Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls presents an installation that reimagines the Brooklyn Museum’s Beaux-Arts Court through the work of four artists whose practices are rooted in abstraction. Each artist transforms one of the monumental walls of the space, creating a dynamic environment defined by color, scale, and material experimentation. The installation is inspired by the museum’s extensive holdings of paintings by Leon Polk Smith, whose hard-edge abstractions and shaped canvases provide the conceptual starting point for the exhibition. Smith’s work emphasizes clarity of form and precise delineations of color, establishing a dialogue between historical abstraction and contemporary practices. In response, three Brooklyn-based artists—Maya Hayuk, José Parlá, and Kennedy Yanko—contribute newly created works that extend the language of abstraction into immersive spatial environments. Hayuk’s tactile modular works emphasize vibrant color and pattern; Parlá’s large environmental paintings merge gestural mark-making with architectural scale; and Yanko’s sculptural works combine metal and paint skins to create dramatic surfaces that blur the line between painting and sculpture. Organized by Catherine Futter, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Senior Curator of Decorative Arts, and Erika Umali, Assistant Curator of Collections at the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition highlights abstraction as a living and evolving artistic language. The installation invites visitors to move through the Beaux-Arts Court as a fully activated visual environment where historical and contemporary abstraction intersect.

Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens is a solo exhibition of work by Seydou Keïta, presented at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York 11238-6052. Runs through May 17, 2026. The exhibition is described by the museum as the most expansive North American exhibition of Keïta’s work to date and features more than 280 works, including iconic prints, never-before-seen portraits, textiles, and personal artifacts. Developed with insights from Keïta’s family, the presentation expands understanding of his practice beyond the photograph alone, emphasizing the material richness and lived context surrounding his studio portraits. Working primarily in black-and-white photography, Keïta became renowned for his striking studio portraits made in Bamako, Mali, particularly from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. Collaborating closely with his sitters, he recorded a period of social and political transformation through their choices of backdrops, clothing, fabrics, jewelry, and accessories, creating images that are at once intimate, elegant, and historically resonant. The exhibition underscores how Keïta changed the history of portrait photography through a practice rooted in care, collaboration, and visual precision. By placing photographs alongside textiles and personal materials, Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens foregrounds touch, self-fashioning, and representation, offering a fuller view of how the artist shaped images of modern Malian identity and left a lasting mark on global photographic history.

Keisha Scarville: Where Salt Meets Black Water features work by Keisha Scarville, a Brooklyn-born artist whose practice uses photography to explore family history, migration, mourning, and transformation. Presented as a public installation at the Brooklyn Museum, the project activates the Iris Cantor Plaza and extends Scarville’s ongoing engagement with the Caribbean diaspora in Brooklyn. Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238-6052. May 8, 2026 — Runs through October 4, 2026. The museum’s announcement describes the installation as part of the UOVO Prize, which includes a public project on the museum plaza. In the available exhibition summary, Where Salt Meets Black Water is described as a contemplative environment where photography, memory, and mourning converge.