Opening November 5 in Long Island City, the landmark exhibition brings together more than 40 artists to reconsider how abstraction has shaped Black artistic expression, political imagination, and the history of American art.
NEW YORK — Abstract art is often described through its formal qualities: color, shape, texture, rhythm, and the relationship between a work and the space around it. But what happens when abstraction is also understood as a way to challenge expectations, resist restrictive definitions of identity, and imagine different political futures?
That question lies at the heart of Hard Art, an ambitious exhibition opening at MoMA PS1 on November 5, 2026. Bringing together more than 40 artists across three generations, the exhibition examines the legacy of Black artists’ engagement with abstraction in the United States from 1969 to the present. Historical paintings are placed in conversation with contemporary practices that extend beyond the canvas into sculpture, video, sound, and installation. <Cite refs={[“turn363284search0″,”turn363284search1”]}/>
Rather than presenting abstraction as a single style or movement, Hard Art explores a diverse field of artistic experimentation. Its central proposition is that abstraction has never been separate from the social conditions in which artists work. For Black artists, decisions about representation, visibility, material, and form have often carried cultural and political significance—even when the work does not depict recognizable figures or events.
At MoMA PS1, those questions become a cross-generational conversation about artistic freedom, historical recognition, and the continuing possibilities of abstract expression.
Beyond Representation: Why Abstraction Matters
Black artists have long challenged the assumption that their work should be understood primarily through figurative representation or explicit statements about race. Abstraction offers another set of possibilities: an artist can communicate through scale, gesture, material, movement, repetition, and spatial relationships without being confined to a narrow visual vocabulary.
That freedom does not mean abstraction is politically neutral. Decisions about what is visible, what remains ambiguous, and how viewers are invited to interpret a work can themselves carry meaning. A painting can resist conventional expectations through its structure alone, while a sculpture or sound-based work can transform the viewer’s physical relationship with an exhibition space.
Hard Art places these possibilities within a history that has not always received sustained attention in major museum narratives. Its thematic arrangement connects artists whose practices differ considerably but whose work collectively expands the history of abstraction in the United States. <Cite refs={[“turn363284search1″,”turn363284search2”]}/>
The exhibition therefore asks viewers to look beyond the familiar division between art that represents political realities and art that concentrates on form. For many of the artists included, those approaches need not be opposites.
A History Built Through Artistic Networks
The exhibition’s historical framework begins with landmark projects that created space for Black artists working outside conventional representational approaches.
Among them is Frank Bowling’s 5 + 1 (1969), an artist-curated exhibition that forms part of the broader history traced by Hard Art. Another key reference is The DeLuxe Show, organized in Houston in 1971 by Peter Bradley. The project brought modernist abstraction into a context that challenged assumptions about who participated in—and how audiences encountered—contemporary art.
The exhibition also revisits Afro-American Abstraction, the 1980 exhibition at PS1 curated by April Kingsley. That presentation helped foreground the range of approaches Black artists were developing through geometry, energetic color, material experimentation, and richly textured surfaces. <Cite refs={[“turn363284search2″,”turn363284search1”]}/>
These exhibitions matter not simply as historical milestones but as examples of artists and curators creating their own platforms for critical exchange. They demonstrate that the history of abstraction was shaped by exhibitions, collaborations, debates, and alternative spaces as much as by individual masterpieces.
The title Hard Art draws on Bradley’s description of The DeLuxe Show. The phrase points toward work that may resist immediate interpretation, demanding sustained attention rather than offering a simple or easily categorized message. <Cite refs={[“turn363284search0″,”turn363284search2”]}/>
That resistance is part of the exhibition’s argument. Complexity is not a barrier to engagement; it can be the reason to look more closely.
Three Generations, Different Artistic Languages
Among the historical artists represented are Frank Bowling, Peter Bradley, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Ed Clark, Melvin Edwards, Joe Overstreet, and Raymond Saunders. Their work reflects the range of material and formal strategies through which Black artists have expanded abstraction across painting, sculpture, and mixed media. <Cite refs={[“turn363284search1″,”turn363284search2”]}/>
The contemporary artists bring additional approaches to those questions. Torkwase Dyson, Nikita Gale, Suzanne Jackson, Rindon Johnson, Caroline Kent, Carolyn Lazard, Eric N. Mack, Charisse Pearlina Weston, and SoiL Thornton are among the artists whose recent work broadens the exhibition’s material and conceptual range.
