Datebook: The Art World’s Summer Happenings to Add to Your Calendar

As the sister of Marcel (as well as the lesser-known Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon), Suzanne Duchamp had a lot of distraction to contend with in terms of legacy management. But this 60-work show strives to reposition her as a notable painter and an important figure in the evolution of Dada, which she prodded and poked with painterly advances and material-minded experimentation as much as any decorated Dadaist should.
June 6–Sept. 7

Paris’s biggest modern art museum is preparing to close for years while it undergoes renovations, but before it does, a final show: a vast exhibition for Wolfgang Tillmans that will be situated not in Centre Pompidou’s galleries but in the library. The unusual setting will underscore how Tillmans’s stylish photographs of people, places, and protests serve as an archive of their own, since they are filled with so much invaluable information about the state of the world today. The title of the show tells a story to that effect: “Rien ne nous y préparait – Tout nous y préparait” (Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us).
June 12–Sept. 22

The young American artist Ser Serpas has risen quickly, with works formed from heavily used found objects and an installation that took pride of place in last year’s Whitney Biennial. Though she’s best known as a sculptor, this exhibition, which will open in the run-up to Art Basel, aims to highlight her work in a different medium: performance. Serpas will here collaborate with the Margo Korableva Performance Theater of Tbilisi in works utilizing the same kinds of scuffed, dirtied, and partly destroyed objects she enlists for her sculptures.
June 13–Sept. 21

A storied denizen of the strange netherworld between performance art and comedy, Michael Smith has charted a singular path through and around the art world since the 1970s, when his work in different modes put him in league with idiosyncratic figures including Andy Kaufman, William Wegman, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, and early cast members of Saturday Night Live. This 8-disc DVD collection from an imprint of the redoubtable underground record label Drag City gathers documentation of comedy shows, programs from cable-access TV, and works of musical theater from the early years to the present, with a book featuring an essay by writer and curator Tim Griffin and materials from Smith exhibitions at the New Museum, the Whitney, and Museo Jumex.
On sale May 30

The last Berlin Biennale, in 2022, was defined by its prioritization of participants from marginalized communities, among them members of the Dalit caste in South Asia and queer artists. The new Berlin Biennale goes further with a stated focus on “doing away with the notion of minority altogether.” More than other biennials of its caliber, the venturesome Berlin Biennale—this time curated by Zasha Colah—has always invested deeply in globalism. That worldview is likely to be enlisted here.
June 14–Sept. 14

This timely tome by Lauren O’Neill-Butler charts the history of artistic-activist debate going back to the 1960s, drawing on oralhistory work related to the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, Women Artists in Revolution, ACT UP, and other organizations, as well as art by Agnes Denes, Edgar Heap of Birds, fierce pussy, and Nan Goldin, among others.
On sale June 17

Although Camille Pissarro painted works that look traditionally Impressionist—many feature Parisian streets and brushy landscapes rendered en plein air—he was technically an outsider within the movement, as a Jewish Frenchman born in the Caribbean who identified as an anarchist. This retrospective in Potsdam, Germany, asserts that Pissarro’s unique standing led to a fresh kind of Impressionism that was more politically engaged than it might seem to contemporary eyes.
June 14–Sept. 28

The conceptually dense and dazzling photo and video work of Stan Douglas has traveled forward and backward in time to engage ideas related to futuristic science-fiction, ’70s-era jazz-funk fusion, and all manner of factual and fictional flights of fancy. This 40-work survey in New York’s Upstate Hudson Valley will include the world premiere of a multichannel video installation that revisits D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a 1915 silent film that celebrates the Ku Klux Klan. Douglas rethinks the film, repositioning one notorious scene so that it no longer heroizes the white supremacists.
June 21–Nov. 30

This year’s incarnation of the most momentous of all art fairs will feature 291 galleries, with 16 participating for the first time. The enterprise will also include a new sector, called Premiere, to showcase 10 galleries selling work made within the past five years. As fair director Maike Cruse told ARTnews, “Premiere will reflect the energy and innovation of the current moment—both in artistic practice and the world at large.”
June 19–22

Lubaina Himid, who won the Turner Prize in 2017 at the age of 63, has risen to the status of a British national treasure, with plans to represent the country at the 2026 Venice Biennale. But while Himid’s art has come into view, her exhibition-making—an equally important part of her practice that has shone a light on Black British artists, especially when few others would—has gained less attention. That’s why for this show, the ICA is looking back on exhibitions she curated such as “The Thin Black Line,” which appeared at the same museum in 1985.
June 24–Sept. 7

Barbara Kruger’s last big retrospective, in 2021, was less a conventional survey than a show of past artworks that she remade and remixed, recasting prior one-liners written in her signature sans-serif font for videos, installations, and other formats. The gesture implied that Kruger’s thematic concerns—subverting the one-way flow of information in the media and charting invisible power dynamics—were still as new as they once were, back when she started making art in the ’70s. That would suggest that this Spanish survey, featuring rearranged old texts, will still be fresh, even if you caught the last show. June 24–Nov. 9

