Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour — Frederick Douglass
2023-12-08 - 2026-12-06 | Smithsonian American Art Museum, 750 9th St. N.W., Washington, DC, 20001, United States
Sir Isaac Julien’s moving image installation Lessons of the Hour (2019) interweaves period reenactments across five screens to create a vivid picture of nineteenth-century activist, writer, orator, and philosopher Frederick Douglass. Through critical research, fictional reconstruction, and a marriage of poetic image and sound, Julien asserts Douglass’ enduring lessons of justice, abolition, and freedom that remain just as relevant today.
Lessons of the Hour features passages from Douglass’ key speeches, including the titular “Lessons of the Hour,” “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” and “Lecture on Pictures.”
Julien weaves together reenacted scenes from Douglass’ life and lectures, filming at his historic home in Washington, DC, and a restaged studio of famed Black photographer J.P. Ball (1825–1904) as he makes a portrait of Douglass. Images of contemporary Baltimore—the city where Douglass was enslaved and escaped from bondage in 1838—including footage of fireworks and protests in 2015 following the death of Freddie Gray, Jr. while in police custody, are interspersed as the struggle to make good on America’s promise of equality continues.
Lessons of the Hour was jointly acquired by SAAM and the National Portrait Gallery in 2023. The 28-minute work debuted for Washington audiences December 8, 2023, and remains on public view through the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States in 2026.
Save

Tending and Dreaming: Stories from the Collection
2025-03-07 11:00 - 2027-12-31 18:00 (America/New_York) | San Jose Museum of Art, 110 S. Market Street, San Jose, CA, 95113, United States
Tending and Dreaming: Stories from the Collection launches the first dedicated collection galleries at the Museum. Providing unprecedented access to core works in San José’s only publicly held art collection, SJMA’s collection galleries position artists as storytellers to imagine the Museum as a space where culture and meaning are actively made and always in process.
Organized into thematic groupings, Tending and Dreaming offers poetic starting points for engaging with ideas woven through the works of almost fifty artists from the Bay Area and beyond, including Ruth Asawa, Martha Atienza, Shilpa Gupta, Yolanda López, and Elias Sime, among many others.
Save

“Tell Clyfford I Said ‘Hi’”: An Exhibition Curated by Children of the Colville Confederated Tribes
2025-09-19 10:00 - 2026-05-10 17:00 (America/Denver) | Clyfford Still Museum, 1250 Bannock St., Denver, CO, 80204, United States
“Tell Clyfford I Said ‘Hi’”: An Exhibition Curated by Children of the Colville Confederated Tribes is a collaborative exhibition co-curated with youth from the Colville Confederated Tribes in Washington State, on view from September 19, 2025–May 10, 2026, at the Clyfford Still Museum. It highlights the perspectives of Colville children on Clyfford Still’s depictions of their ancestors and their home, as well as his abstract works. Installed in all nine of the Museum’s galleries, this exhibition investigates six themes identified by our co-curators: Family & Culture, Connection, Storytelling, Wilderness, Love, and Paint & Color.
Clyfford Still Museum’s curatorial and education staff worked with young children (ages three years to fourteen years old) and teachers from partner schools and childcare centers on the Colville Confederated Tribes Reservation on every level of the exhibition, including artwork selection and arrangement, object interpretation and gallery text, and interactive space.
This exhibition continues CSM’s efforts to foster engagement with its collections by sharing authority on Still’s work with the Museum’s critical communities and is an occasion to bridge various gaps—physical, cultural, metaphorical—that exist between Indigenous communities and the traditional art museum space.
Background and Development
While working as an instructor at the Washington State College Fine Arts Department, Clyfford Still assisted in founding a summer art colony for WSC community members and became one of its first instructors in the summers of 1937 and 1938. Instructors held classes in Nespelem on the Colville Reservation and Toppenish on the Yakama Indian Reservation in Washington. The Clyfford Still Museum collections include three paintings on canvas, over 85 drawings and sketches on paper, nearly 20 documentary photographs, and other archival ephemera documenting Still’s time in the area. These objects reveal how Still’s experiences with the Colville community profoundly impacted his work for years.
While culturally distinct and diverse, the twelve bands of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation—Chelan, Chief Joseph Band of Nez Perce, Colville, Entiat, Lakes, Methow, Moses-Columbia, Nespelem, Okanogan, Palus, San Poil, and Wenatchi—share cultural practices and 1.4 million acres of land. Though CSM has focused past exhibitions and programs on Still’s work from Nespelem since 2013, this exhibition seeks to extend and deepen CSM’s relationship with the Colville Tribal community.
Co-curated with children in the Colville Confederated Tribes in northeastern Washington, this exhibition explores Clyfford Still’s work through the perspectives of children, some of whom are direct descendants of individuals Still portrayed in his art. “Tell Clyfford I Said ‘Hi’” centers young Indigenous voices by engaging them to collaboratively develop an exhibition that builds upon previous evaluation, research, and CSM exhibitions.
Save

