The coming of 2025 brings with it a fresh crop of exhibitions across the U.S. From artist outings by the likes of Cecily Brown and Rashid Johnson to new looks at masterpieces by Van Gogh and Artemisia Gentileschi—we bring together 13 shows from the first half of the new year that you can’t miss. Mark your calendars!

“The Book of Marvels: Imagining the Medieval World” at the Morgan Library and Museum
January 24 to May 25, 2025

Sri Lanka (Trapponee) in the Book of the Marvels of the World (ca. 1460–65). Photo: Heritage Art / Heritage Images via Getty Images.

What did the big bad world look like to a 15th-century scribe living in northern France? Rather bizarre, according to the Book of the Marvels of the World, the illustrated text that centers this exhibition at New York’s Morgan Library. Prejudice and imagination combined to fill in the unknown (56 locales are featured) with things fantastical and unsettling: dragons in Ethiopia, snail shell dwellers in Sri Lanka, and dog people in India. The lineage of this Medieval ethnography has its roots in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (77 C.E.), which compared and judged all groups against Roman customs and behavior. In addition to presenting two of the four remaining copies of Marvels, the exhibition offers a host of rare period manuscripts that reveal how Europeans arrived at their imaginings. There are lessons for today, should we wish to see them.

—Richard Whiddington

“Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism” at the Frist Art Museum
January 31–May 4, 2025

Victor Gabriel Gilbert, Le Carreau des Halles (1880). Photo courtesy of Musée d’art moderne André Malraux, Le Havre via the Frist Art Museum

Down south in Nashville, famous for its hot chicken and barbecue stands, foodies will get visually transported to Europe to feast their eyes on an entirely different cuisine: turn-of-the-century French dining. The show begins with the 1870 siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, when Prussian forces blockaded the city, causing widespread starvation. French cuisine emerged from those hardships with a deepened appreciation for both France’s historic culinary traditions and innovation resulting from the scarcity. Altogether, the show features about 50 works by artists including Rosa Bonheur, Gustave Courbet, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro, depicting everything from farmers in their fields to urban markets and chefs and diners as cafés started to boom in France. The show is organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, and is presented concurrently with another, “Tennessee Harvest,” which shows how artists in the Volunteer State romanticized agricultural life like their French counterparts.

—Adam Schrader

“Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200” at the Brooklyn Museum
February 28, 2025–February 22, 2026

Robert Frank, Coney Island, 4th of July (1958). Photo courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum, founded as the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library in 1823, is celebrating its bicentennial with a series of events scheduled through the new year, including this showcase of works from across its collection. The exhibition is broken into three chapters: Brooklyn Made, a tribute to art and artifacts fabricated in the borough over its history; Building the Brooklyn Museum and Its Collection, which tracks the changes to the institution’s collection over time; and Gifts of Art, which specifically highlights contemporary works given to the museum by its donors. Museumgoers will see everything from historic earthenware and turn-of-the-century moccasins to works in a variety of mediums by the likes of Georgia O’Keeffe, the late documentary filmmaker and photographer Robert Frank and current artists Julie Mehretu, Alex Katz, Coco Fusco, KAWS, Duke Riley, and Tourmaline.

—Adam Schrader

“Ryoji Ikeda” at the High Museum of Art
March 7 to August 10, 2025

Installation view in “Yet, It Moves!” at Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen, 2023. Photo: David Stjernholm

The goal of data-verse (2015), the three-chapter video series from Japanese visual artist and electronic composer Ryoji Ikeda? Nothing less than scanning the entirety of our world, from the minute (DNA, quantum mechanics) to the massive (galactic coordinates, cosmology).

To do so, data-verse, commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary, deciphers and visualizes open-source datasets from the likes of CERN, NASA, and the Human Genome Project. Ikeda has been projecting data since the early 2000s, and this work, which makes its U.S. debut at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, is arguably more pertinent today than when it first appeared at the Venice Biennale in 2019. In addition to staging Ikeda’s immersive trilogy across floor-to-ceiling projections, the High burrows deeper with data gram (2022), an 18-screen spectacle that picks through the data that Ikeda sourced to create the landmark work.

