MoMA PS1 has opened Hard Art, a wide-ranging survey of Black abstraction that brings together more than 90 works by over 40 artists, spanning 1969 to the present day. The exhibition runs until 15 March 2027 and is organised by the museum's director, Connie Butler, with curatorial associate Sheldon Gooch.

The show places paintings by an earlier generation in conversation with recent sculpture, sound, video and conceptually driven work. Among the artists are Frank Bowling, Ed Clark, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Melvin Edwards and Howardena Pindell, alongside younger figures including Aria Dean, Torkwase Dyson, Nikita Gale and Carolyn Lazard. Together they trace a history of abstraction made by Black artists that has often been treated as a footnote rather than a central thread.

The exhibition also returns to a question the museum has asked before. In 1980 PS1 presented Afro-American Abstraction, curated by April Kingsley, and on 7 November the museum hosts a public conversation revisiting that show with Pindell and James Little, both of whom took part in it. The discussion underlines that this is not a first recognition but a return to an argument the institution has already staged.

Hard Art looks back further still, to 1971, when painter Peter Bradley curated The De Luxe Show in a former cinema in Houston's Fifth Ward, bringing Black and white artists together around ambitious experiments in colour and form. By placing that landmark in dialogue with the present, the show asks what abstraction has meant for artists working against the expectation that their work should speak first about identity.