Back in September, I looked at which artists were showing at the most museums simultaneously in the United States. I thought that was useful, so I’m doing it again.
The idea is the same: I looked at more than 200 museums, and counted which artists were on view any time during December (that includes a show like the Baltimore Museum’s “Illustrating Agency,” which closed December 1). The resulting list includes a little more than 3,400 artist names. Of these, only about 300 appear more than once—a tiny fraction. And of these, a very few repeat multiple times, giving a sense of which voices are most resonating with curators and institutions.
As I said back in September: Because I’m most interested in breadth of influence, I decided not to make any distinctions between bigger and smaller institutions. I rank career retrospectives and surveys highly, followed by special commissions or exhibitions that spotlight a specific body of work, biennial appearances, and then inclusions in thematic group shows.
Themes: All the most visible figures are Black and Indigenous. A rhetoric of speaking for and to historically marginalized identities surrounds a lot of the work.
More strikingly, multiple of these figures are nodes in networks of advocacy: Simone Leigh has organized events and conferences, including “The Loophole of Retreat” in Venice, specifically for Black women artists and scholars; Jaune Quick-to-See Smith recently curated the touring show “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans,” which began at the National Gallery of Art.
Hank Willis Thomas has consistently stayed in the headlines via a progressive artist organization he co-founded, For Freedoms, which organizes billboard campaigns and conferences. Ming Smith emerged from the collective activity of the Kamoinge Workshop, which has itself received museum attention in recent years.
Media: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is known for painting (though she makes installations as well). Strikingly, three of the most influential artists emerge from the world of ceramics: Simone Leigh, Virgil Ortiz, and Rose B. Simpson. Back in December, textile art was similarly prominent, via figures like Marie Watt and Suchitra Mattai—though one of September’s Museum Artists, Theaster Gates, also got his start in ceramics. A “social craft” upsurge, foregrounding traditional crafts in installations about cultural identity, is a major ongoing theme.
Crossover: Finally, it’s worth noting that there’s quite a bit of overlap in terms of exhibitions. Those that feature more than one of these big names include “By Dawn’s Early Light” (about the legacy of the Civil Rights Act, at the Nasher Museum), “For Dear Life” (about illness and disability, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego), and “Making Their Mark” (spotlighting women artists, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive).
Ming Smith at MoMA, on June 6, 2023 in New York City. Photo: Taylor Hill/WireImage
1. Ming Smith
Unlike the other artists here, Ming Smith (b. 1947) is not featured in a bunch of group shows. Instead, her name is in the news due to an unusually concentrated amount of solo attention from museums.
Today, Smith is the most famous alumna of the Black photography collective known as the Kamoinge Workshop—she was that group’s first female member in the 1970s and also the first Black female photographer acquired by the Museum of Modern Art—though her extraordinary photos have gotten a huge surge of attention of late. “She has inspired a generation of artists engaging the politics and poetics of the photographic image in relation to experiences of Blackness,” MoMA wrote last year.
December was big for Smith because it was the tail end of a touring, five-decade retrospective organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, at Spelman College in Atlanta. But there was something bigger at play, too: Multiple art institutions in the city where Smith grew up, Columbus, Ohio, are concurrently staging exhibitions exploring different facets of her work (including two separate shows at the Columbus Museum!), effectively conspiring to make this a “museum moment” for her
SURVEYS:
—”Ming Smith: Feeling the Future” at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, through December 7, 2024
SPOTLIGHTS:
—”Ming Smith: Jazz Requiem—Notations in Blue” at The Gund, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, through December 15, 2024
—“Ming Smith: Wind Chime” at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, through January 5, 2025
—”Ming Smith: Transcendence” and “Ming Smith: August Moon” at the Columbus Museum of Art, through January 26, 2025
GROUPS:
— “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through February 17, 2024
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Simone Leigh speaks onstage during the 2024 LACMA Art+Film Gala, on November 02, 2024 in Los Angeles. Photo: Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for LACMA
2. Simone Leigh
Leigh (b. 1967) has been on a run that few other artists have ever experienced. Currently, her touring 20-year retrospective of ceramic works, which began at the ICA Boston and then traveled to the Hirshhorn, is filling both LACMA and the California African American Museum (CAAM). Having won almost every top honor in art, from the Hugo Boss Prize to the Golden Lion in Venice, she was celebrated last month at LACMA’s Art+Film Gala, alongside Moulin Rouge director Baz Luhrmann (not an intuitive pairing to me!).
The group shows and projects she’s currently in span the country—and that doesn’t even include the fact that her sculpture Sharifa (2022), honoring author Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts and originally made for her U.S. Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, was installed in the garden of the Art Institute of Chicago last month on a permanent basis. It’s in an edition of two. The other, from the Glenstone Museum collection, is in the Metropolitan’s current “Flight Into Egypt” show.
“I describe my work as an ongoing exploration of Black female subjectivity,” she told the Creative Time Summit in 2015, “and Black women are the primary audience for my work.”
SURVEYS:
—“Simone Leigh” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, through January 20, 2025
GROUPS:
—”For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, through February 2, 2025
—”Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through February 17, 2024
—“When You See Me: Visibility in Contemporary Art/History” at the Dallas Museum of Art, through April 13, 2025
—”Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, through April 20, 2025
—“Figures and Forms” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through Spring 2025
—“The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., through September 14, 2025
—”Art and Design from 1900 to Now” at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, through September 1, 2026
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From left: Director of the National Gallery of Art Kaywin Feldman, artist and exhibition curator Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland perform a blanketing ceremony at the National Gallery of Art, on September 21, 2023 in Washington, D.C. Photo: Shannon Finney/Getty Images
3. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
As an artist, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940) channels Native American iconography in a witty Pop expressionist style. A signature are her melted maps of the U.S., replete with swirling references to Indigenous history.
