Here Are 20 Highly Anticipated, Mind-Expanding Museum Exhibitions to Seek Out Across the US in 2020

There are a bevy of significant museum shows opening across the
country in the first half of 2020, ranging from a provocative
examination of AI art in San Francisco to a historic survey of El
Greco in Chicago. Here’s everything you need to know about the
exhibitions we are looking forward to most.

“Tschabalala Self: Out of
Body” at the Institute of Contemporary Art,
Boston
January 20–July 5, 2020

Interest in the 30-year-old artist has reached a fever pitch,
with skyrocketing prices at auction and a solid footing within the
institutional landscape. For her largest exhibition to date, and
her first in Boston, Self has interpreted her life in Harlem
through the lens of social issues and everyday bodies. Her work is
rooted in figuration, but she adds whimsical colors and formally
impressive strokes that give life to her portraits and
sculptures.

The ICA Boston is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive Boston,
Massachusetts; general admission is $15. 

“Tishan Hsu: Liquid
Circuit” at the Hammer Museum, Los
Angeles 
January 26–April 19, 2020

The first US museum survey for Tishan Hsu, who trained as an
architect at MIT, was organized by the SculptureCenter in Queens,
and will now be making its West Coast debut. Curator Sohrab Mohebbi
makes the case that Hsu is an artist who was ahead of his time,
making works back in the 1980s that already considered the
dangerous implications of artificial intelligence and other
technological advances.

The Hammer is located at 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los
Angeles, California; admission is free. 

 “Ellen Lesperance: Velvet
Fist” at the Baltimore Museum of Art
January 26–June 28, 2020

Ellen Lesperance has dedicated her practice to translating
knitting patterns into paintings, with the aim of developing an art
form separate from the male-dominated tradition of figurative
painting. Her BMA show features works from her “Greenham Common
Women’s Peace Camp” series, inspired by feminist separatists’
protest garments, worn to speak out against nuclear weapons being
stored in Berkshire, England.

The BMA is located at 10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore,
Maryland; admission is free.

“Carrie Moyer and
Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times” at
the Portland Museum of Art,
Maine 
February 7–June 7, 2020

Partners Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe will get their first major
joint museum show this February. The Portland Museum of Art in
Maine has commissioned the artists to collaborate on a
site-specific installation, for which they’ll create a kind of
custom tabernacle for their own brand of spiritual and communal
dialogue.

The Portland Museum of Art is located at 7 Congress
Square, Portland, Maine; general admission is $18. 

“Volcano! Mount St. Helens in
Art” at the Portland Art Museum,
Oregon

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the eruption of Mount St.
Helens, the Portland Art Museum has organized a show about the
volcano’s influence on artists throughout the region, from Native
Americans who made objects carved from obsidian, to landscape
painters of the 19th century, like Albert Bierstadt. Reactions to
the 1980 blast, including powerful documentary photography, are
paired with recent works about the volcano’s continued destructive
potential.

The Portland Art Museum is located at 1219 Southwest Park
Avenue in Portland, Oregon; general admission is $20.

“Dawoud Bey: An American
Project” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art
February 15–May 25, 2020

American photographer Dawoud Bey rose to prominence in recent
years for his stirring, insightful depictions of largely unseen
communities. In this retrospective, Bey’s historically inspired
projects, such as “The Birmingham Project,” which commemorates the
devastating 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, are set
alongside his more recent landscape photographs, to give viewers a
comprehensive look at his work.

SFMOMA is located at 151 Third Street, San Francisco.
General admission is $25. 

“Ree Morton: The Plant That
Heals May Also Poison” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles
February 16–June 14, 2020

Ree Morton hasn’t had a major US museum show in nearly 40 years,
making this presentation of her drawings, paintings, sculptures,
and installations—which boldly claim space for so-called
sentimental subjects, such as love, friendship, and motherhood—long
overdue.

