As museums across North Texas look ahead to 2026, the year arrives with an unusual sense of convergence. Landmark retrospectives, long-awaited surveys, and ambitious institutional projects will unfold alongside a global spotlight, as the Dallas–Fort Worth region hosts matches for the FIFA World Cup 2026 and welcomes an international audience to the city. Against this backdrop, local museums are presenting exhibitions that not only reflect on history and legacy but also signal where contemporary practice is headed, through questions of identity, memory, experimentation, and cultural exchange. From major museum surveys of influential figures to exhibitions that reconsider regional and global narratives, these seven shows offer a snapshot of a cultural moment when North Texas is both looking inward and engaging the world beyond its borders.
Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
March 8–September 27, 2026
Photo: Martin Parsekian
Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers marks a significant milestone in the career of Rashid Johnson. The exhibition is the artist’s largest presentation to date, his first solo museum exhibition in the Southwestern United States, and his first major museum survey in more than a decade.
Internationally recognized for a multidisciplinary practice that spans painting, sculpture, film, and installation, Johnson has emerged as one of the most influential artists of his generation. His work is held in major institutional collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and at the Dallas Museum of Art with The New Black Yoga Installation gifted by the artist in 2022 during the year he was honored at TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art.
Tracing Johnson’s trajectory from early experiments in photography and video to his recent materially dense paintings and assemblages, A Poem for Deep Thinkers engages art history, philosophy, and Black popular culture as critical frameworks for examining the human psyche. Across nearly 90 works, the exhibition explores recurring themes of history, identity, masculinity, parenthood, and self-care, positioning Johnson as both a rigorous interpreter of art history and a defining voice in contemporary culture.
The exhibition brings together black-soap paintings, spray-painted text works, monumental sculptures, film, and video, alongside a site-specific installation, an outdoor sculpture, and two works activated through live performance. Materially rich and emotionally charged, the works foreground Johnson’s distinctive ability to merge personal narrative with broader cultural inquiry.
Robert Rauschenberg: Rauschenberg Sculpture
Nasher Sculpture Center
January 31–April 26, 2026
Opening during the centennial year of his birth, Rauschenberg Sculpture offers a focused examination of the three-dimensional practice of Robert Rauschenberg, an artist whose radical experimentation reshaped the course of contemporary art. Organized by Nasher Senior Curator Dr. Catherine Craft, the exhibition brings renewed attention to sculpture as a central and often underexamined throughline in Rauschenberg’s expansive career.
From the late 1940s onward, Rauschenberg sought to let as much of the world as possible into his art. His groundbreaking Combines (1954–64) collapsed the boundaries between painting and sculpture, incorporating found materials such as scrap metal, tires, fabric, and cardboard alongside photographic imagery. While Rauschenberg rarely worked within traditional sculptural conventions, he neither carved nor modeled nor welded, his three-dimensional works consistently engaged space, movement, and the viewer’s physical presence.
The exhibition traces recurring themes that defined Rauschenberg’s sculptural thinking, including his use of discarded objects, his interest in the relationship between art and science, and his deep engagement with performance, music, and dance. Many works incorporate elements of motion, from wheels and cranks to motors and fabric, evoking what Rauschenberg described as theater’s “sense of urgency.” Technology also plays a key role, with sculptures incorporating sound transmitters, sonar-activated motors, and interactive components that alter their appearance in response to the viewer.
Rauschenberg Sculpture places classic works from the Combines alongside later series such as the Japanese Clayworks and Kabal American Zephyrs, underscoring the artist’s sustained commitment to experimentation across decades. The exhibition is accompanied by an ambitious slate of public programming, including performances developed in collaboration with the Merce Cunningham Trust and musical events highlighting Rauschenberg’s close relationship with composer John Cage. A scholarly Study Day in February will further explore his engagement with technology, vernacular traditions, and popular culture.
Presented as part of the international Rauschenberg100 celebrations, the exhibition situates Rauschenberg not only as a defining figure of the 20th century but as an artist whose curiosity, interdisciplinarity, and inventive spirit continue to shape contemporary practice.
Francisco Moreno: Historia Sintética
Dallas Contemporary
April 17–August 23, 2026
Curated by Thomas Feulmer, Historia Sintética marks the first solo museum presentation by Dallas-based Mexican American artist Francisco Moreno. Born in 1986 in Mexico City and raised between Mexico and the United States, Moreno’s work reimagines history, myth, and identity through a bold visual language that merges Old Master painting traditions with contemporary and fantastical influences.
Moreno’s paintings draw freely from art history, religious iconography, and Mexican symbolism, colliding these references with science fiction, surreal imagery, and invented narratives. The result is a layered practice that interrogates power, heritage, and the construction of historical memory, questioning who gets to author stories and how cultural legacies are shaped.
