In this season of gold toilets selling for millions of dollars, it would be easy to miss that there were more good shows than you could shake a stick at in 2025. The Bronx Museum came alive with the first major exhibition of the Reverend Joyce McDonald, who showed the healing powers of art. Los Angeles-based provocateur Laura Owens commandeered every square inch of Matthew Marks with her interactive painting.
Michael Smith's contributions to the history of Southern California art are critically important. He is a key piece in the larger puzzle that is composed of people who cared about ideas and artistic explorations in this community. He is the kind a curator for whom I have admiration and respect, one who took chances instinctively, without reservation, believing in his own opinions and observations, and motivated to share them.
Visitors to a major JMW Turner exhibition may well be surprised to see the opening work is by Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst sharks, a Bridget Riley stripe painting and some Doc Marten boots supplied by the curator herself are also on display. Surprised? That's what we're hoping, said Melissa Gustin, the curator of British art at National Museums Liverpool. But by the end it will all make perfect sense, she hopes. That is the vibe we are after.
"You'll also find a primer for the exhibitions," Monetta White, the director and chief executive of MoAD, tells The Art Newspaper. "You'll find a framework, some vocabulary, some definitions of the themes." Meanwhile, she points out, much of the rest of the $500,000 renovation has gone into critical infrastructure improvements visitors will hardly notice, such as lighting upgrades and a new heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system.
Once a London district made up of neon-lit sex shops and late-night clubs, King's Cross has been polished by regeneration, yet here, the curators draw on the history of the space to choreograph a dialogue between art, architecture, and the city, attempting to explore how contemporary artistic practices might inhabit, and even provoke, the residues of urban change and regeneration.
The museum and gallery visit has long been a highly curated experience. Visitors are guided through a carefully orchestrated sequence of rooms, with hand-picked works arranged to tell a specific narrative, supported by signage, graphics, scenography, and calibrated lighting. Even the rarely changed exhibitions - the permanent collections, also typically rely on a strong curatorial voice - led by noted artists or curators-to set institutional stance and shape interpretation.
Barry Bergdoll is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University, where he has taught for more than three decades. He is internationally recognized for his scholarship on the history of modern architecture and for his innovative curatorial projects. From 2007 to 2014, he served as Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA, organizing influential exhibitions such as Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront (2009-10), Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream (2012), and Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980 (2015).
The Korean Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia marks its 30th anniversary with "Little Toad, Little Toad: Unbuilding Pavilion," an exhibition commissioned by Arts Council Korea (ARKO) and curated by Curating Architecture Collective (CAC), composed of Chung Dahyoung, Kim Heejung, and Jung Sungkyu. Bringing together architects and artists Kim Hyunjong, Heechan Park, Young Yena, and Lee Dammy, the exhibition critically revisits the pavilion as both a physical structure and a symbolic space, tracing its trajectory since its completion in 1995.
