HARLEM, NY.- The Studio Museum in Harlem opened Fade, the sixth installment of its “F” show series of exhibitions of emerging artists. Presented in the fourth-floor gallery of the Studio Museum’s new home, where it will be on view from May 1 until September 6, 2026, Fade 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 part of the Museum’s inaugural year of programming in its new building, which opened in November 2025. It is the latest edition of the “F” shows, a series of group exhibitions that began in 2001 with Freestyle, a landmark in defining contemporary Black art. The “F” shows that followed—Frequency (2005–06), Flow (2008), Fore (2012–13), and Fictions (2017–18)—all featured work by emerging artists of African descent and advanced innovative and groundbreaking dialogues within contemporary art.

Thelma Golden, Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, said, “When we presented Freestyle a quarter of a century ago, I could never have imagined that an entire series of eagerly awaited exhibitions would follow in its wake, let alone that these “F” shows would one day carry over into a magnificent new purpose-built home for the Studio Museum. The seventeen artists represented in Fade are the newest of our trailblazers, who contend with complex and diverse issues while reconceptualizing once again what it means to be an artist of African descent. My heartfelt gratitude goes to the artists and to the curators of Fade, who have brilliantly upheld the Studio Museum’s dedication to making space for new creative voices.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue, designed by Caroline Washington and published by the Studio Museum in Harlem. Scheduled for publication in summer 2026, the Fade catalogue will include a roundtable discussion with the exhibition curators and commissioned essays on each artist, written by Chenoa Baker, Daniella Brito, Ryan C. Clarke, Akili Z. Davis, Destinee Filmore, Simon Ghebreyesus, Josie R. Hodson, Taylor Jasper, Shameekia Shantel Johnson, Gervais Marsh, Tayler Montague, Amandine Nana, Ade Omotosho, Nzinga Simmons, Diallo Simon-Ponte, LaCharles Ward, and Natalie Willis Whylly. Fade will be available for purchase online and in-person at Studio Store.