LITTLE ROCK, ARK.- The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (AMFA) announces its upcoming exhibition schedule, including two AMFA-curated exhibitions inspired by significant works from the AMFA Foundation Collection. First, Rivera’s Paris will open on February 7, 2025, with Dos Mujeres – a signature artwork by Diego Rivera in the AMFA Foundation Collection – as the centerpiece of the exhibition. Following on October 3, 2025, the AMFA Foundation Collection’s work Title Garden IV by Louise Nevelson will anchor Architects of Being: Louise Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina.

In addition, AMFA will open the impactful environmental exhibition, The Long View: From Conservation to Sustainability: Works from the Bank of America Collection, on June 13, 2025. The year will also be filled with solo exhibitions from artists like Kwame Brathwaite and an international art film by Hans Op de Beeck in the New Media Gallery.

“2025 brings a thoughtful range of exhibitions that will inspire guests and ensure that each visit to the Museum brings new ideas and fresh perspectives,” said Dr. Victoria Ramirez, Executive Director at AMFA. “We are proud that the year will start and end with major exhibitions featuring monumental works of art from the AMFA Foundation Collection.”

Rivera’s Paris
Harriet and Warren Stephens Family Gallery
February 7 – May 18, 2025

Rivera's Paris is an exploration of the artist’s years spent in Europe, where Diego Rivera formed his ideas about art and the world that ultimately would propel him to become one of the most influential Mexican painters in the 20th century. The exhibition will be groundbreaking —uniting paintings, drawings, and photographs for the first thorough examination of the years surrounding the creation of AMFA's masterpiece by Diego Rivera, Dos Mujeres (1914).

This exhibition offers a unique glimpse into Rivera’s world, revealing the profound influence of the artists he encountered in Spain and France and his vibrant life in Paris, the art capital of the world. Rivera’s Paris offers deeper insight into Rivera’s artistic evolution and explores his distinctive approach to Cubism while examining the work of his contemporaries.

Dos Mujeres was gifted in 1955 to the Museum by Abby Rockefeller Mauzé, daughter of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and sister to future Governor Winthrop Rockefeller. The painting was also the first artwork donated to the Museum by a member of the Rockefeller family, which prompted subsequent donations by David Rockefeller, Laurance S. Rockefeller, Winthrop and Jeannette Rockefeller, and collateral descendants.

Dos Mujeres is a double portrait of Rivera’s common-law wife, Angelina Beloff (standing), and their friend and fellow artist, Alma Dolores Bastián (nicknamed Moucha, seated), who together with her husband lived in the same building as Beloff and Rivera at 26, Rue du Départ. Rivera painted Dos Mujeres in 1914 in his apartment-studio, from which he stated “one looked out on the vast sea of rooftops—with their squared and angular rhythm of waves—of nearby warehouses and workshops; the panes would rumble—the rumble of trains—from the Gare Montparnasse.”
Rivera’s most important Cubist painting—and one of his largest—Dos Mujeres was first exhibited in 1914 at the Société des Artistes Indépendents. There, it received extensive coverage in the press, hailing Rivera as the “Champion of Cubism.”

AMFA has secured several key loans representing the full evolution of Rivera’s years in Europe, including an early landscape (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); a Cubist portrait (Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas); and several later drawings when Rivera returned to naturalism, as evidenced in his tender portrait of his wife, Angelina Beloff (1917, Museum of Modern Art, New York), who is one of the subjects depicted in Dos Mujeres. Additionally, major examples by artists who influenced Rivera: Darío de Regoyos y Valdés, whom Rivera praised as being “a marvelous colorist” (Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas); a monumental painting by Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa (The Hispanic Museum and Library, New York); Jean Metzinger, a vibrant portrait of the artist by Robert Delaunay (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston); and two works by Jacques Lipchitz (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) —who traveled to Spain with Rivera in 1914 to escape the war and later credited him with his own explorations of Cubism.

The Long View: From Conservation to Sustainability: Works from the Bank of America Collection
Harriet and Warren Stephens Family Gallery
June 13 – August 31, 2025

The Long View: From Conservation to Sustainability traces the history and impact of the environmental movement through art, featuring 77 works from the Bank of America Collection. Spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, this exhibition includes photographs, paintings, works on paper, and sculpture by artists who have shaped the environmental conversation.

