I’m back with my quarterly look at which artists are getting the most attention from museums in the United States.
I comb through the temporary exhibitions at hundreds of museums, counting which living artists were on view at any time during the same month. Only a few hundred artists (out of thousands) appear in more than one exhibition.
The order of my list represents which artists I think are having the best month, based on the combination of the number and type of shows they are in. I rank career retrospectives highly, followed by dedicated exhibitions, followed by special commissions or spotlights on a specific work, biennial appearances, and then inclusions in group shows. Because I’m most interested in breadth of influence, I don’t make distinctions between bigger and smaller institutions.
There’s no central source for this data, and museum websites are not always complete or reliable. New data could change the picture. If I missed anything, send me an email.
Thoughts on September’s List:
At the moment, the major force ripping across U.S. museums is the government’s grotesque attack on anything it terms “DEI.” But museum shows are planned long in advance. We won’t know what impact this political climate is having on long-term programming for months more at least.
As in all the versions of this list (which I started doing last year), the most-spotlighted figures in U.S. museums during September 2025 are Black and Indigenous artists. Almost all of the artists here make art that explicitly addresses racism or colonialism as a theme. Also extremely common as a theme is work about nature or the land.
In general, forms of eye-catching installation and sculpture continue to be the dominant medium, from the colorful textile environments of Jeffrey Gibson to the magic lanterns of Anila Quayyum Agha. For what it’s worth, big, splashy painting is a presence, via Firelei Báez and Rashid Johnson—though both of these artists have retrospectives that veer in the direction of immersive spectacle.
Conversely, even some of the artists who work in more experimental media also create objects that are painting-like: Jennie C. Jones makes abstract painting-like objects that are plays on acoustic absorption panels; Ai Weiwei builds paintings with Legos.
Read full article at news.artnet.com
