The 10 Most Anticipated Art Shows This Season

Several of the art events I’m most psyched for in the season ahead aren’t neatly packaged and cataloged shows. They’re multi-venue extravaganzas, institutional self-celebrations or, in one case, the return of a monumental collection to view.

The Getty-sponsored Los Angeles project formerly known as Pacific Standard Time, made up of some 70 separate, more or less concurrent exhibitions, is a major season starter in early September. The two previous incarnations of the series, in 2011 and 2017, were both L.A.-centric in theme. The new one, “PST Art: Art & Science Collide” (Sept. 15-Feb. 16, 2025),is broader in scope, lifting off fromSouthern California into, among other places, outer space.

PST’stopics will include medieval European astrology, cosmological concepts in Mesoamerican art, and cyberpunk cinema. The Hammer Museum will present a keynote ecological show, “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice,” and at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory we’ll find “Blended Worlds: Experiments in Interplanetary Imagination,” which — according to the news materials — will embrace time travel, seismic percussion and an immersion in Martian winds, all of which, true, sounds very L.A., which I love.

Chicago has a citywide project, too. Called “Panafrica Across Chicago,” it’s a season-spanning set of shows exploring the cultural and political concept of Pan-Africanism, which gained traction in the early 20th century. As a movement it promoted both the unity and the diversity of people of African descent across the globe, going back to ancient Egypt, forward into the Black Lives Matter present, and onward into the future. The centerpiece will be “Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica” at the Art Institute of Chicago (Dec. 15-March 30, 2025), a show of some 350 objects touching on colonialism, self-assertion and varying definitions of Blackness itself,with satellite presentations at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, the University of Chicago and the Arts Club of Chicago.

Complementingthe Chicago lineup will be “Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876-Now” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Nov. 17-Feb. 17, 2025), an exhibition demonstrating ways in which Black cultural figures engage and identify with ancient Egyptian images in art, literature and science. The show will cull historical pieces from the museum’s fabulous African, Asian and European collections, and stir in work by a pharaonically powerful gathering of contemporary art stars, including the late-and-beyond-great jazz musician Sun Ra and the young Los Angeles artist Lauren Halsey, whose Afrofuturistic version of the Temple of Dendur beamed down to the Met Roof Garden last year.