Whitney Museum Announces Upcoming Exhibitions Through Fall 2025

Linda Lomahaftewa, Untitled Woman’s Faces, 1960s. Oil on canvas, 36 × 48 in. (91.4 × 121.9 cm). Heard Museum, Phoenix; Gift of the artist. © Linda Lomahaftewa

A major survey reimagining the 1960s opens in the Fall of 2025, and Spring 2025 presentations featuring Marina Zurkow, Mary Heilmann, Louise Nevelson, and more come to the Whitney.

The Whitney Museum of American Art announces updates to its advanced exhibition schedule through fall 2025. Opening in September 2025, Sixties Surreal is a sweeping survey of American art from “the long 1960s,” highlighting the era’s most underrecognized and yet fundamental aesthetic current. This group exhibition includes works by artists like Diane Arbus, Romare Bearden, Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, David Hammons,Yayoi Kusama, and more to offer a revisionist survey that focuses on the 1960s’ surrealist psychosexual, fantastical, and revolutionary tendencies.

Opening in April 2025, an exhibition of software-based animations by Marina Zurkow, along with a site-specific presentation on the Museum’s fifth-floor terrace as part of the Whitney’s Hyundai Terrace Commission, explore the intersections of nature and culture. Artist Mary Heilmann will mark the 10th anniversary of the Whitney’s downtown building with a reexamination of her work Sunset (2015). This new site-specific installation considers the relationship between the Museum’s architecture and the city. Presentations that feature renowned holdings from the Museum’s collection will also be on view. Highlighting the Whitney’s commitment to an inclusive and representative view of American art, these exhibitions focus on various mediums, from painting and sculpture to large-scale installation to video and digital art.

NEWLY ANNOUNCED EXHIBITIONS

Sixties Surreal

September 17, 2025–February 2026

Sixties Surreal is an ambitious survey reimagining American art from “the long 1960s” (1958–72), encompassing the work of more than 100 artists. Spanning painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, prints, film and video, and large-scale installation, this revisionist exhibition looks at the ways artists took permission from Surrealism to explore fundamental and underrecognized aesthetic currents, including psychosexual, fantastical, and revolutionary tendencies.

Sixties Surreal recontextualizes some of the decade’s best-known figures alongside those only recently rediscovered. The exhibition gathers a range of works by artists including Diane Arbus, Lee Bontecou, Franklin Williams, Nancy Grossman, David Hammons, Linda Lomahaftewa, Mel Casas, Yayoi Kusama, Romare Bearden, and Louise Bourgeois, among others. In the 60s, many of these artists sought new strategies for connecting art back to a lived reality that seemed increasingly unreal due to rapid postwar transformation and the social, political, and technological upheavals of the later part of the decade.

Organized thematically, Sixties Surreal offers a sweeping panorama of the era, juxtaposing contexts and forging new linkages across different communities and ideologies from the East Coast to the West. The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue structured chronologically from 1958 to 1972.

Sixties Surreal is organized by Dan Nadel, independent curator; Laura Phipps, Associate Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art; Scott Rothkopf, Alice Pratt Brown Director, Whitney Museum of American Art; and Elisabeth Sussman, Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, with Kelly Long, Senior Curatorial Assistant, and Rowan Diaz-Toth, Curatorial Project Assistant, Whitney Museum of American Art.

Marina Zurkow: Parting Worlds

Opening April 2025

Marina Zurkow: Parting Worlds features a selection of software-based works by Marina Zurkow (b. 1962, New York, NY), an artist who explores the intersection of nature and culture through various mediums, including animation, code, and participatory experiences like dinners and card games. In the two works on view in the Museum’s fifth-floor gallery and the adjacent Hyundai Terrace Commission, Zurkow uses software that drives the interplay of the elements seen on screen and their ever-changing compositions to reflect on the complexity of ecological and social systems.