—Richard Whiddington

“Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations” at the Barnes Foundation
March 9–May 25, 2025

Cecily Brown, Madrepora (Alluvial) (2017). © 2024 Cecily Brown.

When future scholars look back on our present, they might find that Cecily Brown’s reality-bending paintings encompass this era in art history—in both the British-American artist’s ability to toe the surreal liminal space between abstraction and figuration, and her quest to reclaim motifs of the colonialist, patriarchal canon. Who’s to say, from our current vantage point, whether Brown’s auction prices and cultural cachet have soared more as a result of her work’s powerful conceptual roots, or its sheer visual beauty? A sprawling new survey of Brown’s vivid, sensual canvases is currently offering a deep dive into decades of her oeuvre in Dallas. For East Coasters hoping to stay local, the exhibition will travel to Philadelphia’s esteemed Barnes Foundation next spring, where it will remain mostly true to its debut—aside from a few substitutions and additions.

—Vittoria Benzine

“KAWS: FAMILY” at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
March 15–July 28, 2025

KAWS, FAMILY (2021). Photo courtesy of the artist via Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Fresh off a major exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the characters of Brian Donnelly aka KAWS will head south to Arkansas for a heartfelt show about family. The artist’s characters—with names like Companion, Chum and BFF—have been constant forces that have shaped his career and regularly appear in his work. The exhibition itself takes its name from a 2021 sculpture that depicted four of his characters posing as if for a group portrait. The museum has called such depictions “familiar and astonishingly heartfelt.” The show was first curated by Julian Cox with the Art Gallery of Ontario and was expanded for Crystal Bridges by Alejo Benedetti, the museum’s curator of contemporary art.

—Adam Schrader

“Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits” at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
March 30–September 7, 2025

Vincent van Gogh, The Postman Joseph Roulin (1889). Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Between creating his atmospheric landscapes and vivid night-scapes, Vincent van Gogh longed to paint portraits, but could never find willing sitters. That is, until 1888, while in Arles, France, when he met his most enduring subjects: the Roulin family. Over the course of a year, Van Gogh would create a series of portraits of the family patriarch and postman Joseph, his wife Augustine, and their three children, Armand, Camille, and Marcelle—painting each member more than once. “You know how I feel about this,” he wrote his brother Theo about the work, “how I feel in my element.” The resulting suite of portraits bears out the painter’s keen eye for expression and evocative use of color, as well as his deep relationship with the family. They form the heart of MFA Boston’s showcase, which also includes letters from postman Roulin to Van Gogh and further insights into the artist’s portrait practice.

—Min Chen

“Ruth Asawa: Retrospective” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
April 5–September 2, 2025

Ruth Asawa, Untitled (1961). ©2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy David Zwirner. Photo: Laurence Cuneo.

In November, the International Astronomical Union named a crater on Venus after Ruth Asawa. But forget extra-planetary recognition, the Japanese-American only received art world attention in her final years. One exception was in San Francisco, where Asawa settled in 1949 to work and raise a family with the architect Albert Lanier. Her presence spread beyond gallery walls and public installations (residents lovingly called her “fountain lady”) to the city’s schools, where Asawa became an educator and activist.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is the logical starting point for the most complete retrospective for the artist to date (the same institution gave her a mid-career show in 1973). Five years in the making, this 300-work show traces Asawa’s life, from being placed in an Arkansas internment camp during the Second World War to studying under Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller at Black Mountain College, to building a home, studio, and garden in the city’s Noe Valley.

From SFMOMA, the exhibition will travel on to New York, Bilbao, and Basel, closing on January 24, 2027, on what would have been Asawa’s 101st birthday.

—Richard Whiddington

“Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
April 18, 2025–January 18, 2026

Rashid Johnson, Antoine’s Organ (detail) (2016). Photo: Stefan Altenburger, courtesy of the artist.

Rashid Johnson’s wide-ranging practice receives its largest survey in a decade next Spring. The spectacle will reanimate the museum’s tradition of challenging artists to converse with its Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda. (Johnson left the Guggenheim’s board last year just to avoid any conflicts of interest.) Rarefied names like Miami collectors Don and Mera Rubell have contributed to the 90 artworks that will be unveiled across “A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” which is named after a poem by Amiri Baraka. The loosely chronological show will ascend through themes that Johnson has explored, such as social alienation, rebirth, and escapism. A newer film will screen in a site-specific monumental sculpture of the same name, and performances will activate the space.

