The Art Edit: May’s Must-See Art Shows & Where to Stay
Your Monthly Art and Travel Guide
Yeah, yeah— it’s already mid-May and you’ve probably seen at least one museum, two art fairs, and three gallerists’ vacation selfies by now. I know this month’s edition is landing in your inbox a little later than usual—thank you for your patience. I just wrapped up my first semester of grad school (cue the exhale), and while final papers had me buried under books, I didn’t want to miss the chance to share May’s must-see shows with you.
From powerful solo retrospectives to immersive textile installations, this guide has everything you need to plan your next art-filled escape. And yes, the hotel picks are still curated with style and comfort in mind.
Best Art Exhibitions in New York, NY
Jack Whitten: The Messenger
Artist(s): Jack Whitten
Location: MoMA
Dates: Through August 2, 2025
Description: A sweeping retrospective that honors Whitten’s trailblazing contributions to abstraction, featuring works from his signature slabs to his experimental mosaic paintings.
Why You Should See It: Whitten was a master of material and meaning—this show cements his legacy.
Hugo McCloud: As For Now
Artist(s): Hugo McCloud
Location: Sean Kelly, New York
Dates: Through June 22, 2025
Description: McCloud’s latest body of work continues his experimentation with nontraditional materials like single-use plastic and oxidized metal, challenging the boundary between industrial waste and fine art. His pieces meditate on migration, labor, and the everyday landscapes of working-class resilience.
Why You Should See It: Materially rich and politically sharp—McCloud is an artist who can turn discarded scraps into deeply resonant stories.
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William Kentridge: A Natural History of the Studio
Artist(s): William Kentridge
Location: Hauser & Wirth
Dates: Through August 1, 2025
Description: An intimate look into the artist’s Johannesburg studio practice, full of kinetic drawings, filmed performances, and process-based installation. ‘A Natural History of the Studio’ extends to Hauser & Wirth’s nearby 18th Street location with a selection of nearly thirty prints made by Kentridge over the last two decades.
Why You Should See It: A rare peek behind the scenes of one of contemporary art’s great storytellers.
Luana Vitra: Amulets
Artist(s): Luana Vitra
Location: SculptureCenter
Dates: Through July 28, 2025
Description: Vitra transforms everyday objects into powerful protective sculptures inspired by Afro-Brazilian cosmology. Through an abstract language that encompasses drawing, performance, sculpture, and installation, her work is interested in the metallurgical and transformative charge of these elements and their capacity for metamorphosis. She creates a dialogue between their natural and industrial manifestations and, more recently, their spiritual dimension.
Why You Should See It: It’s sculptural mysticism at its most striking.
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style
Artist(s): Various
Location: The Met
Dates: Through October 26, 2025
Description: This Costume Institute exhibition explores Black style over 300 years through dandyism, fashion, and self-presentation as resistance.
Why You Should See It: Fashion becomes a lens for liberation, style a method of survival.
Huê Thi Hoffmaster: I Wish You Bluebirds
Artist(s): Huê Thi Hoffmaster
Location: Eric Firestone Gallery
Dates: Through June 14, 2025
Description: Hoffmaster’s richly colored, emotionally charged paintings draw from folklore, diasporic memory, and poetic interiority.
Why You Should See It: A haunting and intimate reflection on cultural hybridity.
Artist(s): Moffat Takadiwa
Location: Nicodim Gallery
Dates: Through July 5, 2025
Description: Takadiwa transforms waste into monumental wall sculptures that critique consumerism, colonial residue, and global inequities.
Why You Should See It: A visual feast with sharp political bite.
Sonia Gomes: Ó Abre Alas!
Artist(s): Sonia Gomes
Location: Storm King Art Center
Dates: Through November 10, 2025
Description: Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes presents her first U.S. solo institutional exhibition, featuring 13 large-scale hanging sculptures crafted from weather-resistant materials and personal artifacts. These works, deeply rooted in Afro-Brazilian craft traditions, reflect themes of memory, cultural identity, and resistance. The exhibition also includes a selection of her works from the past two decades.
Why You Should See It: A powerful fusion of textile, memory, and movement—set against the open-air grandeur of Storm King.
