The July 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
The 15th Annual New York City Poetry Festival
- What: “The festival invites poetry organizations and collectives of all shapes and sizes to bring their unique formats, aesthetics, and personalities to the festival grounds. By uniting the largest community of poets in the country and offering a unique setting for literary activity, the New York City Poetry Festival electrifies arts and literature and brings poetry to new light in the public eye.”
- Where: Nolan Park, Governors Island (New York, NY)
- When: July 18 – July 19
- What: “The Bishop Gallery presents All That Remains, Residue (curated by: Luz Harmon), a group exhibition that gathers 18 emerging artists whose work examines the unstable mechanics of cultural inheritance. Through methods of return, dispersal, and rematerialization, these artists make use of personal histories as wayfinding material, arriving at what remains by means of myth, memory, and reimagination.”
- Who: Adom-Binfo Asante, Ava Brock, Elana Casey, King David, Alexander Edwards, Luz Harmon, Xavier Leopold, Amanda Srge-Lindsay, Audrey Lyall, Paula Mans, Rebel-Spirit Morgan, Devin Osorio, Dunia Shawty, Dimithry Victor, VILLAGER, Chanya Vitayakul, and Mark Anthony Wilson Jr.
- Where: The Bishop Gallery (630 Flushing Avenue|Brooklyn, NY)
- When: June 20 – July 25
- What: “Brown pulled the title from the old Black way of asking, are you “in the life” (aka are you gay or lesbian)?….Underneath all of it, the real subject: pleasure. Black lesbian pleasure, female pleasure, queer Black women’s bodies that want and get to want, no apology. In Uses of the Erotic, Audre Lorde named the erotic a power that women are trained to fear, and wrote that once in touch with it, she became “less willing to accept powerlessness.” That’s the whole show. Brown never got the memo to be ashamed. Her work in In the life is powerful.”
- Who: Aya Brown
- Where: Company Gallery (145 Elizabeth Street|New York, NY)
- When: June 20 – July 31
Firelei Báez. feet squelching on wet grass, nourished by uncertainty
- What: “Across two floors of the gallery’s 22nd Street location, Báez extends her ongoing engagement with colonial legacies and the natural, spiritual and cosmic reverberations of the African diaspora. A storyteller and world maker, Báez works within the tradition of history painting while quietly undoing the very conventions through which histories are fixed and made legible. In this presentation, she subtly shifts her focus away from the discernible, if chimerical, figures that occupy her previous bodies of work to achieve a more atmospheric sensibility, one that invites a broader, deeper understanding of how bodies and nature shape our experience of being in the world.”
- Who: Firelei Báez
- Where: Hauser & Wirth (542 West 22nd St|New York,NY)
- When: May 12 – July 31
- What: “Water No Get Enemy curated by Jomani Danielle is inspired by Afrofuturism and the mythology of Drexciya, Water No Get Enemy explores water as a site of memory within the African diaspora.”
- “At the center of the exhibition is the Drexciyan myth, which imagines that although enslaved African women perished during the Middle Passage, the children carried in their wombs survived beneath the ocean and formed an underwater civilization beyond the reach of slavery. The myth positions Black women as the origin of a future world. Their wombs become vessels not only for life, but for the continuation of African society itself.”
- Who: Barrington Brisset, Lisa Brown, Luca Goly, Aala Oni, Georgi, Phoenix
- Where: Governors Island | Art Crawl Harlem Art House (403 Colonels Row – Building 403| New York, NY)
- When: July 11 – August 2
- What: “Overproof features a range of works across painting, collage, assemblage, and sound, and debuts the artist’s new EP, No More Evening Plans, consisting of five tracks presented as part of a sound installation within the exhibition.”
- “Taking an interdisciplinary approach to concepts of masculinity, language, desire, portraiture, and community, Overproof interrogates what it means to be ‘masculine’ today, and the sociological effects of manhood on both self and others.”
- Who: Karryl Eugene
- Where: White Columns (91 Horatio Street|New York, NY)
- When: June 25 – August 1
Los Angeles
- What: “Thermidorian Reaction, is a group exhibition curated by Umar Rashid. Bringing together an extensive and global circle of artists, this show explores the volatile relationship between physical heat and the cycles of history.”
- “Set in the peak of July, Thermidorian Reaction leans into the intensity of the summer. Rashid connects the literal heat of the month to a sense of social friction where energy and violence can feel strangely intertwined. The featured artists move beyond simple observations to offer different ways of looking at the world. They challenge us to see how “one becomes three” as our perceptions shift under the weight of a changing climate and a complicated past.”
- Who: SHAGHA, Jasmin Blasco, Eric Beltz, Tarek Sebastian Al-Shammaa, Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Cheyann Washington, Alissa Warshaw, Xochitl Camille Goss, Micah James, Yashua Klos, Jeffrey Sims, Tommaso Buldini, Margherita Paoletti, Francesca Lalanne, Augustine Kofie, Cory Jones, Umar Rashid, Lookout & Wonderland (Niki Tsukamoto and Yusuke Tsukamoto)
- Where: Wönzimer Gallery (341-B S Avenue 17|Los Angeles, CA)
- When: July 17 – August 14
Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar
- What: “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar, an exhibition exploring the central role of costume design in Saar’s early career and throughout her life as a mother and artist. The archivally-driven exhibition features over 200 objects, including costume designs, photographs, drawings, garments, jewelry, artworks and historic materials from the 1950s–1970s.”
