Happening Type: Installation

EJ Hill, an artist known for his physically exhausting durational performances, is inviting visitors to be the star of his debut museum solo show with their own thrilling challenge. Emerging in a blue cart from behind a velvet curtain, a solitary rider plummets over the bubblegum-pink tracks of a roller coaster before ending on a stage. Embedded in the exhilarating installation is a meditation on the history of segregation in American amusement parks and how social inequities can be confronted with joy. Through January 2024.

Seattle and Reykjavík are sister cities, and now one of Iceland’s most famous musicians is having his first American museum show in the National Nordic Museum, which is inspired by life on the coasts. Jónsi, known for his ethereal lead vocals for the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós, has created an immersive installation where visitors are enveloped by mist, music, and the scent of seaweed, all intended to engage the senses in a transporting experience into the mysterious depths of the ocean. Through July 30, 2023.

Two luminous installations by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist that were hugely popular when they debuted in 2017 have returned to the galleries of the MFAH. Pixel Forest with its constellation of thousands of LED lights suspended in orbs and Worry Will Vanish, which immerses viewers in a video piece, are joined by the newly acquired Peeping Freedom Shutters for Olga Shapir. It has a video within a window frame as a tribute to the Russian writer and feminist. All three offer transportive experiences with art and technology.

Known for otherworldly art that meditates on reviving extinct creatures and recreating the voices of the past through speech technology, Marguerite Humeau is now unveiling a colossal 160-acre earthwork in a Colorado valley impacted by droughts. Made with the nonprofit Black Cube, Orisons is very different from earlier land art that reshaped landscapes to an artist’s vision. Instead, the French artist partnered with local farmers and ecology experts for a more subtle intervention involving biomorphic sculptures that asks visitors to reflect on an ecosystem’s precarity.

In the summer of 1987, a German carnival offered rides decorated by Salvador Dalí, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Kenny Scharf, and Sonia Delaunay. The event was obscure art history lore until the rides’ reemergence from decades in storage in 2022. This Boyle Heights spectacle revives the visual magic, from a carousel painted by Haring to a Ferris wheel adorned with Basquiat’s art, though visitors can now only view rather than ride the kaleidoscopic pieces.

If your summer road trips take you on old Route 66 through Albuquerque, keep an eye on the historic signs. Friends of the Orphan Signs started in 2010 as a public art project that revitalizes disused totems of roadside culture, like signs for once bustling motels and diners. The works range from poetry interventions to more elaborate installations, such as a two-sided neon piece with a woman holding a sun on one side and pouring water onto a landscape on the other, a work now planned to be part of the city’s new West Central Route 66 Visitor Center opening this year. orphansigns.org

Opened in March, the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park was created by the Equal Justice Initiative to fill a void: a permanent site to remember the millions who were enslaved in the United States. The art installed on the banks of the Alabama River includes pieces that meditate on how America is rooted in this past, such as a huge hand by Eva Oertli and Beat Huber that has a tree bursting from its center, and consider this history’s influence on the present, like a colossal Hank Willis Thomas piece with one arm wielding a police baton being held back by another. legacysites.eji.org

Guadalupe Maravilla elevates cast-off objects into elaborate sculptures imagined as tools and spaces for healing, a response to his own experiences with illness and immigration. Mariposa Relámpago is his largest piece yet in his Disease Throwers sculptural series. He turned a whole school bus into a dazzling assemblage of chandeliers, gongs, and imagery related to Maya cosmology and contemporary medicine. This Austin stop on its ongoing journey will include several sound ceremonies, some led by Maravilla and others by sound healers, to sonically immerse visitors in the work. thecontemporaryaustin.org

Following architectural installations like her 2023 rooftop commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that presented an Afrofuturist temple, artist Lauren Halsey is transforming a vacant lot in her South Central LA neighborhood. The sculpture park’s full name is sister dreamer, lauren halsey’s architectural ode to tha surge n splurge of south central los angeles. The park will feature her distinctive remixing of forms inspired by ancient Egypt—such as sphinxes and columns—graffiti tags, and nods to local culture. Community programming is planned to be integral to the garden space. Opening Spring 2025.

Unveiling alongside the fiftieth anniversary of the mass migration of Vietnamese refugees following the end of the Vietnam War, We Have Arrived by artists Denise Duong and Gabriel Friedman takes on the sculptural form of a small fishing boat. It is adorned with details recalling the stories of the hundreds of thousands of individuals who made that often harrowing journey, including many to Oklahoma City. Installed in the city’s Asian District in Military Park—itself home to a Vietnam War memorial—it honors the history and resilience of this vibrant local community. To debut in spring 2025.

Just as his acclaimed The Clock (2010) has twenty-four hours of meticulously edited footage of actors responding to timepieces in cinema, Christian Marclay’s Doors is a loop of comings and goings spliced together from hundreds of films. Characters enter, exit, and peer through keyholes as if trapped in an endless Escher-esque architecture. This is the American premiere of the work, which was ten years in the making as Marclay sifted through decades of movies for these moments of tension and transition. Through September 1, 2025.

Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda uses electronic sound, light, and video to immerse viewers in complex concepts such as the chaos of a black hole or the connections between the microscopic and the macroscopic in the universe. Seven “chapters,” as his works are called, are brought together in this major show and involve data from NASA, CERN, and the Human Genome Project. The multi-sensory experience is cacophonous and disorienting as Ikeda attempts to offer an encounter with immense ideas that cannot be seen. Through August 10, 2025.