Richard Hambleton: Momentum
2026-01-29 11:00 - 2026-03-30 17:00 (America/New_York) | Woodward Gallery, 132A Eldridge Street, New York City, NY, 10002, United States
Woodward Gallery opens the new year with Richard Hambleton: Momentum, an exhibition of works spanning 1982 – 2007. This selection brings together key bodies of work, including Beautiful Paintings, Shadowman, and Burning Merit, to trace movement as a persistent and driving force throughout Hambleton’s practice. Hambleton achieved the impossible: capturing the illusion of motion on canvas. Gesture, layering, and atmosphere generate an almost kinetic energy that invites viewers to experience the animated textures depicted in Hambleton’s paintings. Through his various styles of painting, Hambleton’s work embodies movement as energized momentum.

Richard Hambleton approached painting as an act of immediacy and intention. Working in spontaneous bursts, he translated emotional and physical states directly onto the surface. His practice was deeply participatory, shaped by a belief that art functions as both a psychological and sociological encounter. Materials were mixed intuitively, varnishes, pigments, and unconventional substances layered in ways that reveal the artist’s inner state. Nothing in Hambleton’s work is static; everything is in motion.

The Beautiful Paintings, including Priscilla (2006) and Magdalena (2007), evoke the qualities of dawn and dusk. Incorporating silver leaf, these dramatic seascape works function as immersive experiences. Once presented in David Rockefeller’s art gallery at Rockefeller State Park Preserve, these works underscore Hambleton’s capacity to channel stillness, depth, and quiet momentum, an encounter that lingers well beyond the first viewing.

In Malibu (1986), a stark black monolith, an ancient symbol of life and transcendence, is intended to be an entry point to heaven. Acting simultaneously as barrier and passage, this foreboding rectangle shields the viewer from the sun’s intensity while also offering entry into it. In this and related works, Hambleton’s use of vertical black lines functions as collapsed shadows, a modern element he sometimes added, both an echo of Hambleton’s iconic figures and a conceptual homage to Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman.

Another significant body of work in the exhibition centers on horse-and-rider imagery. Drawing from cigarette advertising, most notably the Marlboro Man, Hambleton critiqued American hypermasculinity and the commodification of identity. Instead of a cool-looking cowboy, Hambleton painted the Marlboro Man as a shadowy silhouette, symbolizing the dangers of smoking. Reappropriating the ads, Richard sometimes embedded actual tobacco into the paint, confronting seduction and toxicity simultaneously.

The Burning Merit series critiques vintage Merit cigarette advertisements, replacing the fantasized image of a ship full of happy smokers, with a dark parody of this same ship on fire from a stray lit cigarette. Through the explosive imagery of a burning ship, momentum is harnessed. Romanticization of cigarette addiction and the catastrophic effects of smoking culture collide.

Freiburg (1982), a striking Shadowman painting, depicts an exploding white figure suspended in motion. Like the broader Shadowman series, originally conceived as urban interventions, this work captures sudden presence, psychological tension, and the shock of encounter. The figure feels alive, erupting into the viewer’s space with urgency and force.