For Dallas Contemporary, Moreno will present several major bodies of work, including The Chapel, an immersive painted environment inspired by a Spanish Byzantine chapel loaned from the Dallas Museum of Art’s collection, alongside a recent series of mural-scaled paintings that have never before been exhibited. Together, these works transform the gallery into a charged, immersive space where past and present collapse into a speculative visual history.
Nic Nicosia: Everyday Surreal
Nasher Sculpture Center
May 16–August 16, 2026
Bottom: Nic Nicosia, aggregates (stories), 2013, Archival inkjet on Hahnemühle rag paper, 27 x 40 in. (68.6 x 101.6 cm). © Nic Nicosia. Image courtesy of the artist and Erin Cluley Gallery, Dallas.
Nic Nicosia: Everyday Surreal presents a sweeping survey of the last 25 years of Nic Nicosia’s five-decade career, offering a fresh perspective on one of Dallas’s most influential living artists. The exhibition foregrounds Nicosia’s turn toward sculpture in the 2010s, bringing together more than 70 works—including three-dimensional objects, drawings, photographs, and films—in an installation that mirrors the subtly disorienting environments long central to his practice.
Born in Dallas in 1951, Nicosia emerged in the 1980s alongside the Pictures Generation, an informal cohort of artists who interrogated the construction, circulation, and authority of images. Best known for elaborately staged photographs and films depicting everyday life rendered quietly strange or theatrically off-kilter, Nicosia’s work employed costumed actors, brightly colored sets, and a mix of real objects and fabricated simulacra. His work aligned with broader postmodern strategies also explored by artists such as Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and Jeff Wall, earning him inclusion in landmark exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial (1983 and 2000), Image Fabrique at the Centre Georges Pompidou (1983), and Documenta IX in Kassel (1992).
Following mid-career surveys organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 1999–2000 and CASA Salamanca in 2003, Nicosia reassessed his practice amid prolonged health challenges, prompting a significant shift in both form and focus. Everyday Surreal centers on this evolution, tracing how his buoyant whimsy gave way to a more philosophical engagement with time, memory, and the psychological slippage embedded in everyday reality.
Beginning in the early 2000s, Nicosia scaled down his elaborate photographic sets, constructing miniature architectural models populated with collaged imagery and small sculptural elements. By 2009, sculpture became a consistent and independent component of his practice, with works in paper clay, hydrocal, wire, and eventually cast metal. These eccentric figures: anonymous male bodies, whimsical portraits, and exaggerated forms, soon migrated back into his photographs and later into real domestic interiors, producing hand-collaged and rephotographed images that collapse distinctions between reality and artifice. Notable among these works is bighands (2010), an eight-foot-tall steel sculpture now in the Nasher’s permanent collection.
Nicosia’s drawings further extend these inquiries, often using repetition, duration, and accumulation to visualize time’s passage. Works trace the same route dozens of times, tally seconds in a day, or chart decades of lived experience, while others record drifting thoughts as text blocks or doodles amassed over months.
The exhibition carries particular resonance in the summer of 2026, when North Texas will host matches for the FIFA World Cup, welcoming an international audience at a moment when the region’s cultural identity is on global display.
Rubén Guerrero
Meadows Museum / ARCO
February 22–June 21, 2026
The Meadows Museum, in collaboration with Fundación ARCO, has selected Spanish painter Rubén Guerrero for the third edition of the Meadows/ARCO Artist Spotlight (MAS) program, an initiative dedicated to promoting contemporary Spanish artists through focused museum presentations.
Guerrero’s paintings operate at the intersection of abstraction and figuration, probing the limits of two-dimensional space through carefully calibrated color, geometry, and architectural suggestion. Visually rigorous and conceptually layered, his work invites sustained looking, revealing shifting spatial relationships that challenge conventional readings of surface and depth.
His practice has been widely exhibited across Spain, with presentations at major contemporary art institutions including the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville and the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Málaga. Guerrero’s work is held in both public and private collections in Spain, Germany, and the United States.
As with previous MAS exhibitions, Guerrero will travel to Dallas to participate in a series of educational programs, many offered exclusively to Southern Methodist University students, underscoring the initiative’s commitment to pedagogy and cultural exchange.
Black Photojournalism
Amon Carter Museum of American Art
March 15–July 5, 2026
Carnegie Museum of Art, Margaret M. Vance Fund.
