The year 2025 saw several solo exhibitions by well-known Black artists, including Kerry James Marshall, Amy Sherald, Rashid Johnson, Jack Whitten, Lorna Simpson, and Elizabeth Catlett. Following his exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, Marshall is now lauded as one of America’s most important artists. Sherald resisted “a culture of censorship” at Washington, D.C.’s National Portrait Gallery and moved her show to the Baltimore Museum of Art. Johnson made the entire rotunda of the Guggenheim into an immersive sanctuary. The spirit of Catlett—American-born but self-exiled to Mexico and later barred from reentering the United States because of her leftist leanings—unapologetically returned to the U.S., liberated and in full force at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art. At the Museum of Modern Art, we discovered the breadth and weight of Whitten’s extraordinary oeuvre, and through a survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we witnessed Simpson transform her art for the ages.
But this year also saw group exhibitions that showed how Black art within the Western art-historical canon works to change society at large. These group exhibitions, featuring Black artists from around the globe, demonstrated what Black art can be and what it can do. Two of the group exhibitions reminded us of artists no longer living, Faith Ringgold and David Driskell, focusing on the influence they had on their contemporaries and continue to have on subsequent generations. All these exhibitions showed the range of Black artistry and the impact it can have on the status quo. Here are six of them.
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“Collection in Focus: The Reach of Faith Ringgold” at the Guggenheim Museum, New York
Image Credit: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. This exhibition included the museum’s first presentation of artist/activist Faith Ringgold’s iconic story quilt Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5 (1988) from the “Tar Beach” series. The curator, Naomi Beckwith, put Ringgold’s art in conversation with works by modernist predecessors like Jacob Lawrence, Pablo Picasso, and Marc Chagall, as well as contemporaries such as Sanford Biggers, Carrie Mae Weems, and Mickalene Thomas. Ringgold, who created art in a variety of styles, is best known for her story quilts that obscures distinctions between fine art and craft.
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“Black Earth Rising” at the Baltimore Museum of Art
Image Credit: Meg Rorison. As part of its “Turn Again to the Earth” initiative, which explores environmental justice, climate change, and colonial histories through art, the Baltimore Museum of Art presented “Black Earth Rising,” a group exhibition of 13 African diasporic, Latin American, and Native American contemporary artists including Firelei Báez, Wangechi Mutu, Frank Bowling, and Yinka Shonibare. The exhibition focused the discussion of climate change on the Southern Hemisphere, which is most affected by global warming while contributing to it the least. The curator, Ekow Eshun, a British writer and journalist, has authored a companion book for the exhibition.
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“Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetic Transitions” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Image Credit: Copyright © Museum Associates/LACMA This group exhibition of 60 African diasporic artists working in Africa, Europe, and the Americas covered a quarter century of art and included works by Mark Bradford, El Anatsui, Nick Cave, and Deana Lawson. As curator Dhyandra Lawson wrote in her introduction to the exhibition catalog, this LACMA show was conceived in response to the BlackLivesMatter movement. While the exhibition showcased the variety of ways that artists interpret Blackness, it never lost sight of the shared struggle for equality and the need for solidarity.
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“Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica” at the Art Institute of Chicago
Image Credit: Joe Tallarico. This exhibition, now making stops in Brussels, London, and Barcelona after its run at the Art Institute of Chicago, features 350 artworks by 100 artists from Africa, Europe, and North and South America, including art by Kerry James Marshall and Chris Ofili. The show opens with works made after the emergence of the Pan-African movement at the end of World War I and covers Garveyism in the United States and the Caribbean, Negritude in Africa and Francophone countries, and Quilombismo in Brazil. The ideas of freedom, community building, and self-determination resonate throughout the exhibition, which was curated by Antawan I. Byrd, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Adom Getachew, and Matthew S. Witkovsky.
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“Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985” at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Image Credit: Amazon.
Though photography is known to have played a central role in the civil rights movement, as images of protesters reached the public through the printed media, this exhibition is the first of its kind to articulate the role of the medium in the Black Arts movement, which employed literature, theater, music, art, and yes, photography to create an aesthetic of Black beauty and power. For this exhibition, running through January 11 at the National Gallery, curator Deborah Willis has included 150 works by more than 100 artists, such as Kwame Brathwaite, Ming Smith, Roy DeCarava, and Lorna Simpson.
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“David C. Driskell & Friends: Creativity, Collaboration, and Friendship” at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville
Image Credit: UCR Arts. This year was the last chance to see an exhibition which started its rounds at the University of Maryland; the University of California, Riverside; the University of Pennsylvania; and Wilkes University beginning in 2023. The late David C. Driskell, an acclaimed curator, artist, and scholar, was a champion of African American art and established deep friendships with many of the most notable Black artists of his day. This exhibition showed Driskell’s own work in conversation with some of these artists, among them Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, Elizabeth Catlett, Alma Thomas, and Jacob Lawrence. Conceived and organized by Sheila Bergman, Curlee Raven Holton, and Heather Sincavage, the show featured 70 artworks by 35 African American artists from the collection of the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland.
