Best exhibitions of 2025: United States, Canada, Mexico

For those visiting Canada in 2025, Aga Khan Museum’s must-see 10th-anniversary exhibition, Light: Visionary Perspectives, has been extended into spring. The omnipresent subject has found an apt home at the museum, which Pritzker Prize-winning architect Fumihiko Maki designed as a building constantly animated by light. Within this awe-inspiring context, the exhibition features several immersive installations by renowned contemporary artists, such as Olafur Eliasson and Anish Kapoor, each of whom uniquely harness light, expanding its perceptive possibilities.

‘Over the past decade, we have consistently looked to the arts to provide light and enlightenment, with the aim to contribute to more inclusive, pluralistic communities,’ says Dr. Ulrike Al-Khamis, Director and CEO of the Aga Khan Museum, in the exhibition’s press materials. ‘Light, in all of its manifestations, is a powerful metaphor for the positive change that we are aiming to drive in everything we do at our Museum.’

Organised in close collaboration with the artist, Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional is the artist’s first museum exhibition in Mexico since 2006. Having burst onto the scene in the early 1990s, Orozco has not only become one of Mexico’s leading contemporary artists but also a prominent force in international art. While his practice encompasses drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, assemblage and painting, three areas have preoccupied the artist for decades: geometry, organic material and spontaneity. Through these lenses and other technical aspects of his work, the exhibition examines Orozco’s experimental oeuvre through about 300 works.

After debuting in 2023 at the Brooklyn Museum, María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold will reach West Coast audiences via the Getty. For nearly four decades, the Cuban-born, Nashville-based artist has transported viewers with her thought-provoking photography, paintings, immersive installations and performances, in which she tackles subjects ranging from enslavement and diaspora to migration and motherhood, based on her personal family story. As the first multimedia survey of the artist’s work since 2007, the exhibition underscores Campos-Pons’ resilience and reverence for her Nigerian and Chinese ancestors through not only her artwork but also her extensive activism.

An often overlooked category of Chinese art, bronzes have been a venerated form in the region for centuries. While bronze vessels were associated with ritual and power in ancient China, they gained further significance in the 12th through 19th centuries, when they were rediscovered and revered as symbols of a lost golden age. Thus began a revival of bronze casting, expanding bronze’s use from food and beverage containers to a wide range of functional objects, such as incense burners and scholarly objects.

Co-organised with the Shanghai Museum, Recasting the Past marks the most comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the importance of bronze throughout China’s history. Around 100 pieces from the Met’s collection will join nearly 100 objects on loans from major institutions across China, Japan, Korea, German, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. Painting, calligraphy, lacquer and more will complement the impressive array of bronzes.

After more than a decade since his first US retrospective, Ai Weiwei’s inaugural exhibition in Seattle is also his largest-ever American show. Over 100 works spanning his four-decade career will capture the full breadth of the Chinese conceptual artist’s socially and politically charged practice. Weiwei’s most iconic creations, including Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) and Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (Gold) (2010), will feature alongside works never shown in the US before.

From 19 March 2025 through 15 March 2026, visitors to the Seattle Art Museum can also experience Ai Weiwei: Water Lilies, the artist’s most ambitious LEGO work to date. Nearly 50 feet in length, the work pays homage to Claude Monet’s sweeping canvases through 650,000 LEGO blocks.

When it comes to emblematic California artists, Wayne Thiebaud is amongst the first to come to mind, so it’s fitting that his latest show should find a home at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor. In addition to his practice as an artist, Thiebaud was a lifelong learner and passionate teacher at Sacramento Junior College and the University of California, Davis.

Beyond the artist’s candy-coloured confections, this exhibition explores Thiebaud’s preoccupation with art history. A self-described art ‘thief,’ he frequently cited European and American works as launching points for his own oeuvre, which spanned six decades. While cakes, portraits, landscapes and more will comprise the 60 some works by Thiebaud on view, the cherry on top will be the inclusion of objects that inspired him from his personal art collection.

Having never married or had children, Vincent van Gogh found a chosen family in the Roulins, whose patriarch, Joseph Roulin, was the artist’s postman during his stay in Arles in the South of France. Between 1888 and 1889, van Gogh produced many portraits of Joseph; his wife, Augustine; and their three children, Armand, Camille and Marcelle.

One of the most famous portraits from this series, Postman Joseph Roulin (1888), is a beloved work in the collection of the MFA Boston, which has organised Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits in partnership with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. This iconic painting will join approximately 20 works by Van Gogh, as well as letters and other objects that attest to the deep bond between the artist and the family, which became a bulwark for Van Gogh amidst his mental health struggles.

