The year 2025 saw several solo exhibitions by well-known Black artists, including Kerry James Marshall, Amy Sherald, Rashid Johnson, Jack Whitten, Lorna Simpson, and Elizabeth Catlett. Following his exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, Marshall is now lauded as one of America’s most important artists. Sherald resisted “a culture of censorship” at Washington, D.C.’s National Portrait Gallery and moved her show to the Baltimore Museum of Art. Johnson made the entire rotunda of the Guggenheim into an immersive sanctuary. The spirit of Catlett—American-born but self-exiled to Mexico and later barred from reentering the United States because of her leftist leanings—unapologetically returned to the U.S., liberated and in full force at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art. At the Museum of Modern Art, we discovered the breadth and weight of Whitten’s extraordinary oeuvre, and through a survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we witnessed Simpson transform her art for the ages.

But this year also saw group exhibitions that showed how Black art within the Western art-historical canon works to change society at large. These group exhibitions, featuring Black artists from around the globe, demonstrated what Black art can be and what it can do. Two of the group exhibitions reminded us of artists no longer living, Faith Ringgold and David Driskell, focusing on the influence they had on their contemporaries and continue to have on subsequent generations. All these exhibitions showed the range of Black artistry and the impact it can have on the status quo. Here are six of them.