Eliana Willis

Although the less-than-stellar weather has meant summer getting off to a slow start, triple-digit temperatures and heavy humidity are surely in our future. Want to escape the heat? Step into the cool air-conditioned galleries of an art museum, where you can take a mental vacation. Feeling FOMO about the European excursions you’re not able to attend? Gustav Caillebotte’s 19th-century views of Parisian life are a good consolation. And if you’re looking to expand your mind beyond this realm, Anicka Yi and Saya Woolfalk have conjured up alternate realities in mind-bending solo exhibitions. Here are our pick of the best shows to see around the country this summer.

“Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings” at the Morgan Library and MuseumJune 27, 2025–January 4, 2026
Lisa Yuskavage, (b. 1962), Neon Sunset, 2013. Monoprint with hand additions in pastel mounted on aluminum. Private Collection © Lisa Yuskavage. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
After a rocky start in the art world—where critics dismissed her high-octane, hyper-feminine style as girlish or superficial—Lisa Yuskavage’s legacy is undergoing a reappraisal. Now 62 and firmly mid-career, she has found renewed critical and market recognition. Her recent painting show at David Zwirner in Los Angeles confirmed her commercial relevance; and a new museum exhibition of her drawings aims to cement her place in the critical canon.
On June 27, the Morgan Library and Museum opens Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings, the first comprehensive museum presentation of her work in just one medium, charting back to the 1990s through now. It’ll be an opportunity to see her work without the effect of her usual color range, as the works on paper are often made with materials with set pigments like graphite, pastel, charcoal, and Conte. The entirety of the museum’s Thaw Gallery will be filled with renderings of Yuskavage’s early explorations of the figure and still lives, and more recent dives into landscape.
—Annie Armstrong

“Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World” at the Art Institute of ChicagoJune 29–October 5, 2025
Gusave Caillebotte, Boating party (1877) Private collection. Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images.
French painter Gustave Caillebotte was a member of the Impressionist group though his style stands out for being decidedly more realistic than some of his fellow artists (think Monet’s brushy waterlilies) and was also closely tied to his love of photography. Caillebotte frequently depicted friends and relatives in scenes set in late 19th-century urban Paris, whether it was famous scenes like Floor Scrapers or the Art Institute’s own Paris Street; Rainy Day.
This exhibition, which originally on view at the Musée d’Orsay last fall, includes more than 120 works—paintings, works on paper, photographs and other ephemera—and showcases a number of lesser-known but important works such as Musée d’Orsay’s recent acquisition, Boating Party, and the Louvre Abu-Dhabi’s The Bezique Game, alongside many works from private collections that are rarely seen by American audiences.
—Eileen Kinsella

“Anicka Yi” at the Museum of Fine Arts, HoustonJune 29–September 7, 2025
Anicka Yi, Each Branch Of Coral Holds Up The Light Of The Moon, 2024, film still, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment. © 2025 Anicka Yi / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.
Deep in the heart of Texas, South Korean bio-tech artist Anicka Yi is having a museum show that opens on June 29 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, with several works dedicated to the theme of “karmic debt.”
Yi is known for her deeply imaginative conceptual artworks that toe the line between artwork and scientific exploration. Often, she blends uncommon mediums together, such as fragrance, musical instruments, and homemade robotics. Two of the pieces prominently featured in the show in Houston include an animatronic sculpture that moves in a manner meant to emulate prehistoric lifeforms, and another is a fully programmed software designed to keep Yi’s studio practice ongoing after her death.
—Annie Armstrong

“Queer Lens: A History of Photography” at the Getty CenterJune 17–September 28, 2025
Gay Liberation March on Times Square, 1969. Diana Davies. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations © NYPL. Image Courtesy of Getty Center/Valerie Tate.
Photography has long served as both a mirror and a weapon for the LGBTQ+ community—capturing, affirming, and at times rescuing queer life from erasure. “Queer Lens” at the Getty traces this layered history from the mid-19th century to the present, veering from the hyper-stylized, baroque portraits of Pierre et Gilles and David LaChapelle to Weegee’s raw street reportage. A 1966 photograph of the “Sip-In” protest at Julius’, Manhattan’s oldest gay bar (still open, still slinging cheeseburgers and brews), is especially resonant. So, too, are images of early pride events, long before corporate floats and branded sponsorships, when protest signs were handmade and clothing logo-free.
This hits differently in light of this year’s pride season, as the cowardly banks and big-box retailers—who once latched on to pride to vacuously virtue-signal and shill their wares—have retreated, fearing retribution from the current administration. But we don’t need them, and never did. As these images make clear, queer communities have always created space for themselves—and will continue to persevere, with or without corporate approval.
—William van Meter

“Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe” at the Museum of Arts and DesignThrough September 7, 2025
Installation view of “Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe” (2025). Photo: Jenna Bascom, courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.
Fans of Saya Woolfalk’s “world building” installation have a lot to dive into here. “Empathic Universe” marks a retrospective of her work, famous for a fictional narrative focused on an imagined race of women known as “Empathics.” Woolfalk creates a signature visual imagery for these women that is a blend of visual symbols and folklore that are rooted in an analysis and exploration of African, African American, Japanese, European, and Brazilian art and stories.
The artist tells her stories with the use of garment-based sculpture, video, paintings, and works on paper.
—Eileen Kinsella

“Wrapped Walk Ways” at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of ArtJune 28, 2025–January 18, 2026
Christo, Wrapped Walk Ways (Project for Jacob L. Loose Memorial Park, Kansas City, Missouri), 1978. Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Photo: by Eeva-Inkeri, © the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.
In 1978, visitors strolling through Kansas City’s Loose Park might well have thought: “we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.” If they chose to follow the saffron fabric road, they’d find themselves immersed in Wrapped Walk Ways, the temporary outdoor installation by Christo and Jeanne-Claude that transformed 2.7 miles of park pathways into a glowing, otherworldly landscape. As with their many site-specific interventions, the Bulgarian-born Christo and his partner Jeanne-Claude reimagined the familiar, inviting the public into a new, heightened experience of place and scale.
Now, as the 50th anniversary of Wrapped Walk Ways approaches, the Nelson-Atkins Museum revisits this “fabulous expedition” through an exhibition drawn from the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation’s 2024 gift of preparatory drawings, plans, photographs, and archival materials—much of it ephemeral, yet visually compelling enough to be artworks in their own right. This behind-the-scenes look into the intricacy and artistry of the duo’s process is revelatory, offering a rare glimpse of Christo and Jeanne-Claude in two dimensions.
—William van Meter

“Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg: Glacial Decoy” at the Walker Art CenterJune 26, 2025–May 24, 2026
Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg: Glacial Decoy. Image Courtesy of Walker Art Center Public Relations (Walker).
The exhibition, which marks Rauschenberg’s centennial year, pays tribute to the groundbreaking 1979 dance of the same name (Glacial Decoy), which premiered at the Walker. Brown choreographed the performance, in which four figures in flowing dresses shift back and forth on the stage, against a backdrop created by Rauschenberg. His oversized, rotating black-and-white photographs of everyday objects serve as a way to ground the performers’ dramatic movements in the physical world. The exhibition includes original costumes, video documentation, and archival materials. Further, it kicks off a multidisciplinary series of programs to celebrate the artist’s centennial.
—Eileen Kinsella

“Charles Atlas: Hail the New Puritan” at the Bass MuseumThrough October 19, 2025
Charles Atlas, Hail the New Puritan (film still). ©Charles Atlas. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
“Hail the new puritan! Righteous maelstrom!” sang Mark E. Smith of The Fall, the English post-punk band who, by the early 1980s, was finding renewed vigor through its unexpected collaboration with renegade Scottish choreographer Michael Clark. The group’s 1984 live television appearance featured Clark’s troupe in their signature cut-out tights (and often bare backsides), merging the raw energy of punk with the formal discipline of ballet and queer subcultural spectacle—polka dots, whether painted on faces or used in fabric for costumes, was also a big thing for some mysterious reason. Their collaboration would later culminate in the 1988 ballet I Am Curious, Orange. Experimental filmmaker Charles Atlas was there to capture the scene—or rather, to reinvent it. Hail the New Puritan (1985–86) is not so much a documentary as a fictionalized portrait of Clark’s world, offering an intimate, stylized snapshot of the vibrant collision of dance, fashion, nightlife, and underground culture in 1980s London.
Leigh Bowery, one of Clark’s most audacious collaborators, appears throughout this scene, as performer, muse, and provocateur. With Hail the New Puritan now on view at The Bass, the film offers a timely counterpoint to the major retrospective “Leigh Bowery!” currently on view at Tate Modern in London. The unbridled creativity that flourished in 1980s London—rising up amid economic hardship, social unrest, and fraught sexual politics—feels especially resonant today, as artists once again turn to performance, identity, and community as radical forms of expression.
—William van Meter

