The title of the exhibition, The Time Is Always Now, references an essay on desegregation by American writer James Baldwin (1924–1987). Organized around three themes—double consciousness, the persistence of history, and our aliveness—the exhibition showcases works by artists including Michael Armitage, Jordan Casteel, Lubaina Himid, Kerry James Marshall, Wangechi Mutu, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Amy Sherald.

This collective assertion and interest in figuration and representation, examining both the presence and absence of the Black figure in art history, transcends geographical boundaries. Through their work these artists invite a shift in the dominant art historical perspective from “looking at” the Black figure to “seeing through” the eyes of Black artists and the figures they depict.

“Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys” is a groundbreaking exhibition that marks the first major showcase of the Dean Collection, owned by renowned musicians and cultural icons Swizz Beatz (Kasseem Dean) and Alicia Keys.

Organized by the Brooklyn Museum, “Giants” highlights nearly 100 significant works by Black diasporic artists, including Gordon Parks, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lorna Simpson, Amy Sherald, and more. The exhibition reflects the Deans’ passion for supporting established and emerging artists while fostering important dialogues about art, culture, and identity.

“Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys” is organized by Kimberli Gant, Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, and Indira A. Abiskaroon, Curatorial Assistant, Modern and Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum.

Thaddaeus Ropac London presents three new paintings by Jordan Casteel, on view in the Ely Room. Born in Denver and now based in New York, Casteel is known for her magnetic, larger-than-life compositions that combine empathetic storytelling with bold, luminescent colour. The presentation follows the recent announcement of Casteel’s representation by Thaddaeus Ropac in February this year, as well as the artist’s inclusion in the major group exhibition The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure, which travelled from the National Portrait Gallery, London, to The Box in Plymouth, Philadelphia Museum of Art and North Carolina Museum of Art (2024–25). The presentation at Thaddaeus Ropac London will coincide with London Gallery Weekend, 6–8 June 2025, during which the artist will participate in an ‘In Conversation’ event at the gallery. 

The works on view capture Jordan Casteel’s ever-deepening kinship with the communities and environments she inhabits. Since establishing a home in the Hudson Valley alongside her base in Harlem in 2021, Casteel has found new opportunities to weave the textures of these natural surroundings with her closely felt observations, while continuing to explore themes of rootedness and belonging. Elizabeth and Roman II (2025) is an exceptional example of the portraiture that first launched the artist to acclaim. A mother stands in a garden with a young child propped against her hip; his weight is supported by her sinuously rendered hands as he turns to join his mother in meeting the artist’s gaze. Details of the composition signal the changing season as winter transitions into spring: pink budding flowers peek through shaded areas of moss, emerging from a warm pastel-pink ground. Casteel often begins her paintings with an expansive field of electric colour: ‘the gesture of covering the canvas in a colour is setting the stage for the rest of the painting,’ she says. ‘It becomes an aura, an essence of the work.’ 

I knew when I asked to paint Elizabeth and Roman, in some ways they were my own mirroring of desire. The paintings become surrogates for my own thinking or desires, or a sense of longing or curiosity. — Jordan Casteel

On view alongside Casteel’s portraiture is a painting from the artist’s celebrated Subway Series: an ongoing body of work begun in 2015 in which train carriages become the perfect backdrops for looking. In Subway Bouquet (2025), an overflowing floral arrangement takes the place of a figure, positioned centrally on an orange plastic subway seat. Cascading tassels of amaranthus, fuschia flowers and rose-pink cosmos petals reflect in an adjacent glass pane to produce a mesmerising double image. Through this visual mirroring – itself an experiment in form, colour and texture – Casteel explores her own intersecting worlds of Hudson Valley and New York City, and the relationship between objecthood and personhood.  

I always think of the paintings as being an opportunity for other people to slow down to observe something that they maybe haven't seen before or seen in this way before. Whether it is a person, whether it is a street scene, whether it is my garden or the environment that I am in. — Jordan Casteel

In recent years, Casteel has created intimate, small-scale portraits of flowers, painted en plein air in her upstate garden. Painted in springtime, Iris (2024) captures the titular flower mid-bloom. Daubs, flecks and outlines are traces of the artist’s hand, working intuitively, wet on wet, to feel out shape in real time. Treated with the same dignity as the figures who populate her portraits, Iris is a contemplation on the physicality of paint itself.  

Following her London presentation, Jordan Casteel will have her first solo exhibition in France at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais in 2026. 

resonance is a group exhibition curated by artist, cultural architect, and community steward Lauren Halsey. The exhibition brings together work from thirty artists, an ensemble whose dynamic practices and eclectic strategies of representation, storytelling, and thematic exploration create a generative bridge for dialogue, respite, and rumination. resonance spans a variety of mediums—including installation, painting, photography, mixed media, sculpture, and video—and gives attention to a range of topics and subject matter. Through the figuration of people, plants, and animals, a shared central theme in the exhibition is the symbol of life that reflects our interconnectedness and the intricate relationships we share with the world around us.

The exhibition is the brainchild of Lauren Halsey—the artist, cultural architect, and community steward whose large-scale foil collages and hand-carved gypsum works draw on the histories, vernacular poetics, and everyday contexts and forms of South Central Los Angeles, and reflect her ongoing engagement with Afro-diasporic mythologies, Funk music and aesthetics, and the interplay between personal history, collective memory, and broader societal narratives.

For Halsey, resonance is conceived less as a group showcase or articulation of a shared community-centered mission/standpoint. “It’s more in the spirit of a kiccbacc,” she maintains, that is to say an opportunity for fellowship, pleasure, rekindling old connections and cultivating new ones. “I invited kinfolk to show up and be a part of this,” Halsey explains. “These people are not all like-minded. And not all of their work is community focused. But I admire all of them. And we all jam.” She elaborates, “This exhibition (and a lot of my practice in general) is focused on that: generating community-centric moments, not merely community-centric work.”