Years without Venice Biennales tend to be quieter affairs, but that’s not the case for 2025, which is shaping up to be a particularly busy period for the art world, with long-anticipated museum openings across the globe and experimental biennials staged on nearly every continent. With 2025 finally here, it’s time to start planning.
Below, we’ve created a list of 20 art happenings to look forward to next year.
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Three New York Museums Return, Bigger and Better
Image Credit: Albert Vecerka/Esto The New York museum landscape has looked a bit sad lately, no doubt in part because three notable institutions—the Frick Collection, the New Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem—have been missing from the conversation. They’ve all been closed while they undergo expansions and renovations, and they’re all slated to return next year. The New Museum’s expansion, which adds 60,000 square feet to its existing structure, may be the biggest of these renewed institutions, but the Studio Museum is the starriest. Set to open in the fall, the Studio Museum’s 82,000-square-foot new building is set to dramatically raise the profile of this trailblazing institution, which has fostered generations of Black artists.
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Sotheby’s Moves into Its New Home in New York
Image Credit: Photo Christina Horsten/picture alliance via Getty Images Marcel Breuer’s famed building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side has been through a lot of changes over the past decade. Having been vacated by the Whitney Museum, its longtime resident, the structure briefly acted as a contemporary art annex to the Met and a temporary home for the Frick Collection, whose main building was being renovated. Now, the building has officially switched hands, with its newest owner being Sotheby’s. What will it look like for multimillion-dollar masterpieces to regularly grace this boxy modernist icon, not in retrospectives but in auctions? Find out in May, when the house holds its marquee sales there.
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A Golden Lion–Winning Star Readies Her Latest Performance
Image Credit: Nicky J Sims/Getty Images Anne Imhof made her name on performances that involve übercool dancers writhing around, appearing to variously seduce, punish, and empower each other over the course of hours-long periods. The performances are maximal and entrancing; one staged at the Venice Biennnale’s German Pavilion in 2017 won her the Golden Lion. The German artist’s performances have been seen widely in Europe and less so in the United States, and that makes her latest work, to be staged in March at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, something of an event. Titled DOOM, it is being cryptically teased as a work that “juxtaposes apathy and anxiety with resistance and optimism.”
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An ‘American Season’ at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo
Image Credit: Photo Herve Champollion/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images Naomi Beckwith was recently named the curator of Documenta 16, and while that show won’t open in Kassel, Germany, until 2026, she’s already got a lot on tap. First, in April, Beckwith is debuting a retrospective for Rashid Johnson at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, where she serves as deputy director and chief curator. Later in the year, in Paris, Beckwith will lead the charge on an ambitious slate of programming at the Palais de Tokyo, which is hosting what it’s called an “American season” under her aegis. Details haven’t been announced yet, but they may provide hints about which directions her Documenta will take.
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The Museu de Arte de São Paulo Grows in Size and Ambition
Image Credit: Courtesy MASP The 2024 Venice Biennale is now in the rear-view mirror, and its curator, Adriano Pedrosa, has returned to his base in Brazil, where he serves as the artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. That institution has already received due attention for Pedrosa’s canon-expanding “Historiás” exhibition series—the latest, about queerness, is now on view—and it is set to receive yet more attention in 2025, this time with an expansion that will grow MASP’s surface area by about 66 percent. Years in the making, the expansion offers Pedrosa an even bigger canvas than he had before; the results promise to be exquisite.
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Europe Gets a Yayoi Kusama Retrospective
Image Credit: Photo Andrew Toth/Getty Images The popularity of Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror Rooms” can obscure the fact that this artist made loads of weirder—and more art-historically significant—work early on in her career. During the ’60s, while she was based in New York, this Japanese-born artist produced sculptures festooned with faux phalli, paintings composed solely of air mail stamps, and performances that made use of her nude body, a gesture that was relatively new at the time. The joy of a retrospective like this one, which opens in the fall at Switzerland’s Fondation Beyeler before traveling to the Museum Ludwig and the Stedelijk Museum, is that viewers will now be able to see Kusama anew, with the understanding that she is more than an Instagram-friendly phenomenon.