Where to Stay in New York
Best Art Exhibitions in Washington, D.C.
Essex Hemphill: Take Care of Your Blessings
Artist(s): Various
Location: The Phillips Collection
Dates: May 17 – August 31, 2025
Description: This exhibition honors the late poet and activist Essex Hemphill through archival photographs, poetry, and newly commissioned work inspired by his legacy.
Why You Should See It: A deeply moving tribute to Black queer life, love, and resistance.
We Gather at the Edge: Contemporary Quilts by Black Women Artists
Artist(s): Various
Location: Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Dates: Through June 22, 2025
Description: A stunning display of quilts that fuse traditional craft with contemporary expression. This exhibition is both remarkable in its scope and groundbreaking in its representation of Black history and culture as told with needle and thread.
Why You Should See It: A powerful reminder that quilts are both art and archive.
Where to Stay in Washington, D.C.
Best Art Exhibitions in Los Angeles, CA
Jeffrey Gibson: The Body Electric
Artist(s): Jeffrey Gibson
Location: The Broad
Dates: Through January 2026
Description: Gibson’s first major museum exhibition since representing the U.S. at the Venice Biennale, this exhibition celebrates individuals and communities who have maintained their dignity and traditions in impossible circumstances, centering the resilience present in the legacies of Indigenous makers.
Why You Should See It: By combining American, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ histories with references to popular subcultures, literature, and global artistic traditions, Gibson honors the multiplicity of identity.
Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited
Artist(s): Diane Arbus
Location: David Zwirner
Dates: Through June 15, 2025
Description: A revisionist look at the MoMA retrospective that shaped Arbus’s legacy, exploring what was left out and why.
Why You Should See It: It invites you to rethink photographic canon formation.
The Abstract Future
Artist(s): Various
Location: Jeffrey Deitch
Dates: May 16 – August 2, 2025
Description: Curated by Alia Dahl, this exhibition documents a new generation of artists who are redefining abstraction by merging sculpture, painting, photography, and performance speculative survey of abstraction as it unfolds across time, media, and identity.
Why You Should See It: The future is abstract—and it’s here.
In Us is Heaven
Artist(s): Various
Location: Southern Guild
Dates: May 16 - September 6, 2025
Description: This group exhibition explores the fluid contours of Queer being not only as lived experience but as a visionary realm where personhood and autonomy are reimagined beyond the binary confines of heteropatriarchy, normative function, nationalism, and coloniality.
Why You Should See It: The exhibition’s works contend that Queer art is not marginal or other – it is everywhere, existing and persisting in the intersections of our cultural, political, spiritual and emotional landscapes.
Where to Stay in Los Angeles
Best Art Exhibitions in Chicago, IL
Lindsay Adams: All Water Has a Perfect Memory
Artist(s): Lindsay Adams
Location: Patron Gallery
Dates: Ongoing
Description: An exploration of how water’s fluid nature can act and serve as a metaphorization of memory, emotional truth, and place.
Why You Should See It: Personal narrative meets poetic materiality.
Caroline Kent
Artist(s): Caroline Kent
Location: Patron Gallery
Dates: Ongoing
Description: Kent paints with a vocabulary all her own—shaped by language, abstraction, and cultural translation.
Why You Should See It: It’s abstraction as dialogue.
Michi Meko: Under the Flickering Light of the North Star
Artist(s): Michi Meko
Location: Miriam Ibrahim
Dates: Through May 31, 2025
Description: Meko's mixed-media landscapes evoke the act of navigating through trauma and toward hope. The exhibition explores the artist's contemplations on the legacies of critical geographies, particularly those of the American South.
Why You Should See It: A Southern visual poet in top form.
Where to Stay in Chicago
Best Art Exhibitions in Baltimore, MD
Black Earth Rising
Artist(s): Various
Location: Baltimore Museum of Art
Dates: May 18 – September 21, 2025
Description: A group exhibition that explores ecological grief, Black futurity, and land-based practices.
Why You Should See It: Urgent, lush, and rigorously researched.
Where to Stay in Baltimore
Best Art Exhibitions in Detroit, MI
Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art
Artist(s): Various
Location: MOCAD
Dates: Through August 10, 2025
Description: A dynamic group show exploring Black digital presence and resistance across online platforms.
