Museum News
The Studio Museum in Harlem, Spring 2026
The Studio Museum in Harlem has announced the program for its first spring season in the museum’s new building at 144 West 125th Street, designed by David Adjaye (Ghanaian-British, b. 1966). In this post, we share current and upcoming events with a selection of works from the exhibitions.
Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, said, “Our inaugural spring season in our magnificent new home builds upon what has already been an incredible slate of exhibitions and installations. These presentations reinforce our commitment to showcasing works by artists of African descent from across the globe, and strengthen our dedication to a contemporary art world that foregrounds the plurality of ideas, practices, and methodologies that today’s artists are engaging with.”
“Tom Lloyd,” on view until March 22, is a comprehensive presentation of the work of Tom Lloyd (American, 1929-1996), whose pioneering artwork was the focus of the Studio Museum’s first exhibition, “Electronic Refractions II,” in 1968. Based on extensive new scholarship and intensive conservation work, “Tom Lloyd” explores the artist’s contributions to the interplay of art and technology and pays tribute to his activism with the Art Workers’ Coalition and his founding of the Store Front Museum in Queens—the borough’s first art museum.
“Expanding the Walls: Making Connections Between Photography, History, and Community,” on view until April 12, presents work created by participants in the Studio Museum’s free photography program for high school-aged youth. Marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of “Expanding the Walls,” this exhibition features photographs across the program’s years, offering a glimpse into the people, places, and moments that define a teenager’s world. As their camera may have evolved—first from Polaroid, then to film, and now to digital—each photographer presents a distinct visual language shaped by the techniques and technologies of their time. Whether navigating self, family, or community, these young artists use their cameras to capture adolescence in all its complexity and clarity.
From July 2, 2026 until summer 2027, the Museum will present the culminating exhibition of “Expanding the Walls: Making Connections Between Photography, History, and Community” featuring work by the 2026 program’s seventeen participants, alongside a display of photographs by James Van Der Zee (American, 1886-1983), the celebrated Harlem photographer whose collection and archive serve as an entry point to the program.
“Christopher Myers: Harlem Is a Myth” (ongoing) is a site-specific installation in the Museum’s Education Workshops that depicts an intergenerational community of mythic beings, including iconic figures from Harlem. Myers (American, b. 1974) transforms a young Kareem Abdul-Jabbar into a basketball-carrying centaur, jazz legends Thelonious Monk and Count Basie sprout butterfly and angel wings, and two girls strike poses with antlers and a tail.
“Camille Norment: Untitled (heliotrope)” (ongoing) is a site-informed sculptural and sound installation by the Norway-based interdisciplinary artist Camille Norment. Commissioned by the Studio Museum in Harlem for its terrace staircase, Untitled (heliotrope) is inspired by contemporary and historical migration. Handwoven by the artist herself, brass wires frame brass tubes of varying lengths and diameters, with the resulting shape recalling a pipe organ and a raft.
A long-term installation on the façade of the Studio Museum, Untitled, 2004 by David Hammons (American, b. 1953) combines the American flag design with the colors of the Pan-African flag.
A fixture of the Studio Museum since 2007, Give Us a Poem by Glenn Ligon (American, b. 1960) flashes between Me and We, provoking consideration of binaries like light and dark, presence and absence, and the self and the collective.
“Fade,” on view from May 1 until September 6, is the sixth installment of the Studio Museum’s “F” show series of exhibitions of emerging artists. “Fade” is presented in the Museum’s fourth-floor gallery and features the work of seventeen early-career artists of African and Afro-Latinx descent from across the United States. Comprising newly commissioned and loaned artworks in a variety of media, “Fade” reflects the concerns of a new generation of artists. Red Bed Country by Utē Petit (American, b.1995), which opened this post, is included in “Fade.”
Working across disciplines, the artists in this exhibition embrace feeling, spirituality, and non-linear conceptions of time. Through sculptural and visual interventions that foreground ancestry, spaces of refuge, land as archive, grief, and the surreal, “Fade” locates the in-between as a space of resistance.
“From Now: A Collection in Context,” on view until August 16, is a dynamic, shifting installation of thematic exchanges drawn entirely from the Studio Museum in Harlem’s collection and installed throughout the building. Featuring a call-and-response of regular rotations of works, the exhibition is organized in sections that will unfold and evolve over the course of the year. Altogether, the installation presents a plurality of voices and explores motifs that have preoccupied artists of African descent across generations. Artists whose work is newly on display since the initial rotation of “From Now” include Charles Alston, Dawoud Bey, McArthur Binion, Diedrick Brackens, Willie Cole, Bethany Collins, Elizabeth Colomba, vanessa german, Gerald Jackson, Ben F. Jones, Jacob Mason-Macklin, Reverend Joyce McDonald, Julie Mehretu, Otobong Nkanga, Andy Robert, Nadine Robinson, Lezley Saar, David Shrobe, and Bob Thompson.
The following are works in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s renowned collection.
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