The newly named SITE Santa Fe International is a relaunch of a prestigious biennial that began in 1995 but went on pause after its last edition, in 2018. For its resurrection, SITE handed the reins to star curator Cecilia Alemani, whose credits include a long stint at High Line Art in New York and a memorable turn at the helm of the 2022 Venice Biennale. Alemani’s guiding theme here is “Once Within a Time,” a reference to a movie by filmmaker Godfrey Reggio (of Koyaanisqatsi fame) and a signal of a storytelling impulse centered around characters in and around Santa Fe—among them, as a curatorial statement says, “historical figures, mythical beings, local heroes, unassuming residents, reclusive artists, forgotten writers, and charismatic healers.”
June 27–Jan. 12

The intriguing premise for this show in Oslo is the changing nature of medical care during the lifetime of Edvard Munch, whose art (which he called his “lifeblood”) often engaged different signs of sickness and health in regard to himself and others around him. From the late 19th century, before hospitals were routine, to Munch’s death in 1944, ideas of care evolved considerably, and the change will be marked here by medical objects (among them a baby incubator, a vaccine certificate, and nursing badges) shown alongside works by Munch himself.
June 27–Sept. 21

True to the ethos of a Hong Kong institution whose offerings typically consider art in the context of other kinds of cultural production, “Canton Modern” suggests that painting was but one tool in the project of defining the modern identity of Guangdong, a Chinese province that is home to cities including Guangzhou. Objects in this 200-work show put the province forward as one that underwent a big transition that could be seen through its artistic output, in which creators broke with traditional styles in favor of social realism and other newly engineered visual languages.
June 28–Oct. 5

A little more than a decade ago, Liliana Porter exhibited, at this same museum in Argentina, an installation whose central figure stood less than two inches tall and presided over an array of little objects spread across multiple platforms. The work emblematized Porter’s fascination with the bizarre ways all things miniature can suddenly seem monumental, if considered from the right perspective—an interest that dates all the way back to the start of Porter’s career in the 1960s. Appropriately, this legend of the Argentine art scene is being given a grandscale retrospective in the city where she was born.
July 12–Oct. 13

One year after her paintings appeared in the Whitney Biennial, Mavis Pusey is getting a full-dress retrospective with a focus on how she explored the concept of ruination. She’s best known for her “Broken Construction” series, paintings and prints made between the 1960s and ’90s in which she portrayed structures that suggest disassembled houses. But this exhibition goes beyond that series to show the many ways the late Jamaica-born artist used abstraction to convey the notion that the world is fundamentally unstable.
July 12–Dec. 7

Focused on kids but holding out the promise of intergenerational dialogue, this unusual show will tell the story of art that has involved children as collaborators. An eclectic artist list suggests a wide variety of takes on that description, with names including Nairy Baghramian, Yto Barrada, DIS, Olafur Eliasson, Meredith Monk, and Rachel Rose. And there will be two large installations that invite different kinds of participation: an invitation from Ei Arakawa-Nash for museumgoers to draw on the floor, and a sculpture for skateboarding by Koo Jeong A.
July 18–Feb. 1

Certain large-scale video installations by Pipilotti Rist, including one at MoMA famously involving menstrual blood, have proven divisive, with detractors claiming they are nothing more than eye candy. But her defenders argue that visual pleasure is the point in work that shows how bodies are beautiful and innards are irresistible. Rist will take up her corporeal fascinations in this show in Beijing, with centerpiece status granted to a new video installation commissioned for the occasion.
July 19–Oct. 19

As a sculptor and ceramicist since the 1990s, Joyce McDonald has conjoined her work as an ordained minister with her practice as an artist in search of a higher purpose. After a tumultuous upbringing—including bouts with addiction and HIV that she has made part of her story—McDonald turned to an art therapy program and soon after, starting working with Visual AIDS. Since then, she has produced a growing body of work with clay and everyday materials that evince a certain sort of figurative power. Expect her first museum show to be a stirring experience.
July 25–Oct. 19

Works in concrete, wax, metal, and stone by Japanese sculptor Kishio Suga stand to look at home in Dia Beacon, the extravagantly sized postindustrial haven in Upstate New York that serves as an outpost for Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, and other artists who riff on the pros and cons of monumentality. The Japanese artist was associated with the 1960s-era movement known as Mono-ha (School of Things), and this show will feature works made from then through the mid-’90s. It will also include the first screening of Suga’s “mystery film,” Being and Murder (1999), outside Japan.
July 25–ongoing

Gilles Deleuze had a lot to say about the order and disorder of the world, much of it intensely incisive and all of it brain-bendingly complex in ways that make theory fiends’ eyes go wide while those of others roll back in their head. This book compiles transcriptions of eight seminars Deleuze gave on “painting and its intersections with philosophy,” with annotation by philosopher David Lapoujade and musings on figures including Rembrandt, Delacroix, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, and Francis Bacon.
On sale Aug. 12

Long viewed as anathema to avant-garde art-making, religious imagery has officially returned to the field of painting, and one of the leading practitioners in this regard is Portia Zvavahera. In paintings of her dreams, she has vividly represented unearthly beings in grand enrapturing pictures that transcend the waking world, with many references to her Pentecostal upbringing. Zvavahera has called her dreams a way of “direct communication with God”; this show, centered around recent paintings of hallucinatory animals, aspires to move its viewers toward similar spiritual states.
Aug. 28–Jan. 19