Why You Should See It: Art history gets a reboot—with source code.
Where to Stay in Detroit
Best Art Exhibitions in Houston, TX
Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe
Artist(s): Tomashi Jackson
Location: CAMH
Dates: May 30, 2025 – March 29, 2026
Description: This mid-career survey presents a decade of Jackson’s work, combining civil rights archives and color theory in layered compositions that vibrate with history.
Why You Should See It: It’s not just art—it’s an alternate mode of memory.
Where to Stay in Houston
International
Best Art Exhibitions in Mexico City, MX
Maïmouna Guerresi: A’ishah: Los caminos del alma
Artist(s): Maïmouna Guerresi
Location: Miriam Ibrahim
Dates: May 31 – September 2025
Description: Guerresi draws connections between sacred feminine icons across cultures, linking Europe’s Black Madonnas with Mexico’s Virgen de Guadalupe. Through these figures of protection, resistance, and divine presence, she highlights spiritual traditions often overlooked by dominant narratives. The exhibition invites viewers to consider how histories of migration, memory, and devotion are carried through sacred imagery.
Why You Should See It: A transformative reflection on the sacred feminine—inviting remembrance, reverence, and renewal.
Where to Stay in Mexico City
Best Art Exhibitions in London, UK
Encounters: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha
Artist(s): Alberto Giacometti, Huma Bhabha
Location: Barbican Centre
Dates: Through September 1, 2025
Description: A sculptural dialogue across time and culture. Giacometti's spectral forms meet Bhabha's post-apocalyptic figures.
Why You Should See It: It’s not a battle—it’s a conversation between ghosts and survivors.
Leonardo Drew: Ubiquity II
Artist(s): Leonardo Drew
Location: South London Gallery
Dates: May 30 – September 7, 2025
Description: Drew assembles materials into weathered, monumental forms that speak to history and entropy.
Why You Should See It: Decay has never looked so sublime.
Where to Stay in London
Best Art Exhibitions in Paris, France
Worth: Inventing Haute Couture
Artist(s): Charles Frederick Worth
Location: Petit Palais
Dates: Through September 7, 2025
Description: A retrospective dedicated to Charles Frederick Worth, the English designer credited with founding haute couture. The exhibition showcases over 400 pieces, including opulent gowns, accessories, and archival materials, tracing the evolution of the House of Worth from the Second Empire through the Roaring Twenties.
Why You Should See It: Delve into the origins of haute couture and explore the legacy of a fashion pioneer whose innovations laid the foundation for modern fashion design.
Where to Stay in Paris
Best Art Exhibitions in Düsseldorf, Germany
Julie Mehretu: KAIROS / Hauntological Variations
Artist(s): Julie Mehretu
Location: K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
Dates: Through October 12, 2025
Description: This is the largest survey of Mehretu’s work in Germany to date, showcasing nearly 100 pieces that span her career—from early urban-inspired line drawings to recent large-scale abstract paintings. The exhibition also includes time-based media inspired by her work, such as a music album, documentary, and video work. Notably, it features her extensive image archive, providing insight into her creative process.
Why You Should See It: Experience the evolution of one of contemporary art's most influential painters, whose work transforms media images of political events and historical sites into complex abstract compositions.
Where to Stay in Düsseldorf
Best Art Exhibitions in Venice, Italy
Venice Architecture Biennale 2025: Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.
Curator: Carlo Ratti
Location: Giardini, Arsenale, and various venues across Venice
Dates: Through November 23, 2025
Description: The 19th International Architecture Exhibition, curated by MIT professor Carlo Ratti, explores the intersections of natural, artificial, and collective intelligence. Featuring over 750 contributors and more than 300 projects, the Biennale showcases a diverse array of installations, from AI-generated designs and biodegradable architecture to critiques of architectural labor conditions. Highlights include experimental robotics, sustainable building materials, and projects addressing global challenges such as climate change and urbanization.
Why You Should See It: Experience a comprehensive exploration of how architecture can adapt to and address pressing global issues through innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Where to Stay in Venice
Albergo Quattro Fontane - Residenza d'Epoca
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