“Vermeer’s Love Letters,” at the Frick CollectionJune 18–August 31, 2025
Johannes Vermeer, The Love Letter (ca. 1669-70). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Now that one of New York’s all-time favorite museums is back and better than ever, the Frick has another major treat for art lovers this summer. “Vermeer’s Love Letters” is the first show to be held in the museum’s new Ronald S. Lauder galleries. It features three of the beloved Dutch painter’s masterpieces, the Frick’s own Mistress and Maid, alongside two major loans, The Love Letter from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and Woman Writing A Letter With Her Maid from the National Gallery in Ireland. This marks the first time all three are being displayed in a single gallery together. It’s also the first major Vermeer exhibition in New York City in nearly 25 years.
—Eileen Kinsella More

Jill Magid‘s latest solo show is more than just a gallery show. It’s part of her dealer Esther Kim Varet’s run for Congress. For the exhibition, at Various Small Fires in Los Angeles, Magid made a replica of the platform in the White House Press Briefing Room, with its star-spangled carpet, and invited Kim Varet to use the work, titled The Platform (U.S. General Elections, 2026), to deliver stump speeches.
When Kim Varet announced her run for office in January, Magid had already been hard at work on the show. It was originally focused on a deep dive into official books published by U.S. government offices featuring political speeches, as transcribed in stenographers’ notes. There are still elements of Magid’s initial vision present in the final show, but she very much pivoted to respond to Kim Varet’s campaign.
“I’m an artist who makes work about power and accessing power structures, and here the gallerist is running a political campaign for Congress. How can I not do something with that, you know?” she told me.
”For me, it’s important to put myself in an uncomfortable situation.
And make work from that position that provokes or asks questions.”
The exhibition press release consists of Magid’s email to Kim Varet describing the new direction for the show: “You noted that my work is most powerful when it responds to a site or situation. For this reason I am integrating your run for office as a material of the work.”
Jill Magid, The Platform (U.S. General Elections, 2026), 2025. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
Magid is careful to note that the show is not meant to be an endorsement of Kim Varet’s candidacy. (The dealer is running as a Democrat to unseat a Republican incumbent in California’s 40th Congressional District, and has already raised over $1 million, according to Ballotpedia.)
“I’m questioning free speech, and democracy, and how platforms work,” Magid said. “Not everyone is getting on a state-sanctioned platform. People are using other kinds of platforms and building other places to speak from. For me, I would never step on that platform. I would speak from the floor.”
Titled “Heart of a Citizen,” the show is largely staged outside, with only The Platform in the main gallery space, accompanied by a vitrine of documents related to its creation and the complex campaign finance laws that allow its display in a business owned by a political candidate.
Jill Magid, The Rose Garden (2025) and Stenographer’s Note: (At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden.), 2025, installation view in “Jill Magid: Heart of a Citizen” at Various Small Fires. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
The other two works are displayed outside in the courtyard, with a 15-foot-long neon sign reading Stenographer’s Note: [At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden] hanging on the wall, and 12 cast concrete facsimiles of the artist’s heart, which are titled The Rose Garden. 
To create the sculptures, Magid got an MRI at the Cleveland Clinic, and enlisted the artificial heart lab (officially called the Therapeutic Technology Design and Development Lab) at the department of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge to fabricate an accurate replica of the organ.
Jill Magid, The Rose Garden (2025) and Stenographer’s Note: (At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden.), 2025, installation view in “Jill Magid: Heart of a Citizen” at Various Small Fires. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
“Everyone kept saying, ‘wow, your heart’s really big!’” Magid said.
But if the gallery is the press briefing room, the courtyard has become the White House Rose Garden. Magid was inspired by Trump’s announcement in February that he would pave the historic space to create a patio like the one at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach golf course. (He said it was because women’s high heels were sinking into the grass.)
