Looking Ahead

In 2025, Green Box’s hallmark event, the Green Box Arts Festival, will celebrate its seventeenth year with another two-week, multidisciplinary cornucopia of arts performances, exhibitions, classes, camps, conversations, and parties. Taking place in the idyllic beauty of Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, the event once again promises to deliver dozens of unique events.

Curated by architect and engineer Carlo Ratti, the nineteenth International Architecture Exhibition, titled Intelligens, takes its name from the modern term “intelligence” but hopes to evoke a more inclusive and multi-pronged future for this attribute. Broken into sections of natural, artificial, and collective intelligence, the show will host architects from around the world whose cities and territories are rapidly evolving in response to climate change.

TransCultural Exchange, whose mission is to foster a greater understanding of world cultures, invites artists and those who support them to come together for the International Conference on Opportunities in the Arts: Avenues for Daring. This three-day extravaganza will connect artists and supporters of the arts from around the globe to consider our era’s pressing need for diversity, political equity, and climate and social justice—all while also celebrating the arts’ ability to provide joy, respite, and common ground for dialogue. Participants will explore innovative strategies, technologies, and working methods for artists to best express today’s challenges, offering portfolio reviews, receptions, networking activities, and tours of local attractions to promote resources for sharing and new possibilities of caring.

January 28–February 2, New York, New York
At New York City’s beloved Joyce Theater, Compagnie Hervé KOUBI will perform its poetic and meditative dance What the Day Owes to the Night, a gravity-defying work blending capoeira, martial arts, and contemporary dance. Inspired by Algerian author Yasmina Khadra’s novel of the same name, it traces Koubi’s personal lineage as a French-Algerian choreographer, who, after learning about his family’s Algerian roots, returned to the country of his ancestors to collaborate with street-dance performers from across the Mediterranean basin.

The New York City Ballet will present a program of encores by three of the world’s best current dance-makers: Alexei Ratmansky, Caili Quan, and Justin Peck. Ratmansky will offer his somber and elegiac Solitude, which debuted in the winter of 2024 to broad acclaim. Meanwhile, Peck will present a set to a commissioned score by Dan Deacon, and New York-based choreographer Quan has reinvented Camille Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1 in her first work on the NYCB stage.

A rare planetary alignment (an astronomical term used to describe a moment when several planets gather together on one side of the sun) will be visible on January 21, 2025, when six planets—Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, Venus, and Saturn—line up. Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn will be easily visible to the naked eye, but you will need a telescope or high-powered binoculars to see Neptune and Uranus.

Broadway’s 2025 season will see some of Hollywood’s biggest names gracing the stage in brand-new productions. Bringing their talents to the Great White Way will be Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal in Othello; Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, and Kieran Culkin in Glengarry Glen Ross; Nick Jonas in The Last Five Years; and George Clooney in Good Night, and Good Luck.

The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival offers a unique platform for musicians (more than 85 percent of them local) to showcase their talents on a global stage. The festival is known for its eclectic mix of musical genres, from jazz and blues to gospel, R&B, rock, and folk. But Jazz Fest also features local crafts, with diverse artworks by hundreds of acclaimed artists. Add to that numerous traditional food and cultural displays, and you have a festival that few can match.

Closed for more than four years during its ambitious expansion project, the Frick Collection’s Upper East Side mansion in Manhattan is set to reopen in April. Led by Selldorf Architects, the renovation will open up the building’s second floor for the first time. Along with revamped exhibition spaces, the Frick will unveil state-of-the-art spaces for education, research, and public programs, plus a café and an auditorium.

The highly anticipated third season of Mike White’s Emmy Award-winning anthology series The White Lotus will drop in 2025, and it should be just as hypnotic as the previous two. After filming season one in Hawaii and season two in Sicily, season three will take place in Thailand (filming has already begun in and around Koh Samui, Phuket, and Bangkok). New stars slated for the hit series include Parker Posey, Michelle Monaghan, and Lisa from K-Pop girl group Blackpink.

This year marks the twenty-first anniversary of the International Folk Art Market, with its mission of creating economic opportunities for folk artists while preserving folk-art traditions. The market is held annually in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and this year will include more than 150 artists from more than fifty countries working in ceramics, painting, home decor, clothing, and more.

Among a production of three short ballets titled Shorts, the artistic director at Oklahoma City Ballet, Ryan Jolicoeur-Nye, will premiere a new work—the first professional ballet set to music by American psychedelic rock band The Flaming Lips. Jolicoeur-Nye created every element of the dance in Oklahoma City, from sets and costumes to music and choreography.

History Is Painted by the Victors. This will be the first major US survey of the celebrated Fisher River Cree Nation artist Kent Monkman. Known for his playful reinterpretations of the Western European and American art canon, Monkman offers a better understanding of the colonial injustices inflicted upon Indigenous people and how they live today.