The animations Mesocosm (Wink, Texas) (2012) and The Earth Eaters (2025) in the fifth-floor gallery both imagine the implications of environmental damage and the repeated extraction of raw materials. Mesocosm (Wink, Texas) is an animation that depicts the landscape surrounding Wink Sink 2, a large sinkhole that has been expanding steadily since it formed in 2002 on private oil company property in the small Texas town of Wink. The Earth Eaters is an animated, software-based “fairy tale” that depicts an endless cycle of floating islands, animal inhabitants, and miners who hack away at the land. Together, these works evoke impermanence and loss as environments change and disappear due to human intervention and natural evolution.

Marina Zurkow: Parting Worlds is organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art, with David Lisbon, Curatorial Assistant.

Hyundai Terrace Commission: Marina Zurkow

Opening April 2025

The Hyundai Terrace Commission by Marina Zurkow (b. 1962, New York, NY), titled The River is a Circle, features a new site-specific work that engages with the ecologies of the Hudson River and the neighborhood surrounding the Whitney. The software-driven animation presents a view of the Hudson River in a horizontal split between the world above and below the water. The dynamic composition of the animated elements is driven by algorithmic probability and reflects the current weather and season in New York City. The installation extends the underwater environment to the terrace with maritime wreckage and oyster reef balls, devices used to provide habitat for oysters.

Hyundai Terrace Commission: Marina Zurkow is organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art, with David Lisbon, Curatorial Assistant.

Mary Heilmann: Long Line

Opening April 9, 2025

Inspired by Mary Heilmann’s expansive practice and ethos of social connection, this new site-specific project celebrates the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Whitney Museum’s downtown building, for which Heilmann (b.1940, San Francisco, CA) created Sunset (2015) on the fifth-floor terrace. That project, which included a large-scale reproduction of a vibrant painting, a film, and Heilmann’s signature Monochrome Chairs, inaugurated the Museum’s largest outdoor gallery and transformed it into a site of reverie, memory, and leisure.

Mary Heilmann: Long Line further considers the relationship between the Museum’s architecture and the city. Heilmann’s immersive environment includes a hand-painted enlargement of her 2020 painting Long Line, as well as a variety of chairs related to furniture she has displayed in homes and exhibitions. Serving as elements in her larger composition, this furniture also encourages visitors to recharge and interact with one another and the environment outside the Museum.

Mary Heilmann: Long Line is organized by Laura Phipps, Associate Curator.

Collection View: Louise Nevelson

Opening April 9, 2025

This presentation brings together over fifteen sculptures by Louise Nevelson drawn from the Whitney’s collection and sets them against the backdrop of New York City, a place that long inspired Nevelson in her sculptural assemblages. Born in Pereiaslav, Ukraine, Nevelson (1899–1988) lived and worked in Manhattan from the 1920s through the 1980s. Known for her bold monochrome assemblages of stacked and composed found objects, Nevelson was captivated by the city’s ever-changing skyline and saw creative potential in discarded materials that she scavenged throughout its streets at night. “I see New York City as a great big sculpture,” she once remarked. By painting these sculptures black, she cloaked the specific, identifying details of disparate objects such as duck decoys, lettuce crates, and pieces of rebar, transforming them into abstract shapes. Collection View: Louise Nevelson reimagines the relationship between Nevelson’s work and New York, highlighting the dynamic interplay she sought to suggest in her work between motion and stillness, light and shadow, dawn and dusk.

Nevelson had a long and deep relationship with the Whitney Museum, which organized her first retrospective in 1967. Today the Museum is one of the largest repositories of her work, with over ninety sculptures, drawings, and prints in the collection, many of them gifts of the artist. The works gathered in this exhibition, which span four decades, offer a special opportunity to shine a light on this self-proclaimed “architect of shadows.”

Collection View: Louise Nevelson is organized by Kim Conaty, Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, with Roxanne Smith, Senior Curatorial Assistant, and Antonia Pocock, Curatorial Assistant.

