If 2024 was about spectacle, 2025 is shaping up to be about substance. Across New York’s Art Scene this September, the city’s major museums are doubling down on artists who challenge how we see, hear, and gather. At MoMA PS1, “Gatherers” turns the group show into a call for community and resistance. MoMA’s “New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging” underscores the urgency of identity in an interconnected world. The Whitney grants Christine Sun Kim her most ambitious platform yet, reframing sound through Deaf experience. And the Guggenheim explodes with the color-saturated visions of Beatriz Milhazes, whose canvases insist on beauty as power.
“The Gatherers”
MoMA PS1
Long Island City
Installation view of “The Gatherers” at MoMA PS1, courtesy of MoMA.
MoMA PS1 is showing “The Gatherers,” a sweeping exhibition that confronts the urgent realities of global waste, excess, and resource extraction. The show fills the museum’s third-floor galleries with work by 14 international artists—many presenting in a U.S. museum for the first time—who transform discarded objects, industrial remnants, and everyday detritus into probing reflections on our precarious ecologies.
Curated by Ruba Katrib, “The Gatherers” situates contemporary practices within long histories of reuse and accumulation, while also grappling with the fractured legacies of globalization, neoliberalism, and political instability. Highlights include Selma Selman’s salvaged machines and painted canvases rooted in her family’s scrap-metal business, Emilija Škarnulytė’s haunting video of a decommissioned nuclear plant, and Ser Serpas’s precarious assemblages sourced from New York’s streets. From Zhou Tao’s cinematic meditation on data infrastructures in China to Karimah Ashadu’s film tracing migrant labor economies in Hamburg, the exhibition reframes waste as a lens through which to consider labor, memory, and resilience.
What we love: Alongside installations, performances, and film, “The Gatherers” underscores how artists worldwide reimagine refuse as both a material and a metaphor.
“The Gatherers” at MoMA PS1
April 24–October 6, 2025
“New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging”
MoMA
Midtown
L. Kasimu Harris. “King” Joe Lindsey and his Royal Setup (Roberton’s Vieux Carre Lounge), New Orleans from Vanishing Black Bars and Lounges. 2022. Inkjet print. 24 x 36” (61 x 91.4 cm). © 2025 L. Kasimu Harris. Courtesy the artist.
This fall, the Museum of Modern Art marks the 40th anniversary of its acclaimed New Photography series with “New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging,” on view from September 14, 2025, through January 17, 2026. Bringing together 13 artists and collectives from Johannesburg, Kathmandu, New Orleans, and Mexico City, the exhibition reflects on the connective threads that bind communities across histories, geographies, and generations.
Highlights include Johannesburg-based artist Gabrielle Goliath, whose Berenice 29–39 (2022) uses serial portraiture as a form of iterative address, and Lebohang Kganye, who reimagines personal and collective archives to uncover intergenerational memory. From Kathmandu, the Nepal Picture Library presents The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project, a site-specific installation foregrounding the lived experiences of Nepali women, while Prasiit Sthapit explores shifting borders and fragile terrains. In New Orleans, Gabrielle Garcia Steib transforms family archives into moving-image installations tracing ties between Latin America and the American South, and L Kasimu Harris considers how photography constructs layered identities.
What we love: Mexico City–based artists Sandra Blow and Tania Franco Klein each offer distinct visions of belonging, from celebrating queer youth culture to interrogating social pressures around image and performance.