“At Various Small Fires, you come off the street and there’s a corridor that opens up on this courtyard with tall cinder block walls, painted white, and then it’s this gray, dusty gravel,” Magid said. “It just worked with this kind of lament about the garden as an inquiry of power.”
The White House Rose Garden renovation, tearing out the lawn to create a Mar-a-Lago-style patio, on June 12, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Photo: by Win McNamee/Getty Images.
And even since the exhibition has opened, Trump has begun to make good on that plan, beginning on June 9 to bulldoze the lawn. (Though the rose garden’s origins can be traced to the early 1900s, noted art collector and horticulturalist Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon created the current design for President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.)
Trump had already put his mark on the Rose Garden in his first term, removing the crab apple trees that had lined the space since the 1960s and replacing many of the colorful flowers with more staid greenery and white roses.
Magid pays tribute to those lost trees with the Stenographer’s Note piece, which is taken directly from a transcript of a Rose Garden speech: “[At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden.]”
Jill Magid, Stenographer’s Note: (At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden.), 2025, installation view in “Jill Magid: Heart of a Citizen” at Various Small Fires. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
She was transfixed by the idea that a stenographer, ostensibly tasked with a straightforward transcription, would write such a poetic note, and that it would become part of our historical record, preserved in the presidential papers.
And then there was the vision the words conjured, contrasted with the work’s surroundings, Magid said. “The courtyard being this very barren, desert-like
space. The sun just beats down on it, and it’s dusty. And then there’s this quote where you can only imagine the trees and the wind and the roses.”
Jill Magid, Stenographer’s Note: (At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden.), 2025, installation view in “Jill Magid: Heart of a Citizen” at Various Small Fires. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
Magid’s work has engaged with landscape architecture before. She is perhaps best known for her efforts to secure the return of the archives of Mexican Modernist architect Luis Barragán (1902–1988) to his homeland from Swiss furniture company Vitra in exchange for a diamond ring made from his compressed ashes.
But her interest in the White House Rose Garden actually originated with the flowers, and how they can have a wide variety of associations. For her 2020 project Tender, Magid engraved the edge of 120,000 pennies with the phrase “THE BODY WAS ALREADY SO FRAGILE” and distributed them at bodegas around New York City.
That sparked an interest in cheap bodega flowers and the flower economy. In October, Magid had a floral-themed solo presentation with Mexico City’s Labor Gallery at Art Basel Paris, complete with an installation of blooms from Paris’s open-air flower markets.
Jill Magid, The Platform (U.S. General Elections, 2026), 2025, vitrine documents. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
“Heart of a Citizen” is comparatively spartan. But it had other kinds of complications. Presenting The Platform required a careful study of campaign finance laws, to avoid financial fraud.
Ahead of the show, Magid actually sold the work to collector Michael Young, who donated it as an in-kind contribution to Kim Varet’s campaign. And because she spoke on the platform at the opening, Kim Varet needed to rent our her own space for the occasion, at the rate of $200 an hour. (The plan is to take The Platform on the road for campaign events after the exhibition run.)
“I found it really fascinating and learned a lot about the inner workings of finance and political campaigns,” Magid said.
Jill Magid, The Platform (U.S. General Elections, 2026), 2025, envelope with stamp by the artist. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
The exhibition also includes a stack of paperwork. Magid has provided copies of the official U.S. application to run for Congress, and envelopes to mail them off. On the back, she’s stamped each one with a quote from cultural theorist Robert M. Ochshorn, paraphrasing French writer and philosopher Maurice Blanchot, about how one should “only start building platforms once you’ve fully and deeply rejected the notion and premise and promise of platform.”
“I hope,” Magid said, “that The Platform will be a really good place to provoke questions, debate, and dissent.”
“Jill Magid: Heart of a Citizen” is on view at Various Small Fires, 812 North Highland Avenue, Los Angeles, California, May 22–June 28, 2025.  More

