Guggenheim's 2025 Highlights: Rashid Johnson, and More

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Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York has announced its 2025 exhibition programme, which sees a focus on Black artists, historically overlooked women artists, and modernist painters.

Opening from 18 April to 18 January 2026, Rashid Johnson‘s mid-career survey, A Poem for Deep Thinkers, will feature nearly 90 works spanning the Chicago-born artist’s three-decade career, tracing his evolution ‘from idealistic thinker to seasoned scholar’.

Prior to the announcement, Johnson stepped down from the Guggenheim’s board, where he served for seven years. Johnson was the second artist ever to be nominated. The museum’s leadership praised the artist for being ‘an expansive and independent thinker’.

The exhibition will include Johnson’s black-soap shelf paintings and abstract paintings from his ‘Anxious Men’ and ‘Broken Men’ series. A recent film, Sanguine (2024), addresses the artist’s family dynamics over three generations.

‘I started to build these characters using black soap and wax on their surfaces, as self-portraits looking at a world that was increasingly complicated,’ Johnson told Ocula in 2022. He cited the killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, as well as his experiences of fatherhood and sobriety among reasons.

Johnson, 47, came to attention after his work was featured in Thelma Golden’s 2001 exhibition, Freestyle, at Studio Museum in Harlem, which identified 28 Black artists as the rising generation. Johnson, then a recent graduate of Columbia College, was one of the youngest of the group.

From 9 May to 7 September, an exhibition from the Guggenheim’s ‘Collection in Focus’ series, among five such exhibitions scheduled for next year, will explore the artistic influences of the late Harlem-born artist and activist Faith Ringgold and her impact on subsequent generations.

Centring works from the museum’s collection, the exhibition will bring together works by modernists who inspired the artist, including Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso, alongside American contemporary artists such as Tschabalala Self and Sanford Biggers.

Opening on 7 November, German artist Gabriele Münter’s first monographic exhibition in the U.S. in 30 years will illuminate the expressionist artist’s practice from 1908 to 1920 and later developments through some 60 paintings and a dozen early photographs.

A forerunner of Munich’s avant-garde, Münter was a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter, a group that explored the expressive potential of colour and the symbolic, and often spiritual, resonance of forms.

Her professional relationship with painter Wassily Kandinsky, whose art academy she attended, lasted over a decade. ‘When I begin to paint, it’s like leaping suddenly into deep waters, and I never know beforehand whether I will be able to swim,’ Münter has said.

Noteworthy mentions include a focused exhibition of Brazilian painter Beatriz Milhazes’ vibrant tableaus influenced by geometric abstraction, Op Art, and Brazilian cultural symbols, and works on paper from 1995 to the present, on view from 7 March to 7 September. —[O]

Main image: Rashid Johnson in the studio (2020). © Rashid Johnson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Axel Dupeux.