Arise Alive. A survey of Liliane Lijn’s career from the 1950s to today, this exhibition includes her kinetic sculpture work and her films and videos. A cutting-edge artist who defies categorization, Lijn has drawn inspiration from surrealist ideas, ancient mythologies, linguistics, and other areas of study. Meanwhile, she has experimented with an array of materials, such as plastics, prisms, feather dusters, and copper wire.

The new musical Buena Vista Social Club will begin a set of Broadway performances at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre early in 2025. Directed by Saheem Ali with choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck, the show takes inspiration from the Grammy-winning album of the same name. Starring Natalie Venetia Belcon, Julio Monge, and Mel Semé it will bring the album to life by telling the legendary story behind its making.

Each spring, the small Texas town of Round Top swells from its population of ninety to a few hundred thousand during the Round Top Antiques Festival. With around one hundred venues in the communities of Round Top, Warrenton, Carmine, Burton, and Fayetteville, this two-week festival brings treasure hunts, food, and fun to the otherwise sleepy Texas countryside.

A total lunar eclipse will be visible on March 14, 2025—the first of two total lunar eclipses next year. The eclipse will take place near the moon’s farthest point from Earth (the apogee), making its diameter appear 5.4 percent smaller than average. During this “blood moon” type of eclipse, the moon will gradually get darker while passing through the Earth’s dark shadow, taking on a rusty or blood-red color. The eclipse will be visible throughout all of the Americas.

Who Wants to Die for Glamour. Organized by the museum’s assistant curator, Jody Graf, this will be Jasmine Gregory’s first institutional exhibition in the US and will feature new artworks and a large-scale, site-specific installation. Her oil paintings of advertisements for wealth-management firms and luxury watch companies commingle with wine bottles, vitrines, plastic bags, and more to create ambiguous dramas surrounding production and consumption.

Fortuna and the Immortality Garden. Kara Walker has regularly confronted the power dynamics of race and sexuality through the medium of an oppressive culture. Fortuna is newly commissioned, a site-specific work with the types of automata most commonly seen in theme parks—except here the robots are evoking how people can be trapped in both ritualistic actions and cycles of trauma.

As part of the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute’s giant panda conservation program, Bao Li and Qing Bao—two giant pandas from Chengdu, China—arrived at the zoo on October 15, 2024, and are set to make their public debut on January 24, 2025. The giant pandas are currently acclimating to their new environment. But in the meantime, panda fans can watch Prepping for Pandas, a digital series that looks into how the Smithsonian’s “panda team” prepared for this bear pair.

What was once unthinkable appears to be happening: a reunion of the Grammy-nominated ’90s Britpop band Oasis, despite a long and bitter feud between its founding bandmates and brothers, Liam and Noel Gallagher. After selling out all its tour dates in the UK and Ireland, the band recently posted a series of shows in the US—all in the summer of 2025—which have already sold out.

Making stops in Marrakesh, Fes, and Casablanca in Morocco; touring Turkey in the spring; summertime in Amsterdam and Stockholm; taking in art week in Mexico City; and road trips crisscrossing the US to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Fairhope, Alabama.

The 1935 classic movie Bride of Frankenstein gets a much-needed refresh next year through the eyes of director Maggie Gyllenhaal. The Bride!, starring Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, and Penélope Cruz, tells the story of a young woman in 1930s Chicago who was murdered and reborn as Frankenstein’s romantic partner—not to mention the leader of a radical social movement.

The Seattle Art Museum will present Ai Weiwei’s first US retrospective in more than a decade. Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei will show more than one hundred artworks made between the 1980s and the 2020s, the largest-ever exhibition in the US and his first solo in Seattle. Curated by FOONG Ping, SAM’s Foster Foundation Curator of Chinese Art, this career-spanning exhibition highlights Ai’s role as a provocateur and his strategies for disrupting artistic canons and challenging political authoritarianism.

The 2025 World Expo will be in Osaka, Japan, and it should be as exciting as its googly-eyed mascot, MYAKU-MYAKU. With the theme of “Designing Future Society for Our Lives,” Expo 2025 takes a unique approach by asking people worldwide to propose solutions to social problems with their own astounding ideas and cutting-edge technologies. Approximately 28 million people will descend upon the city to view and produce exhibits, each hoping to glimpse a better future for humanity. What could be more thrilling than that?

A stalwart of global art of African descent, Harlem’s Studio Museum will unveil its new 82,000-square-foot building, designed by Adjaye Associates, in the fall of 2025. The new building will provide extensive exhibition spaces and public amenities to the Harlem community and will kick off with a presentation of the work by artist, educator, and activist Tom Lloyd (1929–1996), whose pioneering practice was the subject of the institution’s first exhibition in 1968.