During her two-decade reign, Marie Antoinette didn’t just preside over France, she reshaped the worlds of 18th-century fashion and design in her image. From her sumptuous pastel gowns and towering wigs to her dazzling jewels and gilded furnishings, the queen embraced a personal style of lavish elegance that bled into her quarters at the Château de Versailles, where striking color, lush tapestries, and rococo touches newly defined royal grandeur.
So revolutionary was Marie Antoinette’s style that centuries on, we’re still talking about it. Artists, designers, and filmmakers—from Alexander McQueen to Sofia Coppola—have been captivated. London’s V&A Museum is not sitting this out either; in September, it’s rolling out a major show dedicated to the regal fashion icon.
Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, Portrait de Marie-Antoinette à la rose (1783). Photo: © Château de Versailles, Dist. Grand Palais RMN / Christophe Fouin.
“Marie Antoinette Style,” the first exhibition in the U.K. centered on the French queen, will unpack her dress and interiors, exploring how her unparalleled style has echoed through the ages. Among the 250 objects going on view are historical artifacts, some traveling from Versailles, as well as contemporary pieces that speak to the monarch’s timeless appeal. The exhibition is sponsored by shoemaker Manolo Blahnik.
“The most fashionable, scrutinized and controversial queen in history, Marie Antoinette’s name summons both visions of excess and objects and interiors of great beauty,” noted the show’s curator, Sarah Grant, in a statement. “This exhibition explores that style and the figure at its center, using a range of exquisite objects belonging to Marie Antoinette, alongside the most beautiful fine and decorative objects that her legacy has inspired.”
Beaded pink silk slipper belonging to Marie Antoinette. Photo: CC0 Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris.
When she ascended the throne in 1774, the royal’s style choices swiftly caused a stir. Against the dreary palette of the French court, Marie Antoinette’s light, cascading gowns stood out for their silhouettes as much as for their bright color and intricate detailing—lace, ribbons, ruffles. She would popularize comfort-first styles including the Robe à la Polonaise, recognizable for its fitted bodice and a skirt gathered into three distinct puffs, and Robe à L’anglaise, where the fitted bodice flows into a wide skirt with an opening that reveals an underskirt.
That look was immortalized by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun in her 1783 portrait of the ornately dressed queen lightly clutching a rose, which is making an appearance at “Marie Antoinette Style.” Also going on view are fragments of court dresses, silk slippers, jewels, and a bottle of eau de cologne from her personal collection. The museum is even recreating the aromas of the court and the queen’s favorite perfume for an immersive scent experience.
Crystal flask with label “Eau de Cologne” from the “Nécessaire de voyage,” belonging to Marie Antoinette. Photo: © Grand Palais RMN (musée du Louvre) / Michel Urtado.
Visitors will also get a sense of how Marie Antoinette decorated her private chamber at Versailles, known as the Petit Trianon. Here, in her private sanctuary, the royal indulged her love for rococo, fitting the space with painted wallpaper, objects and furniture with floral forms, and her famous mirrored shutters. Her exquisite dinner service is making a rare outing at the V&A, as are her chair sets and other decorative objects.
‘Lettre’, 1921 from Fêtes Galantes. Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
The exhibition will also delve into how the sovereign’s fashion footprint has outlived her, fueling the cultural imagination from the 19th century to today. Where Art Deco illustrators Erté and George Barbier sought to capture the fantasy of Marie Antoinette’s style, modern-day couture designs from the likes of Vivienne Westwood, Moschino, Dior, Chanel, and Valentino have attempted to match her extravagance.
Moschino show, Runway, Fall Winter 2020, Milan Fashion Week, Italy. Photo: PIXELFORMULA / SIPA / Shutterstock, courtesy of the V&A Museum.
Of course, due space will be given to Sofia Coppola’s beloved 2006 film Marie Antoinette, which won an Academy Award for costume design. Looks and Manolo Blahnik shoes designed for the movie will be featured, alongside other costumes, film stills, and music videos that highlight the doomed queen’s broader legacy on screen and stage.
“This is the design legacy of an early modern celebrity and the story of a woman whose power to fascinate has never ebbed,” Grant added. “Marie Antoinette’s story has been re-told and re-purposed by each successive generation to suit its own ends. The rare combination of glamour, spectacle and tragedy she presents remains as intoxicating today as it was in the 18th century.”
“Marie Antoinette Style” is on view at the V&A Museum, Cromwell Road, London, September 20, 2025 – March 22, 2026. More

