Must See Art Exhibitions Closing in January 2025
Visit these Eleven Exhibitions Before They Close
Happy New Year! As we step into the new year, we’re excited to highlight 11 must-see exhibitions closing this month. These showcases span a variety of mediums, including visual arts like painting, sculpture, and photography, as well as film art. Our selection features a diverse range of museums, from major institutions to hidden gems in smaller cities. Don’t miss the chance to experience these incredible exhibitions before they come to an end!
Women Artists of the Ballets Russes: Designing the Legacy at The McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX.
Closes January 12, 2025
Women Artists of the Ballets Russes: Designing the Legacycelebrates the artistic achievements of the women designers behind Serge Diaghilev’s renowned Ballets Russes. These artists allowed this early 20th century ballet company to flourish and become the vision of decadent beauty that captured the imagination of so many throughout the past century and to this day. By presenting the designs of Sonia Delauney, Alexandra Exter, Natalia Gontcharova, and the choreography of Bronislava Nijinska, the exhibition aims to turn the focus from the prominent men of the Ballets Russes company, such as Serge Diaghilev, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Léon Bakst, and direct it to the women who created lush and vibrant designs that brought imaginative ballets to life. These women designers, through their artistry and the proliferation of their work, helped ensure this company reached its world-renown artistic heights. Women Artists of the Ballets Russes: Designing the Legacy showcases the accomplishments of these bold women and highlights the meaningful legacy that led to the proliferation of ballet schools and companies around the world. (Follow on Instagram)
Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, MA.
Closes January 20, 2025
American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) and British sculptor Henry Moore (1898–1986) are among the most distinctive artists of the 20th century. They have long been admired for their extraordinary distillations of natural forms into abstraction—O’Keeffe’s iconic paintings of flowers and Moore’s monumental public sculpture. This major exhibition is the first to bring these two artists into conversation, using compelling visual juxtapositions to explore their common ways of seeing. Each artist experimented with unusual perspectives, shifts in scale, and layered compositions to produce works that were informed by their surroundings—O’Keeffe in New Mexico and Moore in Hertfordshire, England. (Follow on Instagram)
Jackson Pollock. The first years (1934-1947) at The Musée national Picasso-Paris, Paris, France.
Closes January 19, 2025
The exhibition "Jackson Pollock. The first years (1934-1947)" looks back on the beginnings of Jackson Pollock's career (1912-1956) marked by the influence of regionalism and Mexican muralists, until his first drippings in 1947. This corpus, little exposed for itself, testifies to the various sources that feed the research of the young artist, crossing the influence of native American arts with that of the European avant-gardes, among which Pablo Picasso appears in a prominent place. Compared to the Spanish painter and the great names in European painting by critics, Pollock was quickly erected as a true monument of American painting, and in doing so, isolated from the more complex networks of exchanges of influences that fed his work during his New York years. The exhibition aims to present in detail these years that were the laboratory of his work, restoring the artistic and intellectual context from which both fed. (Follow on Instagram)
Smoke & Mirrors at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO.
Closes January 12, 2025
Smoke & Mirrors is a group show highlighting optical illusions made by eight artists from a wide range of reflective materials and uncommon methodologies. The artwork on view ignites our irresistible attraction to the elusive materiality of shiny and transparent objects that often serve as distractions or distortions of our physical reality. (Follow on Instagram)
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, PA.
Closes January 12, 2025
The Barnes presentation of All About Love showcases a selection of vivid artworks—paintings, collage, photography, video, and site-specific installation—that celebrates Thomas’s distinctive artistic practice from the late 2000s to the present day. Her work is characterized by spectacularly staged, rhinestoned, large-scale painted tableaux and bold, intimate compositions, decisively foregrounding Black femininity in abundant realms of visual pleasure, agency, and kinship. Whether in imaginative dialogue with canonical works from the history of art or playfully reckoning with popular culture, Thomas’s exuberant portraits offer an empowered vision of beauty and desire, formulated through a sensual, Black feminist lens. (Follow on Instagram)
Marisol: A Retrospective at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY.
