All around the world, museums host permanent and temporary exhibits to showcase experiences, historical artifacts, and personal stories. But beyond culture, art and history, museums are a treasure trove of learning and inspiration. Here are a few of upcoming exhibits to add to your social calendar this season.
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Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks
Brooklyn Museum
April 3—August 23, 2015
In early Spring, the Brooklyn Museum is scheduled to host the first major exhibition of Brooklyn-born artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The Unknown notebooks features 160 pages of rarely seen poetry fragments, wordplay, sketches, and and personal observations ranging from street life and popular culture to themes of race, class, and world history.
Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic
Brooklyn Museum
February 20—May 24, 2015
Los Angeles native and New York based artist Kehinde Wiley uses eye catching images of young African American men and women, often associated with hip hop culture, to challenge the subjects found in traditional European portraits. His body of work raises questions about race, gender and politics. The exhibition includes an overview of the Wiley’s fourteen-year career and features sixty paintings and sculpture.
Interventions in Printmaking: Three Generations of African-American Women
The Philadelphia Museum Of Art Debuts
January 25 – April 12, 2015
According to the Allentown Arts museum, the exhibit features nearly twenty artists from the Civil Rights Era to present day who have brokered new technologies and approaches to printmaking while addressing issues pertaining to history, identity, and politics. Featured artists from throughout the United States and the African diaspora includes Ghada Amer, Emma Amos, Mary Lee Bendolph, Louisiana P. Bendolph, Chakaia Booker, Elizabeth Catlett, Robin Holder, Margo Humphrey, Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, Toyin Odutola, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Faith Ringgold, Alison Saar, Betye Saar, Mickalene Thomas, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, and Deborah Willis.
Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott
Museum of Fine Arts
Boston, Massachusetts
January 17, 2015 — September 13, 2015
With a focus on the realities of life under segregation during the 1940s, Gordon Parks, the first African American photographer to be hired full time by LIFE magazine and one of the most celebrated African American artists of his time, uses photographs to tell his own life story and the everyday lives of the residents in his home town, Fort Scott, Kansas.
Represent: 200 Years of African American Art
Philadelphia Museum of Art
January 10-April 5, 2015
Includes over 75 works from 50 artists such as Henry Ossawa Tanner, Horace Pippin, Jacob Lawrence, Martin Puryear and Carrie Mae Weems. The exhibit showcases abstract paintings and sculpture from the 1960s through the 1980s, an array of portraits created by several generations of artists, from those active over a century ago to those making work today, as well as audio excerpts of interviews with contemporary artists Moe Brooker, Barkley L. Hendricks, Odili Donald Odita and more.