“We Make History” gathers artifacts from the Anacostia Community Museum's permanent collection, as well as other items on loan from partner institutions. The exhibition's star attraction is a diary written by Adam Francis Plummer, an enslaved man who once lived in Prince George's County. The exhibition opens on the 185th anniversary of the day that Plummer began the diary: May 30, 1841.
The British Museum has confirmed that the Bayeux Tapestry will be displayed on a long, flat table when it opens in London later this year. Previously, it was displayed vertically and in a room where the tapestry curved around the display case. This summer, it will be laid out flat for the first time in a single specially designed display case, so people can see the full expanse of the tapestry for the first time.
Technology is currently one of the most powerful forces shaping our lives, our economies, our politics, and even our sense of identity and reality. Cultural institutions cannot remain outside of that conversation. If museums are places where society reflects on itself, then they must engage with the technologies that are actively transforming it.
The robot repeatedly inscribes text and images onto the glass surface using a marker, then removes them with a sponge. This cyclical action renders visible the process through which present events transition into recorded history, emphasizing the instability and revisability of historical narratives.
In 2024, art collector Christian Levett opened Europe's first museum dedicated to women artists in a little town in the south of France. But for those of us who can't make the trip to the Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins (Female Artists of the Mougins Museum, or FAMM), the American Federation of the Arts (AFA) has arranged the next best thing: a blockbuster touring exhibition about women artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement, featuring some of the highlights of the FAMM collection.
The V&A is stuffed with a truly magnificent array of weird and wonderful things from centuries of human existence. Under one roof, you can find the sixteenth century Raphael Cartoons, Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, an Iranian carpet thought to be the oldest in the world, a Storm Trooper suit from the Star Wars movies, a diamond butterfly ring worn by Beyonce and... a Labubu.
Candidly, most people visiting the British Museum's Hawaii exhibition probably walk in with a lot of stereotypical preconceptions about the island nation. And will walk out with a totally different understanding of it. Understandably, we probably think of it as not much more than the Pacific island nation that's part of the USA, home to Pearl Harbour and the long-running TV show Hawaii 5.0.
For the first time in its 62-year history, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art will present a survey of artists living and working in Connecticut. Today, Tuesday, January 13, the institution named the 40 participating artists in the inaugural Aldrich Decennial. The exhibition, Aldrich Decennial: I Am What Is Around Me, which is expected to recur once every decade, will open on June 7 and run until January 10, 2027. A complete list of artists is included at the end of this article.
The timing could not be better: We have much to learn in this moment from a movement that was both explicitly antifascist and radically hopeful - and from how the not-so-antifascist Dalí broke from it. But Dreamworlds presents precious little of the historical and political context - for example, the birth of the movement out of the grotesque terrors of World War I - that would help viewers grasp the relevance of what's in front of them.
The vibrant medium of glass takes center stage in Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass. Featuring more than 100 glass art pieces created by 29 Native American and First Nations artists, this exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in New York also includes works by leading glass artist Dale Chihuly, who first introduced glass art to Indian Country as an instructor at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
In 1954, an issue of Manhua, a state-sponsored satirical magazine in China, declared: Some architects blindly worship the formalist styles of western bourgeois design. As a result, grotesque and reactionary buildings have appeared. China's strangest buildings, from pairs of pants to ping-pong bats Beneath the headline Ugly Architecture, humorous cartoons of weird buildings fill the page. There is a modernist cylinder with a neoclassical portico bolted on to the front. Another blobby building is framed by an arc of ice-cream cone-shaped columns. An experimental bus stop features a bench beneath an impractical cuboid canopy, unable to protect you from wind, rain or sun, as a passerby observes. Why don't these buildings adopt the Chinese national style? asks another bewildered figure, as he cowers beneath a looming glass tower that bears all the hallmarks of the corrupt, capitalist west.
Throughout his long career in photography, Jeff Wall has never been interested in capturing Henri Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment." For more than four decades, the renowned Vancouver-based artist has treated the camera not as a tool for recording reality, but as a medium for playfully constructing it. But his body of work feels especially relevant - if a tad politically disengaged - right now, as we navigate AI-generated images, deepfakes, and questions about photographic reliability.
The latest addition to the chronologically structured exhibition can be found logically enough at the very end. It's a red protest sign against the new military conscription law, with the slogan "Wages up, armaments down." A museum employee carried it back to the museum from the demonstration that took place at Bonn's Hofgartenwiese on December 5. Less than a week later, it is already exhibited as a historical document in the section "Today," the last of five time periods covered in the interactive exhibition.
The museum's preliminary webpage for the exhibition, titled Palestine Uprooted: Nakba, Past and Present and scheduled to open in June 2026, includes an image from 1948 of Palestinians fleeing their homes and a more recent one of the displaced in Gaza during the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. It states that the show will include the personal stories of Palestinian Canadians told through video testimonials and objects.
Outside, it was cold and dark. Inside, brightly colored forms seemed to swirl and spread. It was February, 2013, the evening of the opening of "Hilma af Klint-A Pioneer of Abstraction" at Moderna Museet, in Stockholm. Among the attendees was Kurt Almqvist, a white-haired man in his mid-fifties. Though Almqvist considered himself something of an expert on fin-de-siècle intellectual history-he had written a book on Carl Jung-he was seeing af Klint's paintings for the first time.
Not only is the painting-along with 39 others by Caravaggio and an international cast of Caravaggisti, as the Baroque artist's followers are known-making a rare trip from Florence to the U.S., it is presented unconserved, in its original state. "Maybe the varnish is a little yellow, or there are a few scratches," Thomas explains. "But you are seeing the brilliance of the artist's hand, which is unsullied and untouched."
SALEM - The final exhibition to fill the main gallery at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art this year is a delightfully eclectic collection of postwar African American art that is every bit as interesting as the story of how it came together is inspiring.
The Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles opens a new exhibition, Performance and Prestige: A History of Aston Martin, tracing the British company's evolution from its 1913 origins. Installed in the Meyers Gallery, the presentation gathers more than a dozen vehicles that embody the changing language of speed and craftsmanship that has defined Aston Martin for over a century. The Aston Martin exhibition is the first in the museum's history.
A new exhibit at the Museum of Sex New York seizes on that topic with its exploration of nonconforming, experimental lifestyles and the marks they've left on our society. From now until April 12, 2026, experience history and culture through the lens of American cults and communes at " Utopia: Three Centuries of Sexuality in American Cults and Communes." The two-story show features more than 300 artworks, photographs, films, records, garments and rare artifacts from 20 historical intentional communities.
Sadly, despite belief the internet, technology, and evolved morality would open up global conversations in which every voice is heard and all people respected, real life threw up stop signs. In particular, within almost every sector and industry, the history, voices, and stories of marginalized people and communities continued to be largely overlooked, distorted, suppressed, erased, or most tragically, simply forgotten and faced with extinction.
RM will co-curate the exhibition with SFMOMA's América Castillo and Hyoeun Kim. It will feature Korean artists active throughout the 20th century and beyond, such as Yun Hyong-keun, Park Rehyun, Kwon Okyon, Kim Yun Shin, To Sangbong and Chang Ucchin. Their works will be in conversation with pieces from SFMOMA's collection by Kim Whanki, Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Henri Matisse, Georgia O'Keeffe and Paul Klee.