Most Americans know Harriet Tubman as the fearless conductor of the Underground Railroad—but few know she led the largest liberation of enslaved people in U.S. military history.
A new exhibition at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C., “Picturing Freedom,” uncovers this little-known chapter. During the Combahee River Raid of 1863, Tubman guided Union troops behind Confederate lines and freed 756 people in a single night—10 times as many people than she helped escape than all her years on the Underground Railroad.
Featuring works by Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglas, Elizabeth Catlett, and Faith Ringgold (1930–2024), among others, the show brings fresh attention to one of the most daring and underrecognized moments of the Civil War. Underscoring Tubman’s enduring ability to inspire, there are also pieces by contemporary artists.
“Harriet’s story has been told visually over and over and over again,” Angela Mack, the museum’s director, said in an interview. “Just pulling all these works together around the Combahee River Raid is very, very powerful.”
Aaron Douglas, Harriet Tubman (1931). Collection of the Bennett College for Women Collection,Greensboro, N.C.
A Daring Feat
The exhibition, guest curated by Vanessa Thaxton-Ward of Virginia’s Hampton University Museum, is based on the new book COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War, which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for history. Author Edda L. Fields-Black, a descendant of one of the raid’s participants, conducted years of archival research to identify those freed that night, and tell their stories, as well as Tubman’s. Fields-Black first reached out to the Gibbes Museum while she was working on the book in 2022.
“She was kind enough to send us a very early manuscript of the book, and we knew right away this was a story that we wanted to try and tell through an exhibition,” Mack said. The project became her swan song, as she is retiring this year after 44 years at the museum, where she has been director since 2008.
J. Henry Fair, Alligator in rice field (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
The result is a multimedia display combining Modern and contemporary art inspired by Tubman with audio from interviews with descendants of those liberated during the raid. There is also a video reenactment of the daring mission and archival photos of enslaved plantation workers toiling in the fields. Setting the scene are gorgeous landscape photographs of the region—with its tidal rice swamps and dangerous wildlife, including alligators and venomous snakes—by local artist J Henry Fair.
“What is remarkable about what Edda and Henry have done is actually experiencing the site, walking through the pluff mud, understanding the perils that these individuals experienced, knowing perfectly well that if they were captured, their lives would be over,” Mack said. “The daring of it is really unbelievable.”
J Henry Fair, Fields Point and Combahee River Wetlands (2015). Courtesy of the artist.
“You almost feel immersed in the Combahee River as you’re walking through the gallery spaces,” she added, “and you’re understanding Harriet’s presence there.”
The representations of Tubman include a Catlett linocut of her pointing the way to freedom, an inspiring light green canvas by Douglas of the silhouette of a woman in the center of a crowd breaking chains over her head, and a moving quilt by contemporary artist Stephen Towns of Tubman and two escaped plantation laborers slipping away on a small boat on the river by the light of the moon.
Terry Plater, Harriet (née Araminta Ross), 2021. Courtesy of the Cayuga Museum of History an Art in Auburn, N.Y.
The exhibition also includes work by William H. Johnson, who created the cover artwork for Fields-Black’s book. An early 20th-century South Carolina artist, he is the subject of a traveling retrospective from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., that opened at the Gibbes in 2022 and goes to Ohio’s Dayton Art Institute later this month. He’s represented here by Three Freedom Fighters, depicting Tubman hand-in-hand with John Brown and Frederick Douglass, on loan from Hampton.
Preserving a Legacy
“Combahee River Raid” opens at a time when Tubman’s legacy is more important than ever, and in danger of being lost. President Donald Trump’s administration has instructed national institutions to present a sanitized version of U.S. history that glosses over the evils of colonialism and slavery, and a photograph of Tubman and one of her quotes was briefly removed from the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad website earlier this year. Though it has since been restored, the U.S. Navy recently included the USNS Harriet Tubman on list of vessels honoring Civil Rights leaders that it recommends renaming.
William H. Johnson, Three Freedom Fighters (ca. 1945). Collection of Hampton University Museum, Hampton, Virginia. Gift of the Harmon Foundation.
The change is meant to ensure that all military installations “are reflective of the Commander-in-Chief’s priorities, our nation’s history, and the warrior ethos,” chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement.
But Tubman, as the first African American woman to serve in the U.S. military, certainly embodied the spirit of a warrior. She was a spy for the Union Army, scouting ahead of the Combahee River Raid and heading a ring of others working secretly behind Confederate lines.
J Henry Fair, Cypress Swamp, Yamasee. Courtesy of the artist.
The raid made her the first woman in American history to lead an armed military engagement, leading troops of 150, including the Second South Carolina Volunteers and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, one of the first all-Black regiments in the Union Army. The mission’s three gunboats hit plantations along the Combahee River, destroying Confederate crops and storehouses, liberating as they went.
The enslaved people working the rice plantations in the area endured backbreaking labor. The very next day after Tubman helped free them, 150 of those men joined the Second South Carolina Volunteers, joining the Union cause.
Stephen Towns, Wade in the Water (2020).
“These individuals achieved their freedom and then turned right around and joined the Union Army to come back and fight for others to be freed is pretty remarkable,” Mack said. “It’s extremely important for institutions across the country—whether they are art museums, historical societies, or libraries—to tell these important stories about our history.”
“Picturing Freedom: Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid” is on view through October 5 at the Gibbes Museum of Art, 135 Meeting Street, Charleston, S.C. More

