Abstraction is getting a full institutional hearing at MoMA PS1. 'Hard Art', opening 5 November 2026 and running through March 2027, brings together more than 40 artists to examine how Black artists in the United States have engaged with abstraction from 1969 to the present.

The show juxtaposes historical paintings by practitioners who came to prominence in the 1970s — Frank Bowling, Peter Bradley, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Ed Clark, Melvin Edwards, Jennie C. Jones, Joe Overstreet, Raymond Saunders — with recent, conceptually driven work that moves beyond the canvas into sculpture, video, sound and installation. The younger cohort includes Aria Dean, Torkwase Dyson, Nikita Gale, Suzanne Jackson, Rindon Johnson, Caroline Kent, Carolyn Lazard, Eric N. Mack, Charisse Pearlina Weston and SoiL Thornton.

Organised thematically by Connie Butler, the Agnes Gund Director, with Sheldon Gooch, the exhibition builds on PS1's own history: the 1980 show 'Afro-American Abstraction', curated by April Kingsley, was a landmark. The title derives from Bradley's description of 'The DeLuxe Show', which treated abstraction's perceived opacity as an invitation to deeper engagement rather than a barrier.

A fully illustrated publication accompanies the exhibition with essays by Butler, Dean, Jessica Bell Brown, Dyson, Johnson and Erich Kessel, alongside an illustrated chronology of significant museum exhibitions by June Kitahara and Sheldon Gooch. The show lands in a crowded PS1 fall season that includes Teresa Margolles's first US survey and the 'Homeroom: Artists Against the Bomb' campaign for nuclear disarmament, all of them free to enter through the museum's extended free-admission policy.