- “As part of a series of exhibitions and initiatives celebrating the occasion of Saar’s 100th birthday this summer, Let’s Get It On advances a new understanding of the artist’s design work as a vital part of her interconnected and ever-evolving practice.”
- Who: Betye Saar
- Where: Roberts Projects (661 N. Spaulding Ave|Los Angeles, CA)
- When: May 30 – August 20
- What: “SPACE IS THE PLACE is a Hammer Contemporary Collection exhibition that takes its title from the 1973 studio album and 1974 film by Sun Ra (1914–1993), a Black American experimental jazz composer and musician known for his radical and esoteric views on Black liberation. The selected works in the exhibition consider “space” as a conceptual framework, through the themes of afro-futurism, belonging, placemaking, and the act of taking up space.”
- Who: Edgar Arceneaux, Nayland Blake, Mark Bradford, Ben Caldwell, Coleman Collins, Alonzo Davis, Danielle Dean, Fred Eversley, Kohshin Finley, Lauren Halsey, Juliana Huxtable, Arthur Jafa, Shaniqwa Jarvis, Forrest Kirk, Rodney McMillian, Arcmanoro Niles, Thomas J Price, Michael Queenland, Betye Saar, Jamilah Sabur, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Shikeith, Cauleen Smith, Eric Wesley, Fred Wilson, and Brenna Youngblood
- Where: The Hammer Museum (10899 Wilshire Blvd.|Los Angeles, CA)
- When: April 5 – September 6
London
- What: “Bare Woman Mutters Nothing… Candace Hill-Montgomery’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, which brings together works from 1971–2026. Hill-Montgomery moves across assemblage, collage, painting, photography, textile and language to create works that combine social commentary with poetic lyricism. She developed an experimental approach in relation to her experience growing up in postwar New York City, alongside the revolutionary activism of the time.”
- Who: Candace Hill-Montgomery
- Where: Hollybush Gardens (1–2 Warner Yard|London, EN)
- When: June 5 – July 18
- What: “I dwell in Possibility, is a group exhibition with 11 artists who explore the in-between, searching out moments that hover at the threshold of articulation, suspended in time and space. Curated in collaboration with London-based painter Shaqúelle Whyte, the exhibition draws its title from Emily Dickinson’s c.1862 poem I dwell in Possibility.”
- Who: Michael Armitage, Denzil Forrester, Jake Grewal, Hettie Inniss, Sosa Joseph, Ken Kiff, R.B. Kitaj, Masao Nakahara, Jennifer Packer, Antonia Showering, Shaqúelle Whyte
- Where: Pippy Houldsworth Gallery (6 Heddon Street|London, EN)
- When: July 17 – August 28
- What: “The Fountain Overflows, is a group exhibition curated by Yates Norton”
- “In his Proverbs of Hell, the visionary poet and artist William Blake (1757 –1827) wrote: “the fountain overflows, the cistern contains.” For Blake, the fountain symbolised exuberance and the generative, generous movement of relations shaped by imagination and love.”
- “This exhibition takes Blake as a poetic and philosophical companion in considering a number of artists whose works invite us to see and sense the world in all its ever-moving complexity. Like Blake, they remind us that we might better glimpse the depth of this rich, entangled fabric of life (of which we are but a small part), if we allow ourselves to perceive dynamically, beyond habit and custom.”
- Who: Adam Farah-Saad, Anj Smith, Benjamin Orlow, Daisy Parris, Divine Southgate-Smith, Ebun Sodipo, Emmanuel Awuni, Francesca Mollett, Gabriella Boyd, Jesse Wine, Leon Scott-Engel, Rachel Kneebone, Ramin Rokni Hesam, Rebecca Ackroyd and Vivian Suter
- Where: GRIMM (43a Duke Street, St. James’s|London, EN)
- When: June 4 – July 18
PARIS
I am a place as much as I am a flavour
- What: “Marking the artist’s first solo presentation in Europe and his second with the gallery, the exhibition brings together a new body of work in which the artist continues his exploration of Jamaican folklore through the figure of Anansi, the shapeshifting trickster whose transformations blur the boundaries between human and animal.”
- “At the heart of the exhibition lies an invitation: is it possible to challenge default associations we may possess about defined blackness, and start to expand the conversation into a more layered interdisciplinary territory? Like the way we look at each other, how we construct desire, or project fear? These questions run throughout Johnson’s practice, where the queer body occupies a luscious and unstable central stage. Neither fixed nor fully legible, his figures emerge in states of transformation, fragmentation, and sensual performance.”
- Who: Leasho Johnson
- Where: Mariane Ibrahim (18 Av. Matignon|Paris, France)
- When: June 6 – July 25
- What: “Long Story Short Paris brings together a roster of returning artists and first-time collaborators working within a single constraint: black and white. Each artist is given complete freedom, with only one rule guiding the process. What unfolds is a shared field of monochrome, where differences in generation, geography, and practice dissolve into a common visual language…Across painting, drawing, printmaking, and mixed media, the exhibition moves between the surreal, the cinematic, and the intimate.”
- Who: Cheyenne Julien, Keita Morimoto, Sun Woo, H.R. Giger, Namio Harukawa, Nigel Howlett, Edward Givis, Stickymonger, Dustin Emory, and Sam Sherman
- Where: Long Story Short (23 rue Charlot|Paris, France)
- When: July 4 – August 1