Closes January 6, 2025Marisol (Venezuelan and American, born France, 1930–2016) remains perhaps the most intriguing and least understood artist associated with Pop Art. Born María Sol Escobar in Paris to a Venezuelan family, by the mid-1960s Marisol had been lauded as the female artist of her generation proclaimed the “only girl artist with glamour” for her fashion sense and the “Latin Garbo” for her apparent exoticism, legendary beauty, and famed silences. Thousands lined up to see her remarkable life-size Pop Art sculptures, but much of the attention would evaporate as her work became more solemn following her retreat from the art world in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her 2016 obituary in the Guardian announced her as “Marisol: the forgotten star of pop art.” After Buffalo, it will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art, February 23–July 6, 2025. (Follow on Instagram)
Gordon Parks: Camera Portraits at The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Closes January 12, 2025Gordon Parks: Camera Portraits looks at a celebrated American photographer and how he forged a new mode of portraiture after World War II. Parks blended a documentary photographer’s desire to place his subjects where they lived and worked with a studio photographer’s attention to dress, character, and expression. In doing so, he believed he could create portraits of individuals that addressed their cultural significance. He applied this approach to such American icons as boxer Muhammad Ali and conductor Leonard Bernstein, as well as to a Harlem gang leader and to a Detroit couple, revealing the humanity and cultural dignity of each person. (Follow on Instagram)
Gordon Parks, Husband and Wife, Sunday Morning, Detroit, Michigan (Bert Collins and Pauline Terry), 1950, printed later, gelatin silver print, Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection), 2016.117.150 Posing Beauty in African American Culture at The Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, OH.
Closes January 12, 2025
Posing Beauty in African American Culture traces the relationship between African American beauty and visual culture from the 1890s to the present through documentary, commercial, and fine art photography. Documentary photographs and portraits of portraits of Black Americans—some famous, some just ordinary citizens—present the public face of African American beauty, while commercial photographs demonstrate how fashion and advertising have constructed beauty standards. Finally, contemporary photographers—some of whom use themselves as a subject—encourage consideration of how images of beauty impact mass culture and individuals. Posing Beauty includes more than 100 works by photographers including Charles “Teenie” Harris, Leonard Freed, Anthony Barboza, Carrie Mae Weems, Hank Willis Thomas, Sheila Pree Bright, Renee Cox, Mickalene Thomas, and others. (Follow on Instagram)
Lauren Kelley (born 1975), Pickin’, 2007, color-coupler print. Courtesy of the artist Tammy Nguyen: Timaeus and the Nations at The Sarasota Art Museum, Sarasota, FL.
Closes January 19, 2025
Sarasota Art Museum proudly presents Timaeus and the Nations, a solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Tammy Nguyen (American, born 1984), unveiling a new body of work that delves into themes of world order, nationhood, and the boundaries of national identity. Nguyen is celebrated for her intricately layered paintings that weave together figurative imagery, lush tropical vegetation, abstract forms, and symbols. Her compositions, with their ornate surfaces and layers of familiar yet subversive motifs, invite viewers to engage with complex historical narratives and philosophical reflections. (Follow on Instagram)
Installation view. (Tammy Nguyen: Timaeus and the Nations) Sue de Beer: The White Wolf at Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME.
Closes January 26, 2025
The White Wolf is an ongoing exploration of supernatural fiction, suspense, and horror unfolding on screen. Set on a fictional New England island in the late 1980s, the film The White Wolf by Sue de Beer follows the intersecting lives of the doctor, nurse, and patients of a local medical clinic. Throughout the film, the doctor relates the history of the island—and a secret shared by its inhabitants—through a series of monologues written by artist Nathaniel Axel. As the film’s elliptical narrative progresses, the characters grapple with finding equilibrium and meaning in the midst of experiences outside their control. Presented as a non-linear, two-channel installation, The White Wolf fuses the elements characteristic of the werewolf genre with a lyrical examination of the body and its relationship to the ephemeral sense of self. (Follow on Instagram)
Sue de Beer, Untitled (Still from the White Wolf), 2018. (Courtesy of Artist & Marianne Boesky Gallery) Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys at High Art Museum, Atlanta, GA.
Closes January 19, 2025
The exhibition illuminates the renown and impact of legendary and canon-expanding artists. Preeminent “giants” such as Barkley L. Hendricks, Esther Mahlangu, and Gordon Parks push the boundaries of what can be seen on canvas and in photography while building a foundation for today’s Black creatives. Contemporary artists like Hank Willis Thomas and Qualeasha Wood use materials like textiles, steel, and beads to celebrate Blackness and critique society, while mesmerizing compositions from Deana Lawson and Mickalene Thomas challenge and add nuance to perceptions of Blackness. Embodying the exhibition’s “giant” ethos, the paintings by Amy Sherald and Titus Kaphar command attention through striking monumentality. Together, these works bring to the fore many facets of the term giants and reflect the spirit of the Deans, whose creative lives infuse the exhibition. (Follow on Instagram)
Amy Sherald (American, born 1973), Deliverance, 2022, oil on linen, The Dean Collection, courtesy of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys. © Amy Sherald. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Joseph Hyde.
Don’t Miss The Closing of these Exhibitions!
January is the perfect time to reconnect with art and start the year with fresh inspiration. Whether it’s a striking painting, a moving photograph, or a beautifully crafted sculpture, these exhibitions offer a chance to slow down and see things in a new light. This month’s selection proves that creativity knows no season, making it the ideal way to kick off 2025. Take some time to explore, reflect, and let these shows remind you of the power of art to inspire and transform.
So beautiful