These 15 Artists Are Having the Biggest Moment at U.S. Museums Right Now

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December 14, 2025

I’m back with my quarterly look at which artists are getting the most attention from museums in the United States.

How the Project Works:

I comb through the temporary exhibitions at hundreds of museums, counting which living artists are 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, 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 December’s List:

Because it is the end of 2025, and I have been doing this project for the past year, I found I had a lot of thoughts. As an intro, it got a little long, and this is already a long post. You can read my reflections here.

 Or, if you prefer, you can just cut straight to the data on the Museum Artists of December. Here’s are the 15 figures that are everywhere this month.

Dyani White Hawk

A major survey at the Walker—the Minneapolis-based White Hawk’s hometown museum—unites 15 years of her work, which fuses traditional Lakota design with contemporary abstraction. Meanwhile, the Block Museum in Illinois is celebrating its acquisition of two of her recent works, which the artist created during her 2024 residency with Tandem Press. These are abstract hourglass designs that reference the history of Lakota quillwork, a form of textile decoration using porcupine quills.

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