Happening Type: Retrospective

Before his death at the age of forty-one last year, artist and designer Virgil Abloh was helping to realize this survey of a prolific two decades reshaping style, art, and culture. Along with being the first Black artistic director at Louis Vuitton—and one of the few in luxury fashion—he had his own label, Off-White, and worked with everyone from Kanye West and Takashi Murakami to Rem Koolhaas. This retrospective centers on a large-scale sculpture that acts as a social and performance space, echoing his commitment to creativity being collaborative.

Mariano Rodríguez was a groundbreaking Cuban modernist whose work has infrequently been seen in the United States due to the Cuban Revolution. This traveling retrospective reintroduces his vibrant art across six decades of creation, including paintings, drawings, and watercolors. Known as just “Mariano,” he filled his canvases with roosters, marine scenes, and peasant life, accented with abstraction in the 1950s and the grotesque in the 1960s. Fusing modern art styles with local imagery, he pioneered a distinctively Cuban visual expression.

From the intimate perspective of a car’s interior to seemingly limitless landscapes, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami created meditative moments that blurred between reality and fiction. The Oklahoma City Museum of Art is presenting the first museum survey since his death in 2016, which takes a wide view of his career from his lesser-known early work in children’s film and graphic design to his photography and video installations. Alongside, the museum is presenting screenings of his impactful feature films.

After a short but prolific six years of painting, Matthew Wong died at age 35 in 2019. The posthumous skyrocketing of his art in auctions has overshadowed the person behind these vivid yet melancholic landscapes dotted with solitary figures. The Dallas Museum of Art, the only museum that collected his work in his lifetime, is now staging his first museum retrospective. It takes a biographical approach through around sixty pieces, looking at how from his early studio in China to his final years in Canada he created thoughtful works of incredible color.

The mystical work of Remedios Varo has recently received renewed attention for its strange scenes of people exploring unearthly terrain, solitary women engaged in alchemy, and uncanny contraptions. This is the first retrospective on the artist in the US in over two decades and includes over twenty paintings made between 1955 and Varo’s death in Mexico in 1963. Inspired by surrealism and its use of chance, as well as ideas from tarot, Buddhism, and astrology, her work is still being unraveled to understand its enchanting layers of meaning.

Thanks to a recent gift of paintings, works on paper, and sculptures by the Paul and Esther Reed Trust, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art is now the institutional home for the late abstract artist Paul Reed. The museum held a 2023-2024 show of his works on paper and now delves deeper with a full survey of his career as part of a group of innovative artists in Washington, D.C., known as the Washington Color School. The pieces now in Oklahoma City are joined by others on loan for a robust chronology of his practice across a range of media as he channeled his lifelong passion for color. November 22, 2025–April 12, 2026.

Born in 1881 in Russia, Nicolai Fechin became best known for his depictions of New Mexico and its Indigenous peoples. He’d spent time in New York before moving to Taos for his health. There he brought his bold palette-knife technique to expressive portraiture and landscapes. An Artistic Journey takes in his entire life and examines how his experiences in the United States and beyond contributed to works that attempted to capture moments of life in vibrant color. October 3, 2025–April 5, 2026.

“Something told me to draw or die,” Minnie Evans says of why she started to make art in her early forties. After she was hired as a gatekeeper at a North Carolina botanical garden, she was inspired to create faces formed by floral patterns that evoke mandalas. Exploring her work from the 1930s to the 1960s, The Lost World is a long-overdue retrospective for a self-taught artist who, in 1975, became one of the first Black people to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum, yet has had little institutional attention since her death in 1987. November 14, 2025–April 12, 2026.

Anselm Kiefer’s art often appears to be in ruins, with its oxidized copper surfaces, fragile layers of flower petals, and spattering of furrowed paint. He has worked since the late 1960s at a monumental scale in response to the weight of history in his home country, Germany, and beyond. Billed as his first retrospective in the U.S. in two decades, Becoming the Sea centers on a huge installation that links the Mississippi and Rhine rivers and the complex human narratives they contain. October 18, 2025–January 25, 2026.

Women’s bodies are bound, fragmented, and obscured in Christina Ramberg’s paintings, which she began exhibiting in the late 1960s. There is a sense of some external force constantly pushing them into frames and forms. Although these are her best-known works, this overdue major exhibition on the late Chicago-based artist—billed as the first in three decades—has around 100 pieces, which also display her interest in textiles and abstraction.

There were no boundaries between art and family in Ruth Asawa’s life. The artist, who died in 2013, is best known for her intricate wire hanging sculptures where forms nest and interlock, but less recognized is how she chose art materials that could easily be put down when caring for her children. This exhibition of more than 300 works spans the entire six decades of her career to show all aspects of her practice. Especially illuminating are explorations of her Bay Area public sculptures made with local students, as well as her advocacy for arts education in schools. Through September 2, 2025.