A major survey of abstract art opens today in Long Island City. Hard Art, at MoMA PS1, examines the legacy of abstraction by Black artists in the United States from 1969 to today, bringing together more than 90 works by more than 40 artists in an exhibition that runs through March 15, 2027.
The show is built as a conversation across three generations. Historical paintings by artists who came to prominence in the 1970s hang alongside recent, conceptually driven practices that extend abstraction beyond painting into sculpture, video and sound. The premise is that abstraction, often treated as a purely formal language of color, gesture and geometry, has carried social and political weight throughout that period, and that the artists in the exhibition have continually reshaped what an abstract work can do.
The historical core of the exhibition includes Frank Bowling, Peter Bradley, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Ed Clark, Melvin Edwards, Joe Overstreet and Raymond Saunders, alongside figures such as Sam Gilliam, David Hammons, Howardena Pindell, Jack Whitten and Mildred Thompson. Many of these artists worked for decades at a distance from the mainstream story of postwar American abstraction, even as they pushed painting in new directions, experimenting with poured and stained canvas, shaped supports, stitched and assembled materials, and processes drawn from music and craft.
Against those works, the exhibition sets new and recent pieces by a younger generation, including Aria Dean, Torkwase Dyson, Nikita Gale, Rindon Johnson, Caroline Kent, Carolyn Lazard, Eric N. Mack, Charisse Pearlina Weston and SoiL Thornton, with Mark Bradford, Suzanne Jackson and Jennie C. Jones among the artists bridging the two groups. In their hands, abstraction takes forms that would have been harder to imagine in a painting survey a generation ago, including light and sound installations, architectural interventions and works built from industrial and everyday materials.
Placed together, the generations complicate any simple timeline. A large abstract canvas from the early 1970s no longer reads as a closed chapter in art history, and a recent installation does not read as a break with the past so much as an argument with it. The museum describes the result as a set of cross-generational conversations about the enduring relevance, and growing urgency, of abstraction in shaping the current political imaginary.
Hard Art is organized by Connie Butler, the Agnes Gund Director of MoMA PS1, with Sheldon Gooch, Curatorial Associate, and research support from June Kitahara. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring essays by Butler, Aria Dean, Jessica Bell Brown, Torkwase Dyson, Rindon Johnson and Erich Kessel, among other contributors, as well as an illustrated chronology of significant museum exhibitions compiled by Kitahara and Gooch. Major support for the exhibition is provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art.
The opening continues a significant year for the Long Island City museum, which is marking its 50th anniversary. Since January 1, 2026, MoMA PS1 has offered free admission to all visitors, a policy scheduled to run for three years and made possible by a gift from Sonya Yu, removing the ticket price from a visit to one of New York’s principal venues for contemporary art.
Hard Art is on view from November 5, 2026, through March 15, 2027, at MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens. The museum is open from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Thursday, Friday, Sunday and Monday, and from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday. Admission is free, and tickets can be reserved through the museum’s website.