“Part of what I do in my work is use my art as a platform for my beliefs…,” she once told the Smithsonian. “I passionately believe in the life I live, so I think my work will probably go on being political in some way.”
Such work has found a ready audience at museums and biennials. Indeed, the show now celebrating her career at the Saint Louis Art Museum features a pair of artworks, the painting State Names Map: Cahokia (2023) and the sculpture Trade Canoe: Cahokia (2023), she created for the city’s Counterpublic triennial last year.
SURVEYS:
—”Jaune Quick-to-See Smith” at the Saint Louis Art Museum, through May 11, 2025
GROUPS:
—“Illustrating Agency” at the Baltimore Art Museum, through December 1, 2024
—”For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, through February 2, 2025
—”American Sunrise: Indigenous Art at Crystal Bridges” at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, through March 23, 2025
—”Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, through April 20, 2025
—“By Dawn’s Early Light” is on view at Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, through May 11, 2025
—”Expanding Horizons: The Evolving Character of a Nation” at the Toledo Museum of Art, through August 30, 2025
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Virgil Ortiz sitting next to large traditional pot. Photo: Courtesy Virgil Ortiz
4. Virgil Ortiz
The Lowe Art Museum touts Ortiz (b. 1969) by saying that he “embodies all that is energizing and engaging in the broad panorama of contemporary art.” To be fair to this big claim, the range of work represented in that museum’s survey of Ortiz’s career is indeed broad, ranging from ceramics to augmented reality.
A member of the Cochiti Pueblo, Ortiz has been a proponent of “Indigenous Futurism.” The Autry in Los Angeles has a show dedicated to a sci-fi narrative he has been building that draws on the history of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, mingling past and future, history and myth. Indeed, that show, titled “ReVOlt 1680/2180: Sirens & Sikas” (the capital “VO” stands for “Virgil Ortiz”), is coordinated with the Autry’s exhibition celebrating Indigenous fashion and technology, part of Pacific Standard Time. A fashion show featuring Indigenous designs held at the Getty for PST featured an “AR activation” by Ortiz as well.
SURVEYS:
—”Virgil Ortiz: Slipstream” at the Lowe Art Museum, Miami, through January 11, 2025
SPOTLIGHTS:
—”ReVOlt 1680/2180: Sirens & Sikas” at the Autry Museum of the American West, through October 18, 2026
GROUPS:
—”American Sunrise: Indigenous Art at Crystal Bridges” at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, through March 23, 2025
—“Art & Sole” at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, through January 5, 2025
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Hank Willis Thomas in his Brooklyn studio, on May 31, 2024. Photo: Makeda Sandford for The Washington Post via Getty Images
5. Hank Willis Thomas
The Brooklyn-based Thomas (b. 1976) has become well known for work that serves as a prompt for civic engagement. Indeed, his art often feels like it is running for office.
With Boston-based MASS Design Group, he worked on “The Gun Violence Memorial Project,” now on view at the ICA Boston, a structure made of glass bricks containing mementos to the victims of gun violence, originally a part of the Chicago Architecture Biennale back in 2019.
Less somber in tone—and much more literal in its theme of “provoking dialogue”—is Ernst and Ruth (2015), a sculpture in the form of a functional public bench shaped like a large empty speech balloon, inviting visitors to sit and talk together. It went up to promote reflection on citizenship in advance of the election at the Tang Teaching Museum.
SPOTLIGHTS:
—”The Gun Violence Memorial Project” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, through January 20, 2025
—“Ernest and Ruth” at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., through January 31, 2026
GROUPS:
—“By Dawn’s Early Light” is on view at Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, through May 11, 2025
—”Show & Tell: A Brief History of Photography and Text” at the New Orleans Museum of Art, through February 16, 2025
—”Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, through February 18, 2025
—”Posing Beauty in African American Culture” at the Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohio, through January 12, 2025
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From left: Andrew Fierberg, Wanda Aveda, Rose B. Simpson and India Davis attend the 2024 Whitney Biennia, on March 12, 2024 in New York City. Photo: Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
5. Rose B. Simpson
“It goes back to Indigenous aesthetics,” Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983) told the Joan Mitchell Foundation about her philosophy. “There’s no separation between art and life and there’s no separation between spirit and art and spirituality and religious belief systems. All those things are connected.”
Simpson, who hails from a line of ceramicists from Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico, has racked up an astounding exhibition history in recent years (including a spot in the Whitney Biennial earlier this year, which came on the heels of the museum giving her the solo spotlight in 2023). Her style is immediately recognizable: She is known for androgynous human figures in clay, their bodies studded with symbolic ornamentation.
For her current special commission in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s atrium, she has created some particularly towering figures, clay bodies made to evoke geographic layers, heads adorned with elaborate metalwork headdresses.
SPOTLIGHTS:
—”Rose B. Simpson: Strata” at the Cleveland Museum of Art, through April 13, 2025
GROUPS:
—“Illustrating Agency” at the Baltimore Art Museum, through December 1, 2024
—”Infinite Regress: Mystical Abstraction from the Permanent Collection and Beyond” at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Mo., through February 22, 2025
—”Tha Sun Will Set: Contemporary Abstraction and the Body” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through April 6, 2025
—”Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, through April 20, 2025
—”That Which Binds Us” at the Buffalo AKG Museum, through May 12, 2025
—”Art and Design from 1900 to Now” at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, through September 1, 2026
Also Having a Museum Moment:
Tuan Andrew Nguyen
Jeffrey Gibson
Amy Sherald
Dawoud Bey
LaToya Ruby Frazier
Joyce J. Scott
Samantha Box
Suchitra Mattai
Andrea Carlson
María Magdalena Campos-Pons
Mickalene Thomas