“New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging” at MoMA
September 14, 2025—January 17, 2026
“Beatriz Milhazes: Rigor and Beauty”
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Upper East Side
Beatriz Milhazes’s studio, featuring her in-progress painting Mistura sagrada (Sacred Mixture, 2022) in the background, Rio de Janeiro, 2022. Photo: Manuel Aguas. © Beatriz Milhazes.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents “Beatriz Milhazes: Rigor and Beauty,” the first of New York’s Art Scene museum exhibitions dedicated to the celebrated Brazilian artist. Featuring fifteen works from 1995 to 2023, drawn from the Guggenheim’s collection and key loans, the show traces Milhazes’s evolution across three decades of painting and works on paper. Renowned for her vibrant abstractions, Milhazes draws on the visual richness of Brazilian culture—colonial art and architecture, the exuberance of Carnival, and the radical Tropicália movement—while engaging modernist touchstones from Henri Matisse to Piet Mondrian. Her inventive “monotransfer” technique, developed in 1989, layers painted motifs onto canvas through a meticulous process of transfer, yielding dazzling compositions that balance geometry, ornament, and improvisation.
Later paintings explore optical rhythms and vibrant repetition, while her collages—assembled from shopping bags, wrappers, and screenprint cutouts—reveal a more intimate, journal-like practice. Recent works, including Mistura sagrada (2022), reflect on cycles of renewal and nature’s spiritual force.
What we love: Early works such as Santa Cruz (1995) and As quatro estaçōes (1997) evoke Baroque opulence through arabesques, lace-like forms, and floral motifs.
“Beatriz Milhazes: Rigor and Beauty” at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
March 7–September 14, 2025
“‘Untitled’ (America)”
The Whitney Museum of American Art
Meatpacking
Installation view of “Untitled” (America) (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, July 5, 2025-). From left to right: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hollywood Africans, 1983; Andy Warhol, Ethel Scull 36 Times, 1963; Rosalyn Drexler, Marilyn Pursued by Death, 1963. Photograph by Ron Amstutz
The Whitney Museum of American Art marks the tenth anniversary of its downtown home on New York’s Art Scene with “‘Untitled’ (America),” a sweeping reinstallation of its collection that celebrates both icons and new acquisitions. The exhibition spans 1900 through the early 1980s, exploring themes of identity, place, consumerism, media, and abstraction through an open, thematic installation design that encourages connections across time periods. Works by Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jasper Johns, Alma Thomas, Andy Warhol, and Kay WalkingStick anchor the show alongside new acquisitions by artists such as Aaron Douglas and Fritz Scholder, reflecting evolving narratives of American art.
Highlights include explorations of figuration and realism, landscapes shaped by memory and conflict, critiques of mass media and celebrity culture, and dynamic approaches to abstraction. Special installations include a dedicated gallery to Isamu Noguchi’s sculpture, tracing his experimentation with form and material, and Claes Oldenburg: Drawn from Life, which showcases his playful drawings from the 1960s.
What we love: Inspired by Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (America) (1994), the exhibition embraces the complexities and contradictions of American art, leaving “America” as an open question.
“‘Untitled’ (America)” at The Whitney
July 5, 2025-Ongoing
Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night
The Whitney Museum of American Art
Meatpcking
Installation view of “Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night,” courtesy of The Whitney.
The Whitney Museum of American Art presents “Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night,” the first major museum survey of the Berlin-based artist. Co-organized with the Walker Art Center, the exhibition spans three floors and brings together more than 90 works from 2011 to the present, including drawings, murals, paintings, sculptures, and video installations.
Kim (b. 1980) uses sound, musical notation, infographics, and language—in both American Sign Language (ASL) and written English—to examine how communication shapes identity, access, and social power. Her witty, poignant practice reflects on Deaf lived experience, family, trauma, and community while challenging the systemic marginalization of the Deaf community. Highlights include early works like All Day. All Night. (2012), major drawing series such as Degrees of Deaf Rage (2018), video collaborations with artist Thomas Mader, and recent large-scale murals including Ghost(ed) Notes (2024). The exhibition is thematic, exploring sound politics, echoes as metaphors for interpretation, and the complexities of language.
What we love: A free Lobby Gallery installation features ATTENTION (2022), a kinetic sculpture co-created with Mader. For Kim, who began her career at the Whitney in New York’s Art Scene as an educator and consultant, the survey represents a full-circle moment—expansive, experimental, and deeply personal.
“Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night” at The Whitney Museum of American Art
February 8–Sept 21, 2025