The ICA LA is located at 1717 East 7th Street; Los
Angeles, California; admission is free. 

“Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the
Age of AI” at the de Young Museum, San
Francisco
February 22–October 25, 2020

Artists tackle our growing anxiety about technology in this
forward-looking group show featuring Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl,
and Pierre Huyghe. Many of the works highlight the ways in which
the “uncanny valley,” a term for our sense of estrangement from
robots that look too much like us, has expanded to include
behavioral engineering and automation, which increasingly
replicates human behavior—with mixed results.

The de Young Museum is located at Golden Gate Park, 50
Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, California; general
admission is $15.

“Francis Bacon: Late
Paintings” at the Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston
February 23–May 25, 2020

Spanning the last two decades of Frances Bacon’s career, from
1971 to 1991, this exhibition brings together roughly 40 paintings,
including some of his celebrated monumental triptychs. Heading
stateside from Paris’s Centre Pompidou (where it is on view as
“Bacon: Books and Painting,” through January 20), it is the first
major US museum show to feature the artist since 2009.

The MFAH is located at 1001 Bissonnet, Houston, Texas;
general admission is $18.

“Faye Driscoll: Thank You
for Coming” at the Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis 
February 27–June 14, 2020

The first solo exhibition for choreographer Faye Driscoll
revisits her performance trilogy, “Thank You for Coming.” The three
works—Attendance (2014), Play (2016),
and Space (2019)—were co-commissioned by the
Walker, and are returning to Minneapolis after a world tour.
(The performance is
also being staged in New York from January 8–10.) Adapted in
Minnesota from the theater to the gallery with a guided audio
soundtrack, the exhibition will ask that audience members become
active participants in an immersive experience.

The Walker Art Center is located at 725 Vineland Place,
Minneapolis, Minnesota; general admission is $15.

“Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico” at
the National Museum of Women in the
Arts
February 28–May 17, 2020

As the crisis at the US-Mexico border continues to rage, the
National Museum of Women in the Arts is bringing the issue to the
heart of Washington, DC, with a show of photographs by Graciela
Iturbide. The Mexican-born and based artist has spent her life and
career documenting native peoples in the Juchitán and Mixtec
communities—portraying them outside of the sensational news cycle
as individuals with rich lives. Also on display are the portraits
of objects at Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul, and imagery of the flora and
fauna of the country.

NMWA is located at 1250 New York Ave NW, Washington, DC.
General admission is $10. 

“Edvard Munch and the Cycle of Life: Prints From
the National Gallery of Art” at the Chrysler Museum of Art 
February 28–May 17, 2020

There’s a reason Edvard Munch’s iconic The Scream
so perfectly captures a feeling of abject existential terror: the
artist’s life was full of trauma, from the time he accidentally
shot himself during a lover’s quarrel to the psychological collapse
that led him to seek electroshock therapy. The Chrysler will
consider how the artist’s personal pain permeated his work,
particularly his 1890s series of paintings known as The
Frieze of Life.

The Chrysler Museum of Art is located at One Memorial Place,
Norfolk, Virginia; general admission is free.

“Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago” at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Chicago
February 29–May 3, 2020

Though he may be best known in the art world as the husband of
Studio Museum in Harlem director Thelma Golden, Doru Olowu is a
vibrant designer and curator in his own right. Olowu’s eponymous
fashion label blends his British sensibilities with his Nigerian
heritage, often using fabrics that symbolize international fusion
and exchange. He is curating a show at MCA that draws on works from
the museum’s collection as well as prominent Chicago private
collections to create a vibrant, characteristically hybridized
image of the city through a combination of photographs, paintings,
films, and his own designs.

The MCA Chicago is located at 220 E. Chicago
Avenue, Chicago, Illinois; general admission is $15.