Black Photojournalism shines a vital light on the groundbreaking work of more than 60 photographers working across the US during the world-shaping decades between 1945 and the mid-1980s. Featuring over 250 photographs, the exhibition foregrounds the essential role Black photojournalists played in documenting pivotal historical moments from civil rights struggles to political and cultural transformation, while also capturing the richness and complexity of everyday life within Black communities.
Organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the exhibition draws extensively from the Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive alongside photographs sourced from archives and collections nationwide. The works on view reveal the creativity, resilience, and far-reaching influence of Black-owned media outlets including the Afro American News, Atlanta Daily World, Chicago Defender, Ebony, and Pittsburgh Courier. These publications not only chronicled history as it unfolded but actively shaped public discourse, offering narratives often absent from mainstream media.
Together, the photographs position photojournalism as both a historical record and a tool of empowerment: images made from within communities, for their audiences, and with a deep sense of responsibility to truth, dignity, and representation. In doing so, Black Photojournalism offers a fuller and more nuanced account of American life, underscoring the enduring impact of these photographers on how history is seen, told, and remembered.
Holy Sepulcher
Kimbell Art Museum
March 15–June 28, 2026
The Kimbell Art Museum’s presentation of Holy Sepulcher offers a rare and immersive encounter with one of Christianity’s most sacred and symbolically charged sites. Showcasing more than sixty objects in silver, gold, enamel, and precious jewels, the exhibition brings together extraordinary works given by European monarchs and rulers to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, where they have been used in religious ceremonies for centuries.
The objects on view, including ornate reliquaries, crosses, candlesticks, chalices, and richly adorned vestments, represent the height of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century craftsmanship. Many of these works have no known equivalent elsewhere in the world, functioning simultaneously as devotional instruments, diplomatic gifts, and expressions of political power and artistic excellence. Seen together, they illuminate the complex intersections of faith, empire, artistry, and ritual that shaped early modern Europe’s relationship to the Holy Land.
Traveling to only two venues in North America, Holy Sepulcher marks the first (and possibly only) opportunity for U.S. audiences to encounter these objects firsthand. True to the Kimbell’s curatorial approach, the exhibition situates these rare treasures within a rigorous historical framework while allowing their material splendor to command sustained attention, inviting visitors into a space of reflection shaped by devotion, craft, and centuries of pilgrimage.
Paper & Knife: Objects of Beauty in Early Modern Japan
Crow Museum of Asian Art
On view through August 29, 2027
If you missed it over the holiday season, Paper & Knife remains one of the most compelling exhibitions to be seen in North Texas. On view at the Crow Museum through August 2027, the show explores the artistry and refinement of small decorative objects from early modern Japan, spotlighting the extraordinary elegance and ingenuity of everyday materials. The presentation includes folding screens, fans, and other utilitarian objects crafted in paper and metal that were elevated to expressions of aesthetic and symbolic depth. Paired with contemporary work by Gajin Fujita through April 2026, the exhibition bridges historical craftsmanship and current artistic practice, revealing enduring connections between material and meaning.
Roy Lichtenstein in the Studio
Dallas Museum of Art with the Nasher Sculpture Center
January 15–July 5, 2026
Roy Lichtenstein in the Studio offers an intimate look at the working process behind one of the most recognizable visual languages of the 20th century. Celebrating a major joint gift from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center, the exhibition draws from that shared acquisition alongside works from the DMA’s collection and a local private collection.
Comprised of 17 works on paper, the presentation reveals the careful planning, revision, and experimentation underlying Lichtenstein’s polished Pop aesthetic. On view are preparatory studies used to devise larger compositions, projects developed in collaboration with print workshops, and multiple iterations of the artist’s iconic Brushstroke motif. Together, these works expose the deliberate gestures and structural decisions that belie the apparent immediacy of Lichtenstein’s high-gloss style.
By foregrounding process rather than ‘pop’, Roy Lichtenstein in the Studio reframes Pop not as surface-level commentary but as a rigorously constructed practice rooted in drawing, repetition, and precision. The exhibition also underscores the significance of the DMA–Nasher partnership, situating Dallas as a key site for engaging with Lichtenstein’s legacy through both scholarship and collection stewardship.
30 Fields of Vision: Dallas Collects
Green Family Art Foundation
February 7–August 9, 2026
Curated by Sara Hignite, 30 Fields of Vision: Dallas Collects opens at the Green Family Art Foundation on February 7 and runs through August 9, 2026. The exhibition brings together significant 21st-century artworks acquired since 2020 by some of the city’s most engaged collectors, offering an unprecedented view into the private collections that shape the region’s cultural identity. Rather than presenting a single narrative or aesthetic, the show celebrates the multiplicity of Dallas’s collecting practices and their role in expanding how, and what, we see when we talk about art in the 21st century.