Together, the Beautiful Paintings, Shadowman, and Burning Merit works reveal Hambleton’s engagement with nature and the human psyche. Momentum emerges not only as physical movement, but as something accumulated, lived, and carried forward, an enduring force that defines Hambleton’s legacy. Richard Hambleton’s art carries the viewer beyond the canvas, where their momentum continues to unfold long after the encounter ends.

Richard Hambleton: Momentum is on view at Woodward Gallery’s 132A Eldridge Street location from late January throughout March 2026, also available on our website, and as a Viewing Room on Artsy.net. We welcome you to join us in person or online this winter.

Save

Beauford Delaney: The Light Contained in Every Thing
2026-02-07 - 2026-04-04 | Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 100 11th Ave, New York, NY, New York, United States
The gallery’s fourth solo presentation featuring the work of celebrated American artist Beauford Delaney (1901–1979), Beauford Delaney: The Light Contained in Every Thing includes abstract paintings and works on paper created between 1954 and 1968. Taking its title from the introduction to Delaney’s 1964 solo exhibition at Galerie Lambert in Paris written by his close friend and famed author James Baldwin (1924–1987), this exhibition illuminates Delaney’s unmatched ability to imbue his compositions with a radiance that resonates on a visual, psychological, and spiritual level.
Learn more
Save

William T. Williams: Word of Eye
2026-02-07 - 2026-04-04 | Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 100 11th Ave, New York, NY, New York, United States
William T. Williams: Word of Eye is the debut presentation for a new series of paintings by William T. Williams (b.1942). The gallery’s fourth solo exhibition of the artist’s work, the show includes eleven paintings created between 2024 and 2025. Imbued with a sense of monumentality that is expressed through their beauty, compositional complexity, and perceptual impact, Williams states: “I wanted to make a body of work that demanded and would require a person looking and looking for a sustained amount of time. It’s not a 30 second pass, its stopping, looking, inquiring, and allowing the painting and the viewer to become one in the same.”
Learn more
Save

Wallflowers
2026-02-07 11:00 - 2026-05-17 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave, Seattle, WA, 98104, United States
Wallflowers is a dialogue across time centered on one of art history’s most underestimated genres: the floral still life. Bringing together eleven paintings from the Frye’s collection with newly commissioned wallpaper designs from eleven contemporary artists, the exhibition explores how artists from the nineteenth century to the present have turned to floral imagery as fertile ground for experimentation and reinvention.
The floral still life genre has proven remarkably durable, capable of holding centuries’ worth of ideas about beauty, impermanence, social class, and the shifting relationship between art and craft. Today, contemporary artists continue to redeploy the floral as both image and symbol: an unassuming bouquet is actually neither quaint nor static, but full of cultural memory, and a site for subversive social critique.
Structured to mimic the delights of navigating a cultivated garden, Wallflowers oscillates between discrete paintings and immersive patterns, between contemplation and exuberance. The selected works tell a broader story of industrialization, design, and modernism’s ongoing flirtation with the decorative, and celebrate the ability of artists to invest familiar forms with fresh meaning.
Save

Robert The: Book Work
2026-02-26 - 2026-04-26 | JHB Gallery New York, 26 Grove Street, 4C, New York, NY, 10014, United States
Artist Robert The creates sculptural works in which books are transformed with subversive wit and scrupulous invention. Often working with remaindered volumes that were part of large-scale mass-market editions, the artist transfigures these objects through singular gestures such as through-slicing words and cutting out new iconic forms. Always uniquely appropriate to his source material, the artist’s interventions have included turning a bible into a grenade and a Malevich monograph into a Kalashnikov.
For History of Art, 2017, The modifies a copy of H.W. Janson’s ubiquitous art history doorstopper by slicing ‘bristles’ into its leaved edge and affixing a broom handle to its spine. This remarkable sculptural hybrid could be designed for sweeping away the remnants of a dated art history—or reminding us of the alternate histories swept under the carpet by Janson’s grand narrative.
With The Illustrated Story of “O”, 2005, the artist highlights the violence at the core of the notorious “erotic” novel, cutting a nested handgun through the book. As with all his work, The’s disruptive gesture manages to hold the original book and its new form in an urgent, engaging open conversation with one another.
In Philosophical Investigations, 2017, the artist cuts the word THIS all the way through a copy of Wittgenstein’s opus, suggesting both an analog for indexical meaning, as well as a counter to linguistic relativity through a gesture toward presentness.
View the exhibition online here.
While the precision of Robert The’s work suggests the use of die or laser-cut processes, the works are in fact all directly cut by the artist. Playfully referring to his work as “precision vandalism”, The prefers to avoid marks of the hand-crafted and high-end: his book works instead foreground the laser-like sharpness of their creator’s inventiveness.

