60 Must-See Exhibitions to Visit This Spring
by Alex Greenberger
The big themes of the spring season in the world of museums and biennials are migration and mutation. The former is the loose focus of this year’s edition of the Venice Biennale, the world’s biggest art festival, which will explore artists who live in diaspora. But it is also the subject of a range of retrospectives for artists whose work provides a rebuke to the notion of national borders as fixed, immutable things.
Transformation was a core component of Surrealism, an avant-garde that is turning 100 this year. It is, however, not the only movement celebrating an anniversary in 2024—Impressionism, the French movement launched in 1874, is now 150 years old. Both -isms are being toasted in big shows this season.
But it is not just living artists and modernists who are being feted. An Angelica Kauffman retrospective, long in the works, is finally here, and so is a restoration of a prized Jan van Eyck painting. Below, a look at 60 must-see museum shows and biennials to visit this spring.
“Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams” at Baltimore Museum of Art
Many of Joyce J. Scott’s sculptures are intricate and gorgeous, yet they also contain tough material about the painful histories of racism woven into them—literally. A good number of her pieces enlist beading, glasswork, and sewing, raising craft techniques to the status of what has commonly been regarded as “high” art. One of the most important artists to emerge from Baltimore’s art scene in the past half-century, Scott is finally getting a retrospective in her hometown museum, where she will exhibit lesser-known pieces, such as ephemera related to performances staged during the 1970s, as well as a newly commissioned installation. March 24–July 14