A Rare Cultural Moment

Amy Sherald (b. 1973) was originally set to make history as the first contemporary Black artist to have a solo exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in D.C in 2025. When she withdrew her career-spanning retrospective, American Sublime, due to censorship, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) stepped in. What started as a principled stand for artistic freedom, has become as a historic, record-breaking Mid-Atlantic debut.

American Sublime’s BMA run shattered records, welcoming over 84,000 visitors - one of the most attended shows in its history. Sherald was honored with the "Artist Who Inspires Award" at the 2025 BMA Ball and Afterparty, and in a surprise announcement, the BMA renamed it to the "Amy Sherald Visionary Artist Award." The gala raised a staggering $1.1 million for the museum’s mission, while the artist was named one of TIME magazine’s Women of the Year. 

The exhibition is set for its final stop at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, where it will run from May 15 to September 27, 2026. Notably, this final venue brings Sherald full circle to her home state of Georgia. While Baltimore was her professional home for years, the MICA alum was born in Columbus, Georgia, and graduated from Clark Atlanta University. 

Born in Richmond, VA, Adam Pendleton (b. 1984) is a conceptual artist whose practice includes silkscreen paintings, photographic collage, video, performance, and publishing. A 2012 “Forbes 30 Under 30” honoree, he transforms old words and illustrations, into immersive, abstract, floor-to-ceiling works, imbued with new meaning.  

In his first solo exhibition in Washington, DC, he presents new and recent paintings, and a single-channel video work. Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen is on view at the Hirshhorn Museum's second floor inner-ring galleries until January 3, 2027. The artist also debuts Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?), a new video work that is projected floor to ceiling. The work makes use of still and moving images of Resurrection City, the multiday encampment erected on the National Mall in the spring and summer of 1968 and considered to be the culmination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. The film’s score, by multi-instrumentalist composer Hahn Rowe, integrates a reading by late poet and cultural critic Amiri Baraka with an orchestration of brass, woodwinds, and drums.

At the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Nick Cave (b. 1959) makes a powerful Mid-Atlantic debut with Nick Cave: Mammoth, a sweeping, deeply personal installation that marks the museum’s largest-ever commission by a single artist. In doing so, Cave follows in the footsteps of Mark Bradford, whose monumental Pickett’s Charge (2017) set a precedent for ambitious, site-defining works at a Smithsonian institution.

Cave is best known for his celebrated Soundsuits - intricate, full-body costumes constructed from found objects that produce sound when in motion. Created in response to the Rodney King beating, these sculptural garments camouflage race, gender, and class, transforming the body into both a site of protection and performance. They remain among the most iconic works in contemporary art, embodying both protest and possibility.

With Mammoth, Cave turns inward. Drawing on his childhood in rural Missouri and the legacy of his grandparents’ handmade quilts, tools, and clothing, the exhibition channels personal memory into an expansive, immersive environment. Through sculpture, video, and assemblage, Cave builds a world where craft traditions and Black vernacular creativity - rooted in generations of making something from nothing - are elevated and reimagined.

At once intimate and monumental, Mammoth positions Cave as both storyteller and alchemist, transforming everyday materials into vessels of history, identity, and imagination. On view through January 3, 2027, this debut is not only a major moment for the region - it affirms Cave’s enduring ability to merge beauty, sound, and social meaning into work that resonates across time and place.

At the National Gallery of Art, Chakaia Booker (b. 1953) returns to the capital with In the Tower: Chakaia Booker: Treading New Ground - a long-awaited solo presentation that reasserts her place as a pioneer of sculptural abstraction.

For more than four decades, the award-winning artist has transformed discarded tires into commanding, geometric and radically new forms by slicing, twisting, weaving, and reshaping the rubber with machinery. Her sculptures range from 8 to 16 feet tall and can weigh up to a ton.

Booker doesn't belabor the meaning of her work, but said the varied tones of the rubber parallel human diversity, while the treads suggest images as varied as African-Americans, the slavery experience, African scarification and textile designs. The discarded tires is a nod to industrialization and environmental concerns. 

Booker’s work doesn’t just occupy space - it reshapes how we see it. FULL STORY.