Long Island City gets a heavyweight today. Hard Art opens at MoMA PS1, a major exhibition tracing the legacy of abstraction by Black artists in the United States from 1969 to now. It stays on view through March 15, 2027, with over 90 works by more than 40 artists.
Hard Art MoMA PS1: three generations in one room
MoMA's press office frames the show as a cross-generational conversation. Historical paintings by artists who came up in the 1970s sit beside recent conceptually driven work in sculpture, video, sound and painting. Named figures span Frank Bowling, Mark Bradford, Peter Bradley, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Ed Clark, Melvin Edwards, Jennie C. Jones, Joe Overstreet and Raymond Saunders on one side, with Aria Dean, Torkwase Dyson, Nikita Gale, Suzanne Jackson, Rindon Johnson, Caroline Kent, Carolyn Lazard, Eric N. Mack, Charisse Pearlina Weston and SoiL Thornton among the newer voices. Mildred Thompson, Sam Gilliam, Howardena Pindell, Jack Whitten and David Hammons also appear on the full artist list.
The through-line is urgency. Official copy says the conversations emphasize the enduring relevance of abstraction in shaping the current political imaginary. That is the hard in Hard Art: not hardness as toughness alone, but abstraction as a durable public language that keeps rewriting how museums hang Black modernism.
Walk the hang expecting paintings next to sculpture and time-based work. Nikita Gale's PRIVATE DANCER installation, used as one of the official press images, signals how stage hardware and fabric can sit inside the same argument as a 1970s canvas. Peter Bradley's Circle of Fifths and Mildred Thompson's Magnetic Fields are among the other press-ready landmarks MoMA circulated for the opening.
Curators and the Hard Art book
The exhibition is organized by Connie Butler, The Agnes Gund Director, with Sheldon Gooch, Curatorial Associate. Research support comes from June Kitahara. A fully illustrated publication accompanies the show, with essays by Connie Butler, Aria Dean, Jessica Bell Brown, Torkwase Dyson, Rindon Johnson and Erich Kessel, plus an illustrated chronology of significant museum exhibitions by Kitahara and Gooch. Major support is provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art. More exhibition listings live on the MoMA Press exhibitions index.
Opening day is November 5, 2026, which makes Hard Art a same-day destination for anyone already planning a Queens museum loop. Give yourself time: ninety-plus works across painting, sculpture, video and sound will not skim cleanly in twenty minutes, and the publication is worth checking in the shop if you want the chronology in hand after you leave.
Why it matters
This one is Surfacing. Opening-day surveys that put three generations of Black abstraction in one PS1 hang are rare, and the publication means the argument travels past the run dates. If you are museum-hopping this month, stack it with Franz West at the Albertina Modern, Dali: Disruption and Devotion, and the Polynesian gift economy show Tapa at the Met. For a West Coast counterweight, revisit Raven Chacon at SFMOMA.
Plan the visit from momaps1.org and the parent museum at moma.org.