A devastating world war, widespread use of penicillin, the adoption of jet engine propulsion, and the very first electronic computer: the events of the 1940s would have a defining impact on the course of the 20th century. The art world also underwent a major transition, as the bold experiments of European modernism paved the way for New York artists to unleash a fresh, re-energizing proposition in the form of Abstract Expressionism.
At least this is the dominant narrative, and not without reason.
However, a new survey of 1940s art and design at the Philadelphia Museum of Art invites visitors to consider a more complex, comprehensive picture. With over 250 pieces of painting, photography, jewelry, ceramics, fashion, and furniture, “Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s” provides the evidence for a rich variety of visual languages beyond Abstract Expressionism, from charming figurative studies of everyday life and wartime propaganda to resourceful tailoring and eccentric takes on traditional home decor.
Installation view of “Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s” at the Philadelpha Museum of Art, 2025. Photo: Aimee Almstead.
“As an art historian, there’s a tendency to try to make sense of things, to tell a more linear narrative,” said Jessica Smith, the PMA’s chief curator. “By focusing on a decade, you pivot away from the idea that there’s one story. We’re able to give a more multivalent, subtle message.”
All works on view have been sourced from the museum’s own collection, and the desire to tell a more complex narrative about the 1940s has created the perfect opportunity to spotlight some of its lesser known gems. Around 40 percent of the works in the show have never been exhibited before. “What’s most exciting is the way the media interact with one another,” according to Smith. “They’re greater for the collective conversations they have than they are as individual pieces.”
Jackson Pollock, Male and Female (1942-1943). Image courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Visitors can rest assured, however, that the expected classics are not in short supply. As Smith pointed out, “the 1940s is a generative moment, a moment of genesis for things that develop more maturely in the 1950s.” As such, visitors can expect to see early works from celebrated American artists like Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, and designers like Charles and Ray Eames, whose ideas would go on to shape midcentury movements.
Though Pollock and Krasner each had a distinct practice, their aims overlapped enough that Pollock’s Male and Female (1942–43) and Krasner’s Composition (1949) make useful bookends to the decade. In the earlier work, the quintessential AbEx artist seeks to push through figuration to access abstraction. The later work, in a style Krasner called “hieroglyphs,” was made while the couple were living together and both working on canvases laid horizontal. Her highly controlled mark making appears to have a logic and rhythm but it resists narrative.
Installation view of “Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s” at the Philadelpha Museum of Art, 2025. Photo: Aimee Almstead.
Though Pollock, Krasner, and their peers’ experiments with abstraction would change the course of modern art, plenty of artists had a different story to tell that relied instead on figuration. One such group was a milieu of queer artists like Paul Cadmus, Beauford Delaney, George Platt Lynes, and Romaine Brooks, whose network extended to include figures like Man Ray and Isamu Noguchi. Some created blatantly homoerotic artworks and many depicted each other, as in the case of Delaney’s 1945 portrait of his close friend, the writer James Baldwin. Two years earlier, the Harlem Renaissance artist had also been the subject of a rare portrait by Georgia O’Keeffe. She described Delaney, by all accounts a magnetic presence, as “impossible to define” and “a special kind of thought.”
Horace Pippin, The Park Bench (1946). Image courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Self-taught American artist Horace Pippin, meanwhile, used figuration to create records of the deeply racist, segregated society he had returned to after serving in World War I. The double standard in treatment of Black and white veterans is the subject of Mr. Prejudice (1943), an unflinching worked haunted by the presence of a hooded member of the Klu Klux Klan looming on the upper-right. But Pippin was also drawn to scenes of everyday life, as evident in The Park Bench (1946), in which a man enjoys a moment of peace. It was possibly inspired by a local resident the artist has observed in Everhart Park, West Chester.
Though politics are not a principal focus of the show, any viewer preoccupied with the current state of affairs will find plenty to mull over while looking back on the 1940s. It seems unlikely that the U.S. will be forming an international alliance to fight fascism any time soon, but a series of propaganda posters remind us of a time when the U.S., Britain, and Soviet Union joined forces to defeat the Nazis. Though the text is in Russian, the message is clear. In one image, the three countries’ flags unite to create a lightening bold striking down on Hitler and Mussolini, both bloodied and cowering in fear. These fragile pieces were recently uncovered in the PMA’s store room and conserved for the exhibition.
Kukryniksy (artists’ collaborative), Mikhail V. Kupriyanov, Porfiry N. Krylov, A Thunderous Blow (1942). Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Other wartime messaging that feels relevant to the present moment includes posters that call for cutting down on food waste and fashion designs that balance practicality with a more efficient use of material. Everyone had to play their part in the communal effort to ensure the military remained well-supplied. The same spirit of sustainability has proven to be a harder sell in the 2020s, despite our understanding of how overconsumption is fueling climate catastrophe.
But, out of necessity came plenty of invention. “I think there’s a misconception that creative pursuits ground to a halt during World War II,” said Smith. One of the show’s highlights, a woman’s dinner jacket form Elsa Schiaparelli’s spring 1940 collection, is a particularly charming example. The piece is part of a military-themed collection produced at a time when the Italian designer was forced to slash her workforce from 600 to 150. It’s particularly generous: gold-embroidered pockets were intended to take the place of a handbag for a wearer who was too preoccupied with carrying a gas mask she might, at any time, have to don in a hurry.
Woman’s dinner jacket from Elsa Schiaparelli’s spring 1940 collection. Image courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
“We found inspiration from this idea that people persisted and wanted to find a way forward and continued creative pursuits, despite restrictions and adversity,” concluded Smith. “That is an optimistic message that is probably applicable at all times to a greater or lesser degree.”
“Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s” is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy, Philadelphia, through September 1, 2025. More

