10 Institutional Shows of Work by Black Artists to See This Month

At 81 years old, Suzanne Jackson has finally been given a major museum retrospective. “Suzanne Jackson: What is Love?” comprises over 80 works spanning a 60-year art career, from Jackson’s ethereal paintings of the late 1960s to the early 1970s that celebrate humans’ connection to the nature, to recent three-dimensional pieces that suspend paint in midair—her groundbreaking contribution to the art-historical canon. The exhibition also features a commissioned piece, ¿What Feeds Us? (2025), which addresses our global environmental crisis. Part of a West Coast community of Black artists in the 1960s, Jackson ran an art gallery—the storied Gallery 32—between 1968 and 1970 out of her Los Angeles studio; a section of the show brings together artworks originally exhibited there by Betye Saar, Senga Nengudi, David Hammons, John Outterbridge and Emory Douglas, among others. Throughout, “What is Love?” highlights the interplay between Jackson’s visual art and her multifaceted career as a poet, dancer, theater designer, and advocate for Black art.

Through March 1. The show will travel to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, May 14–Aug 23, 2026

This is the first institutional career retrospective of sculptor Tom Lloyd (1929–1996), who, like Jackson, combined art with activism. That it has been mounted by the Studio Museum in Harlem as one of the shows inaugurating its new building is appropriate: When the Studio Museum opened its doors in 1968, its first solo exhibition was devoted to Lloyd’s pioneering electronically programmed light sculptures, which he began making in 1965 in collaboration with engineer Alan Sussman. Shortly before that show opened, Lloyd was a participant, along with Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, William T. Williams, Hale Woodruff and others, in the 1968 roundtable “Black Artists in America: A Symposium,” a response to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show “Harlem on My Mind,” which notoriously included no Black artists. In 1971, Lloyd opened the Store Front Museum/Paul Robeson Theatre, a community-based institution that offered residents of his Queens neighborhood exposure to Black art and culture. “Tom Lloyd” presents 21 of Lloyd’s artworks, including a selection of his electronic light sculptures, wall reliefs made of found metal, and works on paper, as well as documentation of his activism with the Art Worker’s Coalition (1969–1971), a group advocating for more inclusive museum programming, and his leadership of the Store Front Museum.

Through March 22.

This is the self-taught artist’s first major museum exhibition since the 1990s. Born in North Carolina, Evans (1892–1987) was employed as a domestic worker for the family that created Airlie Gardens, a public botanic garden in Wilmington, North Carolina; she later worked as a gatekeeper there, retiring in 1974 at the age of 82. Evans did not draw or paint until she was 43, when she began making art based on the vivid dreams she had had since she was a child. At first, she made semi-abstract drawings resembling mandalas; these gave way in the 1950s to kaleidoscopic oil-and-crayon compositions featuring intertwining humans, animals, and plants. Evans had her first formal exhibition in 1961, and a survey of her work was mounted at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975; she is now recognized as one of the preeminent visionary artists of the 20th century. “The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans” presents over 100 of her artworks in the context of her life history and experience as a Black woman in the Jim Crow South.

Through April 12.

MoMA’s “Artist’s Choice” series, for which an artist is invited to curate an exhibition of works from the museum’s collection, was founded in 1989 and is open to the public without a ticket. For the 17th iteration of the series, artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa follows Grace Wales Bonner (2024), Yto Barrada (2022), and Amy Sillman (2020) as organizer of the show. Known for using montage and collage to present the complexities of Black reality, Jafa has selected over 80 pieces, often juxtaposing them in affecting ways—a Piet Mondrian composition, for example, is hung near a quilt by Gees Bend quilter Lutisha Pettway. The title of the exhibition is a riff on the saying “less is more,” the mantra of Bauhaus architect and modernist icon Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of whose whose steel columns—the underpinning for modernist architecture—is included here. Jafa’s show, however, argues for an alternative to modernist rationality, often used to “other” Blackness, queerness, and femininity, finding it in what the artist calls “affective capacity,” or the emotional power of association.

Through July 5.