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Rarely Seen Ancient Roman Statues Arrive in the US and Canada
Image Credit: Paolo Reda/REDA/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Italy’s Torlonia family has amassed one of the richest collections anywhere of ancient Roman art—and largely kept it out of public view. That changed in 2020, when their statues made a rare public appearance in Rome, then traveled in the years after to Milan and then Paris, where they are currently on view at the Louvre. Finally, the Torlonia Marbles, as these statues are known, are crossing the Atlantic. In March, the Art Institute of Chicago will debut a show featuring several dozen of them; the exhibition will then travel to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
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Los Angeles’s Lucas Museum Is Here at Last
Image Credit: Courtesy Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a long-planned art space founded by collectors George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, may just be the starriest institution on the horizon—and the most ambitious. As its name suggests, the museum is dedicated to exploring a kind of art that attests to “the power of images,” as director Sandra Jackson-Dumont previously told ARTnews. Years in the making and 300,000 square feet in scale, the museum has been steadily acquiring top-dollar artworks, including a Frida Kahlo self-portrait, a Robert Colescott painting of George Washington, and archives related to Black cinema and Judith F. Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles. At long last, the museum is finally nearly here.
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Two of the World’s Biggest Biennials Return
Image Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images Some of the most intriguing experiments happen in the intervals between Venice Biennales. With that Italian mega-biennial currently on break ahead of its 2026 edition, this much will become apparent in Berlin and Sharjah, home to two boundary-pushing recurring shows that are both returning in 2025. This time around, the Berlin Biennale, opening in June, is being curated by Zasha Colah, who has intriguingly themed her show around the foxes that call the German capital home. Per its description, her exhibition will cast a suspicious eye toward “identity-labels that draw circles around minorities, defining artists as indigenous, nomadic, Dalit, that finally pit one minority against another, but never let them be equal to the false myth of a homogenous majority.” The Sharjah Biennial, the product of curators Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala, and Zeynep Öz, will display an even more experimental quality upon its opening in February, since the show’s theme was evolved organically by the artists showing there.
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Hito Steyerl Takes on AI
Image Credit: Photo Rolf Vennenbernd/dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images It is nearly impossible to talk about art of the 2010s without mentioning Hito Steyerl, whose essayistic videos about screen culture, “poor images,” unfettered capitalism, and the cross-national pollination of ideas defined an entire era. Toward the end of that decade, Steyerl’s art began to involve AI, whose image-generating capabilities she utilized as part of her ongoing exploration of what pictures do on- and offline. With DALL-E, ChatGPT, and other models now available to the public, Steyerl takes on AI anew with a new book of essays, Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat, releasing in the US this April.
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Peter Hujar Hits the Big Screen
Image Credit: Courtesy One Two Films The photographer Peter Hujar has posthumously become larger than life, with countless retrospectives, monographs, and scholarly reassessments produced since his passing in 1987 following a battle against AIDS. The latest project about him is a narrative film, Peter Hujar’s Day, which premieres at the Sundance Film Festival this January. Directed by Ira Sachs, a filmmaker beloved for his intimate queer dramas, the film stars Ben Whishaw as the titular photographer and Rebecca Hall as Linda Rosenkrantz, a writer who once asked Hujar to record everything he did over the course of a single day. It’s set in 1974, right in the middle of the period when Hujar’s lush portraits of Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, and other New York literati began gaining a critical audience.
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MOWAA Kicks Off Its Programming
Image Credit: Courtesy MOWAA It will be some time before MOWAA, a grand, glorious museum set on a 15-acre campus in Benin City, Nigeria, opens in full, but 2025 marks the official start of the institution’s programming. In May, the museum will open its atrium to the public, which will get a glimpse at some of the offerings in the institution’s collection. While what will be on view has not yet been detailed, MOWAA has previously said that its main selling point would be its ability to host repatriated artifacts in their historical home. With the goal of becoming one of Africa’s foremost institutions, MOWAA has said those artifacts will eventually be on view alongside contemporary African art.
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The Met Reopens Its Rockefeller Wing
Image Credit: Photo by Paula Lobo, Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s wealth of art from Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean have been off view since 2021, the year that the Rockefeller Wing, the space that hosts the galleries devoted to all these works, shuttered to the public. In May, these dearly missed galleries return to view with a fresh redesign courtesy of architect Kulapat Yantrasast. Alongside a Mayan royal court, prehistoric bannerstones, a stone monument from Teotihuacan, and more, there will be a new addition: a gallery devoted specifically to ancient textiles from the Andean region. No other museum in the US has a gallery like this one, according to the Met, and that’s yet another reason why this institution can’t be beat.
