The exhibitions to see in March 2026: the Whitney Biennial, Lauren Halsey’s Sphinx Park and Tupac in Paris

March is when the spring art calendar actually turns on, and this year it opens with a new Whitney Biennial and ends with Art Basel Hong Kong and a pair of blockbusters. These are seven shows that open or are on view this month, picked for crossover pull as much as prestige: a free sculpture park that rewrote a neighborhood corner, a photographer whose first big break was a Tupac portrait for Vibe, and a Pop Mart retrospective that put Labubu in a Paris mansion. They cover New York, London, Los Angeles, Paris and Venice, in order of opening date. Dates are as the venues and outlets published them.

Dana Lixenberg, American Images, MEP, Paris

This one opened Feb. 11 and runs through May 24, so March is the time to catch it. The Maison Européenne de la Photographie calls it the first retrospective of the Dutch photographer, covering more than 30 years of work on contemporary America, with celebrities and lesser-known people treated with the same consideration. Lixenberg shoots on a 4x5-inch view camera, and the pictures include Tupac Shakur (1993) and Kimberly Denise Jones, Lil’ Kim (1997).

Read moreRoy Lichtenstein’s Whitney Retrospective Says He Saw the Repost Coming

The Tupac portrait was her first major break, made for the hip-hop magazine Vibe, per Dazed, and the show also covers Imperial Courts, her long-running portraits of a South Central Los Angeles housing project. Of that work, she told Dazed: “I was interested in the people themselves,” and she wanted portraits that showed their humanity and charisma rather than the sensationalism around them.

THE MONSTERS 10th Anniversary Exhibition, Hôtel du Grand Veneur, Paris

Kasing Lung’s Labubu has a retrospective now, and it’s in a Marais mansion. MONSTERS BY MONSTERS: NOW AND THEN runs March 4 to 29 at the Hôtel du Grand Veneur on rue de Turenne, co-curated by Pop Mart and How2work. Paris is the fourth stop of its world tour, after Shanghai, Taipei and Hong Kong, and its only European one.

It lays out a decade of Kasing Lung’s universe in six themed zones, including previously unreleased manuscripts, oil paintings, a picture-book zone and an interactive photo cabin lined with plush Labubu figures. Hypebeast says the show followed a star-studded VIP preview that blended fashion, music and art, and FashionUnited notes that it opened during Paris Fashion Week.

The 2026 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, New York

The 82nd Whitney Biennial opens March 8 and, depending on the floor, stays up through Aug. 23, Sept. 7 or Oct. 12. It brings 56 artists, duos and collectives, including artists from places marked by the broad reach of U.S. power, which the Whitney says range from Afghanistan to Vietnam. It was co-organized by the Whitney’s Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer with Beatriz Cifuentes and Carina Martinez.

The talking point is Precious Okoyomon’s installation Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid (2026), which hangs about 50 stuffed animals and dolls from the eighth-floor rafters. It was first planned for the lobby and pulled before the press opening, then went up on March 25 in an expanded version. Okoyomon told ARTnews: “These sculptures are in a state of arrested transcendence.”

David Hockney, A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting, Serpentine North, London

Hockney’s first exhibition at Serpentine opens March 12 and runs through Aug. 23. It brings his panoramic frieze A Year in Normandie to London for the first time. Inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, it shows the gardens of his Normandy home across four seasons in iPad drawings, and ARTnews says it stretches nearly 300 feet. There are also new paintings made for the show, including portraits and still lifes on reverse-perspective checkered tablecloths.

Hockney, 88, couldn’t attend in person, but he has opinions about the rest of the art world. He told the Times, as quoted by ARTnews: “There’s much too much abstract painting being done now.”

Lauren Halsey, sister dreamer, South Central, Los Angeles

Halsey’s free public sculpture park opened March 14 at Western Avenue and 76th Street, presented by Los Angeles Nomadic Division and curated by Christine Y. Kim. Visitors enter through a corridor of eight sphinxes and Hathoric columns carved with portraits of Halsey’s family, friends and heroes, leading to a central cube on the site of a former ice cream shop where she hung out as a kid. It stays up through September 2027.

Halsey first imagined it in 2006, as an architecture student. Her nonprofit, the Summaeverythang Community Center, oversees programming, and Brooklyn Rail’s reviewer describes the opening as a street fair with local food, games and music. Halsey described the neighborhood in the press release:

I grew up on Western Avenue, in the area surrounding sister dreamer. It was and still is a beautiful environment, a place and time of joy, genius, and freedom,

Lauren Halsey, Los Angeles Nomadic Division

Raphael: Sublime Poetry, The Met, New York

The Met’s Raphael show opens March 29 and runs through June 28. It’s billed as the first comprehensive international loan exhibition on Raphael (1483–1520) in the United States, with more than 200 works, including over 170 drawings, paintings, tapestries and decorative arts. The multipart Colonna Altarpiece is reunited as a complete work for the first time since it was dismembered around 1663, and the Louvre’s Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione is on loan.

Curator Carmen Bambach said the seven-year project has been an extraordinary chance to reframe her understanding of the artist, and Met director Max Hollein called it a groundbreaking look at “a true titan of the Italian Renaissance.” ARTnews counts a 237-work checklist, with a portrait gallery as the centerpiece and three tapestries more than 15 feet tall on loan from Madrid.

Lorna Simpson, Third Person, Punta della Dogana, Venice

Simpson’s Venetian solo opens March 29 and stays through Nov. 22, curated by Emma Lavigne and organized in partnership with the Met, which showed a first version as Source Notes in spring 2025. It is billed as the most significant presentation of her work in Europe in more than a decade, built around her painting: about 50 works, including collages, sculptures, installations, film, new pieces made for the building and a major 40-part collage installation.

It’s arranged in three ensembles: dense compositions evoking uprisings, Arctic panoramas recreated from expedition archives, and a gallery of female figures in Tadao Ando’s Cube. Simpson, who also showed in the 2015 Biennale, told AnOther that the work is about process:

The end product is of the least interest. It’s more about the process of letting go and seeing what happens.

Lorna Simpson, AnOther

Also on our radar

Carol Bove’s first museum survey fills the Guggenheim’s rotunda in New York from March 5 to Aug. 2, tracing more than 25 years of her work from paperback-book assemblages to monumental steel sculptures. In Antwerp, MoMu marks 40 years of the Antwerp Six with a retrospective from March 28 to Jan. 17, 2027. And Art Basel Hong Kong runs March 27 to 29; we’ll report back on how its sales went. For the following month’s picks, see our June guide.

Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.