongoing questions about safety, belonging, and well-being.

Accompanying Sanctuary is a selection of Faught's recent basket works. These intimately scaled pieces complement the sprawling height of Sanctuary and highlight the artist's exploration of everyday objects as vessels for human emotions and memories.

This exhibition celebrates Josh Faught's ability to intertwine personal and collective narratives, offering visitors an opportunity to reflect on themes of identity, community and memories.

JOSH FAUGHT explores the conjunction between various histories: the history of textiles, sociopolitical histories, and the artist’s personal history. Recent solo exhibitions include Look Across the Water into the Darkness, Look for the Fog, Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2022); Both Things are True, Koppe Astner, Glasgow (2019); Casa Loewe, London (2019); Sanctuary, commissioned by Western Bridge, St Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle (2017); Siyinqaba, US Embassy in Swaziland, Mbabane (2015); BE BOLD for what you stand for, BE CAREFUL what you fall for, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at the Neptune Society Columbarium, San Francisco (2013); Snacks, Supports, and Something to Rally Around, Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis (2013). Josh Faught has exhibited in group exhibitions at NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Yerba Buena Center for Art, San Francisco; The New Museum, New York; ICA Boston; The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; Pakville Galleries, Ontario; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit. He is a professor of textiles and fine arts at the California College of the Arts.

Josh Faught: Sanctuary is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Senior Curator, with Em Chan, Curatorial Assistant. 

HENRY ART GALLERY

University of Washington

15th Ave NE & NE 41st St, Seattle, WA 98195

henryart.org

Josh Faught: Sanctuary

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle

March 8 - August 3, 2025