Celine is marking its first partnership with the Centre Pompidou by offering free public access on four select days this summer to coincide with Wolfgang Tillmans’s major new exhibition “Nothing Could Have Prepared Us – Everything Could Have Prepared Us.”
The house’s “Accès Libre par Celine” initiative launches today, June 13, and will offer complimentary entry on three additional dates: July 3, August 28, and September 22.
Wolfgang Tillmans, “Lacanau (self)” (1986). Courtesy of the artist and Centre Pompidou.
The exhibition gives Tillmans full rein over the museum’s vast second floor, typically home to the Bibliothèque publique d’information (Bpi), and will remain on view through September 22. Timed ahead of Michael Rider’s arrival as the house’s artistic director in January 2025, the collaboration signals Celine’s continued investment in the cultural sphere. As the Pompidou prepares to shut down for a years-long renovation, Tillmans’s exhibition offers a final chapter for the institution—arriving just as Celine begins a new one.
Wolfgang Tillmans, “Miss Kittin” (2001). Courtesy of the artist and Centre Pompidou.
Rather than a chronological retrospective, the installation engages directly with the building’s architecture, reimagining the space as a dynamic platform for images, objects, and ideas.
“Since the 1990s, Tillmans has constantly questioned the conventions of hanging: he suspends, juxtaposes and assembles works on walls and tables, mixing formats, materials and techniques,” said assistant curator Olga Frydryszak-Rétat. “At the Bpi, he pushes this even further by modifying the site itself—repurposing library furniture, redesigning partitions, and developing new structures that respond directly to the material and symbolic architecture of the space. This immersive and experimental intervention echoes a central part of his practice: bodies of works such as Lighter, Silver, and Freischwimmer—where photography is abstracted, materialized, and redefined—feature prominently in this exhibition. Shown in a public library, these camera-less or chemically manipulated works take on a new significance: they embody experimentation as a form of knowledge, and reinforce the idea that images can be tools for thinking, not just for seeing.”
Wolfgang Tillmans, “Lighter, yellow green III” (2009). Courtesy of the artist and Centre Pompidou.
The show follows Tillmans’s major traveling retrospective “To Look Without Fear,” which opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2022, and his recent intimate solo presentation at David Zwirner which featured standout minimal sculptures and pieces that seemed more “Space and Light” than his usual oeuvre. Whether photographing still lifes, lovers, those in his social circle, or—as he has increasingly turned toward in recent years—the stars and the sea, what runs through Tillmans’s broad oeuvre is its earnestness and honesty. Even when his subjects challenge conventional norms, there’s no sense of subversion or irony—only his distinctive heartfelt clarity.
Wolfgang Tillmans, “in flight astro (ii)” (2010). Courtesy of the artist and Centre Pompidou. More