The Late May 2026 Cherry Basket is ripe and ready for picking! This series shares noteworthy art exhibitions with an emphasis on Black artists. I hope you find something sweet ❤️ 🍒
New York
- What: “SOIL, Lindsay Adams’s second exhibition with the gallery and her New York solo debut. This new body of work delves into Adams’s ongoing investigation into how paintings can emerge from a black ground, using darkness, not as absence, but as a generative foundation from which color, gesture, and form unfold….In SOIL, Adams reflects on questions of place, memory, and emotional terrain to create psychological landscapes rather than fixed imagery. In this way, each painting becomes a world built through experimentation, where memory, intuition, and material process converge. Rooted in a deep commitment to the possibilities of painting, the exhibition reveals Adams’s continued mastery of color, surface, and gesture, whilst affirming black as a generative ground from which new visual worlds can emerge.”
- Who: Lindsay Adams
- Where: Sean Kelly (475 Tenth Avenue|New York, NY)
- When: April 17 – May 30
Never Imagine God’s Gift Alone
- What: “The show gathers three artists who explore photography without ever stopping at the image itself. It’s pushed to be distorted, covered, or warped in ways where it shifts toward abstraction, moving away from the contents within the image….Each artist engages Black subject matter in ways that extend beyond simple understanding or reading. It becomes an archive of relationships that blends with our immediate sense of comfort, familiarity, and misrecognition.”
- Who: Karryl Eugene, Lloyd Foster, and Frank Dorrey | Curated by Oji Haynes
- Where: Photodom (1717 Broadway, 205|Brooklyn, NY)
- When: May 8 – June 3
- What: “In pensive, cinematic portraits, Mckinney captures solitary female protagonists in moments of leisure and respite. Set in dream-like domestic interiors, the figures in Forest for the Trees sprawl across unmade beds, recline atop sleek, modernist furniture, and bask in afternoon sunlight. Unaware of—or perhaps unconcerned with—the viewer, Mckinney’s women smoke, read, and nap, lost completely in the curated comfort of their sacred private spaces…..Alongside these ten new paintings, Mckinney presents—for the first time in New York—a suite of watercolors.”
- Who: Danielle Mckinney
- Where: Marianne Boesky Gallery (509 West 24th St|New York, NY)
- When: May 7 – June 13
- What: “Maximizing the conceptual and formal possibilities of her signature material of reclaimed tires, Dacres’ new busts and wall-mounted sculptures probe the extreme range of emotions experienced over the last 18 months in the United States, an evocation of what it feels like to live through, and to strive for a state of peace amid, the relentless assault on universal rights to life and liberty…..Dacres uses rubber and metal from recycled tires to create her sculptures. While drawn initially to the material for its uniquely accessible, forgiving, and malleable nature, the artist mines its metaphorical resonances with her own personal experience and the broader cycle of injustice and oppression inflicted upon America’s Black and Brown people and marginalized communities of all kinds.”
- Who: Kim Dacres
- Where: Charles Moffett (394 Broadway, Second Floor | New York, NY)
- When: May 7 – June 20
Los Angeles
- What: “Speaking in Tongues, an exhibition featuring an intergenerational and international group of contemporary artists who embrace the role of art as a conduit to the spiritual. Exploring and expanding notions of the sacred and the divine, the presentation includes both new and pre-existing works by artists engaging with embodied and ecstatic forms of expression, ritual, and translation….At a moment when religion is increasingly weaponized as an instrument to divide, Speaking in Tongues celebrates the spiritual as a tool for survival, kinship, and communion—centering the work of Indigenous and diasporic artists from the Global South to trace shared connections across geographies, cultures, and time.”
- Who: Marwa Abdul-Rahman, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Ron Athey and Carmina Escobar, Belkis Ayón, Raven Chacon and Candice Hopkins, Jesse Chun, Asher Hartman in collaboration with Jasmine Orpilla, iris yirei hu, Hanna Hur, Việt Lê, Karen Lofgren, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Na Mira and lexi welch, Senga Nengudi, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Aki Onda, Lydia Ourahmane, Fazal Rizvi, Carlos Villa, and Luis Fernando Zapata
- Where: Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1717 E 7th St|Los Angeles, CA)
- When: April 4 – August 23
- What: “Between a Memory and Me is the first solo exhibition in Los Angeles of work by Rahim Fortune. Born in Austin, Texas, and raised in the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, Fortune uses photography to explore the layered, complex nature of American identity, foregrounding the connections between the communities he photographs and the land they inhabit…..“Fortune’s black-and-white photographs from his Hardtack project weave together tender and reverent portraits of Black life, vast landscapes, and closeup studies. The exhibition also includes Fortune’s new color photographs, commissioned by Aperture and Documentary Arts and created in response to the Texas African American Photography Archive. Fortune’s short film, also on view, takes viewers through the fields and roads of rural Texas, lingering lovingly on quiet, exquisite details. Together they celebrate the histories embedded in the landscape of the American South and the traditions they carry forward.”
- Who: Rahim Fortune
- Where: Art + Practice (3401 W. 43rd Place | Los Angeles, CA)
- When: April 18 – September 5
London
Only Love Will Break Your Heart
- What: “Through floral motifs, layered compositions, and reflective surfaces, the exhibition attends to traces of grief, memory, loss, and resilience while foregrounding questions of spectatorship. Central to the exhibition is a sustained interrogation of the material condition of the photographic image. Across fifteen new works, Jarvis considers photography as object-based and subject to physical encounter, resisting the medium’s association with flatness and fixity.”
- Who: Shaniqwa Jarvis
- Where: Public Gallery (89 – 91 Middlesex St|London, EN)
- When: April 30 – June 7
- What: “The artist draws on her parallel career as a DJ to approach physical and digital processes of bodily augmentation—isolating an element, editing or manipulating it, recontextualising it into something new—using tools associated with electronic music. Extracting, cutting, splicing, looping; in Perpetual remix, Oyiri demonstrates the ways these strategies are applied to both sound and flesh.”
- Who: Christelle Oyiri
- Where: Gathering (5 Warwick Street|London, EN)
- When: April 28 – June 13
PARIS
- What: “Incompleteness proposes a structure of attention that privileges partiality, vulnerability, and the refusal of closure across three distinct practices. The exhibition brings together Cristina Flores Pescorán, Naomi Lulendo and Shannon T. Lewis, artists whose lives and work unfold across multiple geographies, each shaped by forms of circulation and negotiation that resist singular belonging…..Together, these practices do not resolve into a unified reading, but instead sustain an open field of attention in which forms, bodies, and narratives remain in the process of becoming.”
- Who: Cristina Flores Pescorán, Naomi Lulendo and Shannon T. Lewis
- Where: Mariane Ibrahim (18 Av. Matignon|Paris, France)
- When: April 10 – May 30
- What: “Following his national pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, painter Alioune Diagne returns to Paris with Saytu a new body of work rooted in two years of research across Senegal. This exhibition foregrounds the preservation, transformation, and transmission of cultural heritage as key themes….Saytu explores how knowledge and cultural legacies are transmitted and transformed in the context of social media and globalization, raising these central questions: How are such legacies evolving, and what roles will they play in the future?”
- Who: Alioune Diagne
- Where: Templon (28 rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare|Paris, France)
- When: May 21 – July 18