Admirers of modernist sculptor Ruth Asawa will revel in her first major national and international museum retrospective. The show will debut at SFMoMA in San Francisco — the Japanese-American artist’s longtime home — before traveling to the Brooklyn Museum, followed by the Guggenheim Bilbao and Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel. The exhibition features more than 300 works spanning six decades of the artist’s career, as well as her arts advocacy and public sculpture practice from the 1960s onward.

In addition to her signature looped-wire abstract sculptures, the artist’s drawings, prints, paintings, design objects and archival material will enable visitors to enter Asawa’s creative universe and experience her experimental body of work like never before. The retrospective will also highlight works by Asawa’s peers and mentors, including Josef Albers.

This spring the Guggenheim’s iconic rotunda will be filled with Rashid Johnson’s Anxious Men, spray-painted text works, large-scale sculptures, films and more in a highly anticipated mid-career survey. Co-organised with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, where it will travel next, Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers will bring together nearly 90 works that illustrate the breadth of the Chicago-born, New York-based artist’s practice, which explores subjects ranging from history and literature to Black popular culture and music.

Complemented by a robust live-performance program, an indisputable highlight is Sanguine, a monumental site-specific work with an embedded piano on the Guggenheim’s top ramp. The show will continue with a sculpture outdoors. Named after a poem by Amiri Baraka, whose work is a major inspiration for Johnson, the exhibition marks the artist’s largest exhibition to date.

Since the 1980s, Lorna Simpson has steadily become one of the most in-demand and influential image makers in contemporary art. This spring the Met will present the first exhibition dedicated to the entirety of her painting practice, which made its acclaimed debut at the 2015 Venice Biennale. The more than 30 works on view also include recent sculptures and collages, all of which reflect her interests in gender, race and history.

As the exhibition’s title suggests, museumgoers will gain insight into Simpson’s wide-ranging source material, including vintage Ebony magazines and the Library of Congress archive, which she will reimagine in screen-printed collages. Constantly blurring boundaries between genres, Simpson produces arresting imagery at once steeped in history and yet strikingly contemporary.

This summer the seminal Noah Davis retrospective, organised by Barbican, London, and DAS MINSK, Potsdam, comes to the Hammer Museum, a homecoming for the late artist, who was primarily based in Los Angeles. In 2012 he cofounded the LA’s Underground Museum, a cultural hub operating out of four converted storefronts in Arlington Heights neighbourhood, with his wife and fellow artist, Karon Davis.

More than 50 works, including painting, sculpture and works on paper chronicle Davis’s influential career, which was cut short after his untimely death in 2015. The artist is best known for his textured and imaginative figurative paintings, though this show pays particular attention to his practice’s conceptual underpinnings. Above all, Davis’s passion for experimentation and inclusivity shine through.

Also don’t miss:

Picasso and Paper, Cleveland Museum of Art (Through 23 March 2025)

Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism, Frist Art Museum, Nashville (31 January through 4 May 2025)

Amy Sherald: American Sublime, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (9 April through August 2025)

Roaring: Art, Fashion, and the Automobile in France, 1918–1939, Saint Louis Art Museum (12 April through 27 July 2025)

Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art, Toledo Museum of Art (13 April through 27 July 2025)

Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors, Denver Art Museum (20 April through 17 August 2025)

Sargent and Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (27 April through 3 August 2025)

Main image, clockwise from top left: Ruth Asawa and Bruce Sherman, Untitled (S.100, Hanging Tied-Wire, Double-Sided, Open-Center, Six-Petaled Form with Stained Glass), ca. 1978; private collection. © 2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy David Zwirner; photo courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. Red Composition (detail), from the series Los Caminos (The Path), María Magdalena Campos-Pons, photographer American, 1997. Courtesy of and © María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Gabriel Orozco, Four Bicycles (There is Always One Direction), 1994. Photo: Tom Powel. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris/Los Angeles. “Taihe” bell, note “Jiazhong,” China, Song dynasty (960–1279), ca. 1105, reinscribed ca. 1174, Bronze. H. 9 in. (22.8 cm). Courtesy of the Palace Museum, Beijing. Rashid Johnson, Untitled Anxious Audience, 2019. Ceramic tile, black soap, and wax, 159 × 180 × 3 inches (403.9 × 457.2 × 7.6 cm). Image courtesy the artist © Rashid Johnson, 2024. Photo: Martin Parsekian. Self Portrait, 1889, Vincent van Gogh (Dutch (worked in France), 1853–1890). Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney, 1998.74.5. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Wayne Thiebaud, “Buffet,” 1972-1975. Oil on canvas, 48 1/8 x 60 1/8 in. (122.2 x 152.7 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Jon and Shanna Brooks © Wayne Thiebaud Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photograph: Katherine Du Tiel