Barbara Bullock (1949−1996) studied art at George Peabody College for Teachers (now a part of Vanderbilt University) in Nashville; she returned to artmaking after suffering a stroke at age 35, taking classes at the Nashville’s Watkins Institute (now Watkins College of Art at Belmont University). While drawing and painting helped her recover her lost vision and fine motor skills, she saw her art as much more: many of her paintings critique social ills such as racism, classism, and sexism, while works like Gathering (1993) specifically address the social expectations imposed on upper-class Black women. Bullock also depicted her friends, her cat, and herself in such tender portraits as the undated My Friend Gail. Bullock (not to be confused with a Philadelphia artist of the same name) was active in the Nashville art community, and friends and colleagues remember her as a “griot,” a West African term for storyteller, for the narrative-like structure of her paintings and their emphasis on personal and collective experience. Her impact was especially strong on women artists in Nashville, some of whose work can be seen in the adjacent show, “In Her Place, Nashville Artists in the Twenty-First Century.” “Sistah Griot: The Iconoclastic Art of Barbara Bullock,” which features some 40 pieces, is part of the 2026 Tennessee Triennial, a celebration of contemporary artists throughout the state.

Through April 26

Hayward J. Oubre Jr. (1916–2006) is best known, if he is known at all, for his 1950s modernist sculptures made of coat hangers; this much-needed retrospective at the New Orleans Museum of Art both brings attention to an underknown figure and expands the canon of American modernism. Born in New Orleans, Oubre attended Dillard University, where he was the school’s first art major, before pursuing postgraduate studies at Atlanta University; among his teachers there were noted Black artists Hale Woodruff (1900–80) and Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890–1960). After earning a master’s degree from the University of Iowa, Oubre taught art at a series of historically Black institutions: the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes, Alabama State University, and Winston Salem State University, where he founded a studio art program. In addition to his wire sculptures, which he produced from the 1950s to the early 1980s, Oubre created paintings and prints. Featuring over 50 of his artworks, “Hayward Oubre: Structural Integrity,” places them in the context of his military service, his work as an educator, and his activism during the Civil Rights movement.

Through May 3

Devoted to pioneering photographer Ming Smith, this exhibition traces her career from the 1970s to the present day and focuses on the influence of dance and music, especially jazz, on her work.  Originally mounted by The Gund at Kenyon College in Ohio, it includes many images printed for the first time. Born in 1947, Smith earned a degree in microbiology from Harvard before moving to New York City and embarking on a career as a street photographer. In the 1970s, following in the footsteps of many Black creatives, she traveled in Europe, where she encountered the work of modernists Brassaï and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Known for their abstract qualities, her black-and-white photographs communicate the intricacies of the Black experience while subverting the medium’s objectifying qualities.  Smith was the first female photographer to be included in the Black photography collective Kamoinge as well as the first Black female photographer to have a work in the collection at the Museum of Modern Art.

Through June 7

The African American Master Artist-in-Residency program, an outgrowth of the Black Arts Movement in Boston, was founded by artist, educator, and activist Dana C. Chandler Jr. at Northeastern University in 1977. Working at the intersection of art, activism, and community, the program was created to nurture Black excellence in the visual and performing arts; after more than forty years, it is still an operational center for African diasporic cultural development, providing studio space and hosting exhibitions, concerts, lectures, and workshops. “Say It Loud: AAMARP, 1977 to Now” offers an in-depth look at the program’s history through more than 50 works in all media by 39 artists.

Through August 2

Departing from his signature “Soundsuits”—part sculpture and part garment—artist and educator Nick Cave has installed a monumental assemblage of sculptures, videos, and found objects at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum. Commissioned by SAAM, “Nick Cave: Mammoth” is deeply grounded in Cave’s family history and his own experience as a Black man in America. Featuring a monumental tapestry laid over a map of Missouri, where Cave’s grandparents were farmers; a 700-square-foot light table loaded with thousands of found objects, including his grandmother’s thimble collection; and a video of prehistoric mammoths wandering the streets of present-day Chicago; the installation invites viewers to consider their own relationship to the natural world and to the objects and histories that shape our lives. The exhibition ponders human existence and its precarity, asking how we can adapt and thrive, .

Through January 3, 2027

Multidisciplinary artist Adam Pendleton uses a process-oriented approach to making paintings. His works start with combining intuitive mark-making, geometric shapes, and words and phrases on paper; he then photographs these compositions and layers them using screen printing. The completed paintings blur the lines between abstraction and representation and among painting, drawing, and photography. On view alongside this installation of Pendleton’s paintings is Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?), a new video by the artist that combines still and moving images of Resurrection City, the 1968 encampment on the National Mall that was the centerpiece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. The video’s orchestral score integrates a reading by the late, Black Arts Movement leader, Amiri Baraka.

Through January 3, 2027