The point of this juxtaposition is not to suggest that younger artists simply inherit a settled tradition. Instead, the exhibition places different artistic languages in dialogue, revealing how earlier experiments can be reinterpreted under new cultural and political conditions.
A painting, for example, may use color and geometry to create an independent visual system. A contemporary installation may approach abstraction through architecture, sound, or the body’s movement through space. Both can challenge established expectations, but they do so through different materials and historical circumstances.
By bringing these practices together, Hard Art treats abstraction as an evolving field rather than a closed chapter in art history.
Torkwase Dyson and the Politics of Space
One of the exhibition’s major new commissions comes from Torkwase Dyson, whose work explores relationships between abstraction, architecture, geography, and Black spatial liberation.
For Hard Art, Dyson has created a freestanding architectural environment spanning the museum’s double-height gallery. The commission extends her ongoing investigation of how space is organized, experienced, and imagined. <Cite refs={[“turn363284search2″,”turn363284search0”]}/>
The work offers an important example of the exhibition’s wider argument. Abstraction does not have to remain confined to a painted surface. It can become an environment that visitors encounter physically, changing their perception of scale, movement, and spatial relationships.
Dyson’s contribution also gives the exhibition a distinctly contemporary dimension. Questions about who has access to space, how environments shape experience, and how new possibilities can be imagined resonate beyond the gallery. Here, architectural form becomes a means of exploring those questions without reducing them to a literal illustration.
Another contemporary contribution comes from Carolyn Lazard, whose new moving-image work brings experimental cinema into conversation with the history of monochrome abstraction and the politics of visibility in relation to Blackness. <Cite refs={[“turn363284search2”]}/>
Together, these projects demonstrate how abstraction can move across media while continuing to raise questions about perception, identity, and power.
MoMA PS1 Revisits Its Own History
The exhibition carries particular significance at MoMA PS1, a museum with its own history of supporting experimental art and alternative exhibition models.
Its inclusion of Afro-American Abstraction reconnects the institution with an earlier moment when Black artists’ engagement with abstraction was being explicitly examined within its galleries. Revisiting that history provides an opportunity to consider what has changed, which artistic contributions have received recognition, and how institutions can create more connected accounts of modern and contemporary art.
The exhibition is organized by Connie Butler, MoMA PS1’s Agnes Gund Director, with Sheldon Gooch, Curatorial Associate, and research support from June Kitahara. A fully illustrated accompanying publication will feature essays by contributors including Butler, Aria Dean, Jessica Bell Brown, Torkwase Dyson, Rindon Johnson, and Erich Kessel, alongside an illustrated chronology of significant museum exhibitions. <Cite refs={[“turn363284search1″,”turn363284search2”]}/>
That publication extends the project beyond the gallery by documenting the exhibitions and critical conversations that helped shape this history. It also underscores the importance of research and institutional memory in understanding movements that have not always been represented together.
An Invitation to Look Longer
Hard Art arrives at a moment when museums continue to reassess how art history is written and whose work is placed at its center. Its approach is not simply to add more names to an existing narrative. By connecting three generations through formal experimentation, shared histories, and contrasting approaches, the exhibition proposes a broader understanding of what abstraction can do.
For visitors, the experience promises more than a survey of styles. It offers a chance to consider how an arrangement of color, a constructed environment, a textured surface, or a moving image can open onto questions that are simultaneously aesthetic and political.
The exhibition’s most compelling idea may be that abstraction does not need to explain itself immediately. Its complexity invites attention, and its meanings can shift as viewers encounter different histories and perspectives.
Opening November 5, Hard Art positions MoMA PS1 as a place to reconsider not only the legacy of Black abstraction but also the future of the form. In bringing historical experiments into conversation with contemporary practices, the exhibition makes a case for abstraction as an active, contested, and continually expanding force in American art.
Exhibition details: Hard Art opens November 5, 2026, at MoMA PS1, 22–25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens. Admission to MoMA PS1 is free. Visit the official exhibition page for updates and visitor information.