“Johnson well understands that the vocation of the artist entails more than looking inwardly,” curator Naomi Beckwith said over email. “It is also an opportunity to create, quite literally through two site-specific installations, platforms for the creative expression and self-care of others.”

—Vittoria Benzine

“The Gatherers” at MoMA PS1
April 24—October 6, 2025

Emilija Škarnulytė, Burial (still) (2022). Courtesy the artist.

From political unrest and overproduction to faltering infrastructure and social systems—this group show is fixing its lens on how contemporary art practices are confronting the ramifications of geopolitical fallout. More than a dozen international artists will be gathered, with some showing in the U.S. museum for the first time. Among them are Chinese artist Zhou Tao, whose featured film explores the relationship between workers and a data center in the Guizhou mountains; L.A.-based Ser Serpas, whose installations of found objects reflect the detritus of the urban landscape; Georgia-born Tolia Astakhishvili, whose installations unpack the destruction wrought by political upheavals in the Caucasus region; and British-born Nigerian artist Karimah Ashadu, who examines the circuitous labor of Nigerian migrants in Germany in his film Brown Goods.

—Min Chen

“Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind Flowers” at the Museum of Modern Art
May 11, 2024–September 27, 2025

Hilma af Klint, Gagea lutea (Yellow Star-of-Bethlehem), Pulmonaria officinalis (Common Lungwort), Tussilago farfara (Coltsfoot), Draba verna (Common Whitlowgrass), Pulsatilla vulgaris (European Pasqueflower), Sheet 2 from the portfolio Nature Studies (1919). Photo courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

MoMA’s recent acquisition of a suite of Hilma af Klint’s botanical drawings gets the spotlight here. The portfolio, titled Nature Studies, holds 46 illustrations the Swedish spiritualist created between 1919 and 1920, highlighting her deep connection to the natural world. Her observations of her region’s flora, though, comes with her signature abstract spin: a diagram of a sunflower is anchored by concentric rings, while a linden is joined by an array of colored circles. In af Klint’s view, these works were botanical inquiries as much as studies of “what stands behind the flowers,” revealing both nature and human nature.

—Min Chen

“Lorna Simpson: Source Notes” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
May 19–November 2, 2025

Lorna Simpson, Night Fall (2023). Photo: courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, in the 1980s, Lorna Simpson enjoyed an omnivorous education, studying under conceptual artists, performance artists, filmmakers, and poets. This scope has long been evident in the work for which Simpson has become best known: carefully staged studio photographs (typically paired with words) that pick at gender and race in society.

In “Source Notes,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art is focusing on painting, a less-considered part of Simpson’s practice, one the Brooklyn-based artist has developed over the past decade. The sources in question are vintage magazines and the archives of the Associated Press and the Library of Congress, which Simpson abstracts and washes with color to great effect.

—Richard Whiddington

“Artemisia’s Strong Women: Rescuing a Masterpiece” at the Getty Center
June 10–September 14, 2025

Artemisia Gentileschi, Hercules and Omphale (1630), in Getty’s Painting Conservation studio. Photo: Cassia Davis, courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

It’s been two years since Artemisia Gentileschi’s previously unknown painting Hercules and Omphale (ca. 1630) arrived at the J. Paul Getty Museum after turning up following the tragic explosion that rocked Beirut in 2020. After removing glass, restoring paint, and analyzing Gentileschi’s process through x-radiography, the museum’s thorough conservation will conclude next spring. In repayment for the  project, undertaken pro bono, the Getty Center gets to unveil the final product, surrounded by four more Gentileschi works on loan from private collectors and the Columbus Museum of Art.

Altogether, the showcase will highlight Gentileschi’s oft-overlooked Naples period, alongside her unprecedented forays as a female creator of history paintings—particularly scenes featuring donne forti, or strong women. Legend has it that Hercules, after all, served Omphale, queen of Lydia, before the two became lovers. On many levels, the show’s centerpiece, surrounding works, and premise all celebrate feminine fortitude.

—Vittoria Benzine