WHERE BLACK ART BREATHES: MOMENTS THAT TRANSFORMED 2025

In these pages, we witness a year of Black artistry that moved hearts, shook stages and reshaped the contours of possibility

- By Okla Jones III and Shelby Stewart

Studio Museum's long-awaited renovation signals a powerful new chapter for Black art.m

There is a kind of beauty that comes only after the storm—born of ruin, heavy with truth, luminous as a rain-washed sky.

In the year of 2025, when the seams of the United States strained under the pull of its contradictions, Black artists stitched together something new from the frayed edges. And the cloth they made—rich, unruly, iridescent—covered us in a warmth no winter could dim.

We have been here before. We know what it is to create in the shadow of calamity—to turn scarcity into abundance, exile into sanctuary. But 2025 gave us a new vocabulary for survival, one that stretched across the wide spectrum of Black imagination. Across the country, art of every form became both refuge and rally. Painters, poets, dancers and musicians alike carved out spaces for truth-telling. Galleries and museums swelled into sanctuaries; theaters transformed into stages for confession; streets became living canvases; and in the most intimate rooms, the act of creation felt like ceremony.

Perhaps this is what this second renaissance—if that's what we dare to name it—has taught us: that art is not a luxury, not an afterthought in times of unrest, but the very ground we stand on when everything else crumbles. This year, Black artistry refused the script of despair. It chose, instead, to imagine us whole.

STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM STEPS INTO ITS NEXT ERA