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INFANT: (BANNED SKILLS)

Opening June 2025

INFANT’s (BANNED SKILLS), a new digital art project by artists sidony o’neal and Bogosi Sekhukhuni commissioned for artport, is a hypertextual narrative that unfolds in the browser window and can be navigated by visitors. The artists designed the virtual experience as a starting point for exploring their concept of XENOFORMALISM (XF). The prefix XENO, Greek for strange or foreign, suggests an unfamiliar type of formalism, and the term can be imagined as a category of filters one could use to unpack and connect histories of visual aesthetics, sonic landscapes, and both science and science fiction. INFANT uses select artifacts from art, architecture, design, and sound to explore cultural representations through unexpected groupings, such as Alexander Calder’s jewelry designs next to the seemingly ornamental teeth of a crabeater seal. Encounters with juxtapositions of cultural artifacts invite users to gain new perspectives on geopolitical and social tensions in established histories of art and design.

The primary filter that visitors use to navigate the non-linear visual narrative of (BANNED SKILLS) is the kiki-bouba effect, the mental association between certain speech sounds and visual shapes: people commonly associate a made-up word such as bouba with a rounded shape, and kiki with a spiky one. Choosing a kiki or bouba shape, users follow different and intersecting paths that illustrate how the seemingly contradictory categories often work in tandem to reinforce and legitimize one another. (BANNED SKILLS) reveals how widely accepted canonical histories are often riddled with erasures and simplifications that can obscure the complex histories of objects or ideas.

INFANT: (BANNED SKILLS) is organized by David Lisbon, Curatorial Assistant.

PREVIOUSLY ANNOUNCED EXHIBITIONS

Previously announced presentations include Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night, the artist’s first major museum survey, opening on February 8. Spanning three floors of the Museum, the exhibition foregrounds how Christine Sun Kim utilizes sound, language, and the complexities of communication in her wide-ranging approach to artmaking. Opening on April 9, Amy Sherald: American Sublime brings together some fifty paintings by one of the foremost artists of our time. In her first major museum survey, Amy Sherald presents work from 2007 to the present, from her poetic early portraits to the incisive and moving figure paintings for which she is best known.

Current exhibitions include Edges of Ailey, on view through February 9; Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe and the Last Gullah Islands, on view through May; Shifting Landscapes, on view through January 2026; and the digital art commissions Ashley Zelinske: Twin Quasar and Maya Man: A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City.

ABOUT THE WHITNEY

The Whitney Museum of American Art, founded in 1930 by the artist and philanthropist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), houses the foremost collection of American art from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Mrs. Whitney, an early and ardent supporter of modern American art, nurtured groundbreaking artists when audiences were still largely preoccupied with the Old Masters. From her vision arose the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has been championing the most innovative art of the United States for ninety years. The core of the Whitney’s mission is to collect, preserve, interpret, and exhibit American art of our time and serve a wide variety of audiences in celebration of the complexity and diversity of art and culture in the United States. Through this mission and a steadfast commitment to artists, the Whitney has long been a powerful force in support of modern and contemporary art and continues to help define what is innovative and influential in American art today.

Whitney Museum Land Acknowledgment

The Whitney is located in Lenapehoking, the ancestral homeland of the Lenape. The name Manhattan comes from their word Mannahatta, meaning “island of many hills.” The Museum’s current site is close to land that was a Lenape fishing and planting site called Sapponckanikan (“tobacco field”). The Whitney acknowledges the displacement of this region’s original inhabitants and the Lenape diaspora that exists today.

As a museum of American art in a city with vital and diverse communities of Indigenous people, the Whitney recognizes the historical exclusion of Indigenous artists from its collection and program. The Museum is committed to addressing these erasures and honoring the perspectives of Indigenous artists and communities as we work for a more equitable future. To read more about the Museum’s Land Acknowledgment, visit the Museum’s website.

VISITOR INFORMATION

The Whitney Museum of American Art is located at 99 Gansevoort Street between Washington and West Streets, New York City. Public hours are Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 10:30 am–6 pm; Friday, 10:30 am–10 pm; and Saturday and Sunday, 10:30 am–6 pm. Closed Tuesday. Visitors twenty-five years and under and Whitney members: FREE. The Museum offers FREE admission and special programming for visitors of all ages every Friday evening from 5–10 pm and on the second Sunday of every month.