HARLEM, NY.- The Studio Museum in Harlem today announced its inaugural spring 2026 season, which includes new exhibitions and a site-specific commission. Opening on May 1, Fade is the sixth installment of the Museum’s “F” show series of exhibitions of work by emerging artists. Presented in the fourth-floor gallery of the Studio Museum’s new building, Fade features the work of seventeen early-career artists of African and Afro-Latinx descent from across the United States. In the second-floor project gallery, the Museum will showcase BLEED, a site-specific commission by the French and Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga. Opening on March 11, BLEED is inspired by quilting traditions and the symbolism embedded in their intricate designs.

In July, the Museum will present works by the seventeen participants in the 2026 cohort of Expanding the Walls: Making Connections Between Photography, History, and Community—the institution’s free photography program for high school-aged youth—alongside a display of photographs by James Van Der Zee, the celebrated Harlem photographer whose collection and archive serve as an entry point to the program.

Exhibitions and installations that inaugurated the Museum when it reopened last November that are still on view include Tom Lloyd; Expanding the Walls: Making Connections Between Photography, History, and Community; From Now: A Collection in Context; To Be a Place; Camille Norment: Untitled (heliotrope); and Christopher Myers: Harlem Is a Myth.

Thelma Golden, Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, said, “Our inaugural spring season in our magnificent new home builds upon what has already been an incredible slate of exhibitions and installations. These presentations reinforce our commitment to showcasing works by artists of African descent from across the globe, and strengthen our dedication to a contemporary art world that foregrounds the plurality of ideas, practices, and methodologies that today’s artists are engaging with."

Upcoming Exhibitions and Presentations

Kapwani Kiwanga: BLEED (on view from March 11, 2026, until April 1, 2027) is a new site-specific commission by French and Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga. Installed in the Museum’s second-floor project gallery, BLEED draws inspiration from quilting traditions and the symbolism embedded in their intricate designs. Along the Underground Railroad, quilts hanging on clotheslines were believed to be stitched with codes that communicated critical information. BLEED features one of these motifs—a pattern of triangles called the “flying geese” that was purported to guide people north.

Kapwani Kiwanga: BLEED is organized by Yelena Keller, Associate Curator.

Fade (on view from May 1 until September 6, 2026) is the sixth installment of the Studio Museum’s “F” show series of exhibitions of emerging artists. Fade is presented in the Museum’s fourth-floor gallery and features the work of seventeen early-career artists of African and Afro-Latinx descent from across the United States. Comprising newly commissioned and loaned artworks from a variety of media, Fade reflects the concerns of a new generation of artists.

Working across disciplines , the artists in this exhibition embrace feeling, spirituality, and non-linear conceptions of time. Through sculptural and visual interventions that foreground ancestry, spaces of refuge, land as archive, grief, and the surreal, Fade locates the in-between as a space of resistance.

Fade is organized by Adria Gunter, Assistant Curator; Yelena Keller, Associate Curator; Jayson Overby Jr., Assistant Curator; Kiki Teshome, Curatorial Assistant; and Habiba Hopson, former Senior Curatorial Assistant. Exhibition support provided by Maya Davis, Abigail Gordon, and Taylor Ndiaye, Studio Museum/MoMA Curatorial Fellows.

The culminating exhibition of the 2026 Expanding the Walls: Making Connections Between Photography, History, and Community cohort (on view from July 2, 2026, until summer 2027) will feature work by the program’s seventeen participants and will be presented alongside a display of photographs by James Van Der Zee, the celebrated Harlem photographer whose collection and archive serve as an entry point to the program.

This exhibition is organized by Cam McEwen and Taylor Ndiaye, Studio Museum/MoMA Curatorial Fellows; and Maria Wilson, Robert Rauschenberg Curatorial Fellow.

Also on View

Tom Lloyd (on view until March 22, 2026) is a comprehensive presentation of the work of Tom Lloyd, whose pioneering artwork was the focus of the Studio Museum’s first exhibition, Electronic Refractions II, in 1968. Based on extensive new scholarship and intensive conservation work, Tom Lloyd explores the artist’s prevailing contributions to the interplay of art and technology and pays tribute to his activism with the Art Workers’ Coalition and his founding of the Store Front Museum in Queens—the borough’s first art museum.

Tom Lloyd is organized by Connie H. Choi, Curator.

Expanding the Walls: Making Connections Between Photography, History, and Community (on view until April 12, 2026) marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Expanding the Walls and features photographs across the program’s years, offering a glimpse into the people, places, and moments that define a teenager’s world. As their camera may have evolved—first from Polaroid, then to film, and now to digital—each photographer presents a distinct visual language shaped by the techniques and technologies of their time. Whether navigating self, family, or community, these young artists use their camera to capture adolescence in all its complexity and clarity.

Expanding the Walls: Making Connections Between Photography, History, and Community is organized by Jayson Overby Jr., Assistant Curator.

From Now: A Collection in Context (on view until August 16, 2026) is a dynamic, shifting installation of thematic exchanges drawn entirely from the Studio Museum in Harlem’s collection and installed throughout the building. Featuring a call-and-response of regular rotations of works, the exhibition is organized in sections that will unfold and evolve over the course of the year. Altogether, the installation presents a plurality of voices and explores motifs that have preoccupied artists of African descent across generations. Artists whose work is newly on display since the initial rotation of From Now include Charles Alston, Dawoud Bey, McArthur Binion, Diedrick Brackens, Willie Cole, Bethany Collins, Elizabeth Colomba, vanessa german, Gerald Jackson, Ben F. Jones, Jacob Mason-Macklin, Reverend Joyce McDonald, Julie Mehretu, Otobong Nkanga, Andy Robert, Nadine Robinson, Lezley Saar, David Shrobe, and Bob Thompson.

From Now: A Collection in Context is organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Curatorial Department.

To Be a Place (on view until August 30, 2026) celebrates the Studio Museum in Harlem’s nearly sixty-year history through a visual timeline of historical documents, media, and programming ephemera that lays out a concise and detailed narrative of the Museum, from its former building on Fifth Avenue to its current spot on 125th Street. This installation offers visitors an opportunity to discover the host of exhibitions, events, and programs that have defined the institution, and the communities with which it has engaged throughout six decades of cultural, political, and societal change.

To Be a Place is organized by Habiba Hopson, former Senior Curatorial Assistant. Exhibition research is provided by Abigail Gordon, Studio Museum/MoMA Curatorial Fellow.

Camille Norment: Untitled (heliotrope) (ongoing) is a site-informed sculptural and sound installation by the Norway-based interdisciplinary artist Camille Norment. Commissioned by the Studio Museum in Harlem for its terrace staircase, Untitled (heliotrope) is inspired by contemporary and historical migration. Handwoven by the artist herself, brass wires frame brass tubes of varying lengths and diameters, with the resulting shape recalling a pipe organ and a raft.

Camille Norment: Untitled (heliotrope) is organized by Habiba Hopson, former Senior Curatorial Assistant.

Christopher Myers: Harlem Is a Myth (ongoing) is a site-specific installation in the Museum’s Education Workshops that depicts an intergenerational community of mythic beings, including iconic figures from Harlem. Myers transforms a young Kareem Abdul-Jabbar into a basketball-carrying centaur, jazz legends Thelonious Monk and Count Basie sprout butterfly and angel wings, and two girls strike poses with antlers and a tail.

Christopher Myers: Harlem Is a Myth is organized by Adria Gunter, Assistant Curator.