Robert The studied philosophy and mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and design at the Institute of Lettering and Design in Chicago. His work has been included in exhibitions at Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; the Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany; Momenta Art, Brooklyn NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY, New Paltz, NY; Center for Book Arts, New York, NY; and Parsons School of Design, New York, NY. The artist’s work can be found in the permanent collections of Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Modern Art Artist Book Collection, New York, NY; New York Public Library, Print Collection, New York, NY; Walker Art Center Library, Minneapolis, MN; Yale University Library, Arts of the Book Collection, New Haven, CT; and Banff Centre Library, Banff, Alberta, Canada, among many others.
Save

Unseen Layers
2026-03-05 - 2026-05-21 | Ronald Feldman Gallery, 31 Mercer Street, New York, NY, 10013, United States
“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science.”
Albert Einstein
from a 1931 essay, included later in Ideas and Opinions and quoted by Eleanor Heartney in Unseen Layers catalogue.

Ronald Feldman Gallery presents a series of new science-inspired paintings by Edwin Schlossberg, marking his fifteenth solo exhibition with the gallery. Compelled by his study of visual realms newly observed by scientists using innovative techniques and cutting-edge technology, the works expound upon a broad range of subjects: biological and cosmic processes, cellular emergence, organic composition, neural phenomenon, and many others – all united by their alive-ness. The artist approaches life’s activities from an expansive perspective, where art, science and humanity fundamentally interconnect, and opportunities for crosspollination and renewal continually exist.

Notably, Schlossberg considers each work a type of portrait, with titles such as Portrait of Cells Dividing, Portrait of Mouse Brain, and Portrait of the Sun Shining. At once corporeal and spiritual, the paintings are made of luminous, metallic colors with daubed or web-like compositions; the multiple paint layers applied to highly-reflective backgrounds portray structural, life-supporting (or potentially life-threatening) entities.
Schlossberg’s Making Visible will be played in the gallery’s street window. The visionary, 26:38 minute, black and white video was commissioned by the Dilexi Foundation for public television in 1969. The experimental work, narrated by the artist and Buckminster Fuller, is an essayistic exploration of the vast potential for electronic communication, and embodies the promise of technology facilitating human interaction and understanding.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue featuring contributors invited by Edwin Schlossberg and Lara Pan. The publication includes texts and reflections by John Alexander, Céline Fribourg, Steven Heller, Eleanor Heartney, Brett Littman, Debbie Millman, George Musser, Lara Pan, Rose Schlossberg, Sasha Stiles, Sacha Wade, and Kevin Wade, edited by Lara Pan.

Edwin Schlossberg has been represented by Ronald Feldman Gallery since 1978. For over five decades, he has worked across conventional and unconventional media to create visual and poetic worlds that bridge language, image and perception. His work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally and is included in major public and private collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2004, he received the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, and in 2011 he was appointed by President Barack Obama to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Thursday and Saturday, 1-5pm (closed Saturday March 7th and April 4th)
For press and image inquiries, contact Cat Zhou at (212) 226-3232 or catherine@feldmangallery.com
Reception: Thursday, March 5, 6-8pm
Panel Discussion: Saturday March 28, 5pm with Edwin Schlossberg, Eleanor Heartney, and George Musser, moderated by Lara Pan
Save