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A Long-Awaited Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi Readies Its Opening
Image Credit: Gehry Partners In 2006, while he was still director of the Guggenheim Museum, Thomas Krens successfully engineered a plan to open an institution in Abu Dhabi. But that plan has been mired in controversy, and in the 18 years since it was officially signed into action, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, as that Emirati museum is known, has faced repeated allegations of poor labor conditions for workers undertaking the construction. (In 2011, the Guggenheim said the “concerns” raised by artists protesting the planned museum were “misinformed.” Five years later, the museum severed communication with the artists who had made those allegations.) A series of delays and demonstrations against the institution moved critic Negar Azimi to write, in 2016, “The future of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi appears uncertain.” But nearly a decade later, the museum seems closer than ever to opening. In 2025, the museum is finally set to open alongside the rest of the Saadiyat Cultural District of which it is a part.
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South Korea Gets the Lee Bul Survey It’s Long Deserved
Image Credit: Jörg Carstensen/picture alliance via Getty Images Lee Bul, a star of the South Korean art scene, has remarkably never been the subject of a large-scale survey in her home country—not until now, anyway. In September, Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art will showcase the full of Lee’s oeuvre, which has taken up body politics in bizarre, off-putting, and occasionally even smelly ways. Cyborgs, abortions, and fantastical creatures figure in the works of the 1980s and ’90s that made her famous. Whether those works remain as shocking as they once did is one open question for this show, which was co-organized with Hong Kong’s M+ museum.
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Tadao Ando’s Latest Museum Throws Open Its Doors
Image Credit: Courtesy Benesse Art Site Naoshima No one has revolutionized the field of museum architecture quite like Tadao Ando, and the smattering of museums he designed for the Japanese island of Naoshima stands as proof. With their elegant forms that melt away into tree-lined hills, these museums proposed new ways of merging manmade architecture with the natural landscape. If the fact that 2025 marks the debut of his tenth structure on the island is any proof, his formula has hardly grown old hat. That institution, officially titled the Naoshima New Museum of Art and due to open in the spring, will feature some of his familiar architectural stylings: natural lighting, a sleek exterior, a general lack of pretense. Hosted here will be a range of temporary exhibitions, with the debut one featuring works by 11 artists based in Asia, from Takashi Murakami to N. S. Harsha.
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Leigh Bowery Takes Over London
Image Credit: ©Fergus Greer The Tate museum network continues to mount one of the most ambitious and diverse exhibition programs anywhere, with surveys of Nigerian modernism, the Pictorialist photography movement, and Ed Atkins planned for 2025 alone. But it is a Leigh Bowery retrospective slated to open at Tate Modern in February that looks most promising. The Australian-born multihyphenate created body-horror performance art, a thrumming London nightclub, and intentionally off-kilter clothes—and that’s not to mention his famed turn as a model for the painter Lucien Freud. Containing Bowery’s art within museum walls is no small feat, but Tate appears up to the challenge.
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Kerry James Marshall Crosses the Pond
Image Credit: Getty Images for MOCA It’s hardly an overstatement to say that Kerry James Marshall, a treasure of the American art scene, has transformed painting as it stands today. His innovative canvases—many of them allegories populated with Black figures—flirt with the conventions of Western art history only to upend them and inject new life into figuration, a mode that was considered passé at the time Marshall first took it up during the late 1980s. With his art widely seen in the US, Marshall is now gaining a greater foothold in the UK, with the Royal Academy of Art mounting a 70-work survey in September. After its run in London, the show will travel in 2026 to the Kunsthaus Zurich and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
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Jack Whitten Receives an Overdue MoMA Retrospective
Image Credit: ©2024 Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University It’s a common assumption that painters develop one signature style, then stick to it, developing variations on a theme. The joy of Jack Whitten’s practice was that it changed constantly. He dragged paint using a squeegee, made mosaic-like pieces from dried chips of acrylic, and occasionally even branched out into sculpture, producing wooden objects with nails driven into them. Whitten’s experimentalism has acted as a guide to many younger artists working in New York today. At last, he receives the Museum of Modern Art retrospective he’s long deserved.
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Central Asia Gets a Brand-New Biennial
Image Credit: Photo Ibrahim Erikan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images The biennial-ification of the world has been in full force for decades now, though it somehow skipped over Central Asia, a region whose art scene is rich, if often under-recognized by outsiders. Now, it’s getting the big biennial it has long deserved in Bukhara, an ancient city in Uzbekistan known mainly for its Islamic architecture. Diana Betancourt Campbell, artistic director of the Samdani Art Foundation, will curate the healing-themed first edition of the Bukhara Biennial, which include artists such as Gulnoza Irgasheva, Binta Diaw, Antony Gormley, and more.
