Six innovative weavings, made from designs commissioned by Pope Leo X, are on view at the Columbus Museum of Art, alongside nearly 50 other objects which serve to contextualize these works and their influence.

As a site of struggle itself, Montgomery, AL makes a perfect host for “A Site of Struggle: American Art against Anti-Black Violence,” an exhibition examining how art has been used to protest, process, mourn and memorialize racially motivated attacks against African Americans.

After the 2020 removal of Confederate memorials, museums provide a place to confront the ugly past and find a way forward.

“The Chazen Museum of Art continues to put considerable thought into how it tells stories about the objects in its collection,” said Director Amy Gilman. “With re:mancipation, the Chazen has invited artist Sanford Biggers and MASK Consortium to take a deep dive into this single object—Thomas Ball’s Emancipation Group—while also considering how the museum can interpret multiple works of art in the collection.”

This spring, Matthew McLendon, the director of the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, taught a class on a largely shadowy subject: museum collecting. Along with sections on repatriation and deaccessioning, McLendon took his students through the complicated process of acquiring artworks.

Housed in The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., in collaboration with Paris’s Musée Picasso, a collection of 79 masterpieces — about half of which have never been shown in America — are on display. Instead of focusing on an era in Picasso’s life, as many exhibits do, this one centers on the inspiration he drew from one particular region: the Spanish-French border.

There could hardly be a better opening to “Skyscraper Gothic,” the small but charming exhibition now on display at the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia.

It took a pandemic to get our critic to explore the exquisite art in his own backyard. Here’s what he discovered.

“In a difficult year, people wanted a vision,” said Adam Levine, who took the helm at the Toledo Museum of Art in the middle of the lockdown last May, and where a total overhaul of the institution’s strategic plan is now underway. “People wanted something to be excited about for the future.”

She believed that life for her people in America was an act of near-superhuman perseverance, and she was determined to capture that history in every medium she could.

The late artist Aminah Robinson dedicated her life to recovering America’s lost history. At last, she’s finding a bigger audience. A sprawling show of her work is on view at the Columbus Museum of Art, an institution that was close to her heart. – Sarah Cascone, writing about Raggin’ On: The Art of Aminah Robinson’s House and Journals.