“Lucian Freud: The
Self-Portraits” at the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston 
March 1–May 25, 2020

Fresh from the Royal Academy of Arts in London, “Lucian Freud: The
Self-Portraits” showcases the artist’s mastery of the form,
with more than 40 self-portraits created over a period of almost
seven decades. The resulting exhibition shows not only Freud’s
development as an artist, shifting from more linear works to the
looser brushstrokes for which he is best known, but also his
gradual aging, from youth to old age.

MFA Boston is located at 465 Huntington Ave,
Boston, Massachusetts; general admission is $25.

“John Akomfrah: Future
History” at the Seattle Art
Museum
March 5–May 3, 2020

Three of the British artist John Akomfrah’s critically acclaimed
films, which tackle complex themes including slavery, migration,
and colonialism through masterful, epic productions and
juxtapositions, come to Seattle: The Last Angel of
History (1996), Vertigo Sea (2015)
and Tropikos (2016).

The Seattle Art Museum is located at 1300 First Avenue,
Seattle, Washington; general admission is $29.99.

“El Greco: Ambition and
Defiance” at the Art Institute of Chicago 
March 7–June 21, 2020

One of the most comprehensive surveys of the Greek master ever
assembled, “El Greco: Ambition and Defiance” will make its only US
stop at the Art Institute of Chicago in March. The show,
co-organized with the Grand Palais in Paris—where it is currently
on view—charts El Greco’s trajectory from a young artist struggling
to find patronage to a dogged and charismatic perfectionist whose
stylistic innovations were woefully underappreciated during his
time.

The Art Institute of Chicago is located at 111 South
Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois; general admission is
$25. 

“Terry Adkins: Resounding” at
the Pulitzer Arts
Foundation, St. Louis
March 13–August 2, 2020

The Pulitzer Arts Foundation presents some 50 works in sound,
sculpture, video, and printmaking by sculptor and performance
artist Terry Adkins, who died at age 60 in 2014. The exhibition
spans his 30-year-plus career, with rarely exhibited early work and
major installations unseen since their debuts as well as books,
musical instruments, and other objects that the interdisciplinary
and richly collaborative artist collected.

The Pulitzer Arts Foundation is located at 3716
Washington Boulevard, St. Louis, Missouri; general admission is
free.

“An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain” at the
Carnegie Museum of Art,
Pittsburgh
March 14–June 26, 2020

The first proper survey of the work of Vietnam-born,
American-based photographer An-My Lê in an American institution
brings together more than 120 of the artist’s pictures, including
both new and never-before-seen work. Lê’s career-long look at how
war has influenced our relationship to the landscape feels
particularly important today, as episodes of geopolitical violence
and climate catastrophe erupt on a seemingly daily basis.

The Carnegie Museum of Art is located at 4400 Forbes
Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; general admission is
$19.95.

“Natural Forces: Winslow Homer and
Frederic Remington” at the Denver Art Museum
March 15–June 7, 2020

Though Winslow Homer (1836–1910), who painted scenes of the
East Coast, was a generation older than Frederic Remington
(1861–1909), the celebrated master of the American West, this
traveling exhibition aims to tease out connections between their
work. Both men were self-taught artists who captured the spirit of
the late 19th- and early 20th-century United States at a time when
the country was rapidly industrializing, and the notion of the
frontier was rapidly becoming outdated.

The Denver Art Museum is located at 100 West 14th Avenue
Parkway, Denver, Colorado; general admission is $10.

“For a Dreamer of Houses” at the
Dallas Museum
of Art
March 15,
2020–January 31, 2021

The Dallas Museum shows off recent acquisitions of immersive
installations by Alex Da Corte, Francisco Moreno, and Do Ho Suh, as
well as large-scale works by Pipilotti Rist and Janine Antoni
in an exhibition organized around the emotional and psychological
importance of the concept of home, as explored in
the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard.

Dallas Museum of Art is located at 1717 North
Harwood, Dallas, Texas; general admission is free, with
special exhibitions typically $16. 

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Museum Exhibitions to Seek Out Across the US in 2020 appeared
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