The exhibition starts with “The Beginnings of Conservation,” showcasing late nineteenth and early twentieth-century artists like John James Audubon and Carleton Watkins, whose works influenced the founding of the Audubon Society and the National Park Service. Moving into the early twentieth century, “Push and Pull—Industry and Environment” features works such as Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein's iconic Dust Bowl images, highlighting the impact of unsustainable farming practices.

“The Emergence of Conservation Activism” focuses on postwar works and the Ecology Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, including Robert Rauschenberg’s Earth Day poster and Michael Heizer’s Scrap Metal series. Finally, “Working Towards a Sustainable Vision” showcases contemporary artists like Richard Misrach, David Maisel, and Andreas Gursky, emphasizing the radical transformation of the planet and the need for protection.

Architects of Being: Louise Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina
Harriet and Warren Stephens Family Gallery
October 3, 2025 – January 31, 2026

Architects of Being alludes to the architectural spirits of artists Louise Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina, brought together in dialogue for the first time, as well as the ways in which they constructed their identities in a midcentury American art world.

Nevelson called herself an “architect of shadow” and built monumental structures from the scraps of razed buildings. Slobodkina was a painter who extended the use of color, form, and texture to transform her surroundings. They were world builders. But first, they built themselves—as immigrants, working women, and creative pioneers of abstraction—who bravely set out to become artists at the start of the Great Depression.

In this exhibition, each woman’s story amplifies the other’s. In their artworks—which reveal the two as fellow travelers in the legacy of Cubism, Surrealism, and Constructivism—assemblage is an important unifying theme. Works include found object sculptures, mixed media reliefs, collage, painting, jewelry, and clothing, including some of Nevelson’s most iconic fashion statements.

After the exhibition’s premiere at AMFA, it will go on a national tour to the Chrysler Museum of Art and the New Britain Museum of American Art in 2026.

Minimalism: Color, Line, Form
Berta and John Baird Gallery
October 26, 2024 – April 6, 2025

Through sculpture, painting, and works on paper, Minimalist artists focused on reducing art to its core components: color, line, and form. They rejected the emotive and dynamic gestural forms of Abstract Expressionism, an American style of art that flourished after World War II that referenced myths and the inner psyche. Instead, Minimalists created completely non-referential art that celebrated formal concerns by incorporating mathematical-based compositions, hard-edge geometries, primary and commercially mixed colors in flat planes, and precise linework. Sophisticated and spare, these works explore the harmonic beauty of simplicity.

This intimate exhibition highlights works of art from the rich holdings of Minimalist art in the AMFA Foundation Collection, featuring key practitioners of the influential Minimalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s along with works by important artistic predecessors and later artists who continued to embrace the style of Minimalism.

Staging Silence (3): Hans Op de Beeck
Fine Arts Club New Media Gallery
March 1 – November 30, 2025

Staging Silence (3), 2019, is Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck’s third and final installment in a series of autonomous art films. In the video, two pairs of anonymous hands construct and deconstruct fictional interiors and landscapes on a film set that is less than 10 feet in size.

Staging Silence (3) takes the viewer on a visual journey through depopulated, enigmatic, often melancholic, but nonetheless playful, small-scale places, all built and dismantled before the eye of the camera. The hands control the life or death and blossoming or decay of the conjured places. Each new landscape or interior teems with historical and current cultural and subcultural references, specifically in the way in which humans try to mold both nature and architectural spaces to create meaning, identity, and a logical interaction with time.

Op de Beeck also included clear references to his life-size sculptures and immersive installations within the film. Inspired by the images, the score of Staging Silence (3) was composed and performed by British composer-musician Scanner.

Kwame Brathwaite: The 1970s
Berta and John Baird Gallery
April 19 – October 12, 2025

In the 1960s, Kwame Brathwaite (1938-2023) used photography to promote “Black is Beautiful” through the artist collectives he helped create—the African Jazz Art Society and Studios (AJASS) and Grandassa Models. Building on that legacy, this exhibition highlights the artist’s independent studio work in the 1970s.

From shooting gorgeous, color-saturated portraits in his studio, to capturing musicians Nina Simone and Marvin Gaye mid-performance, new creative stories emerged with a new decade. The exhibition will include some never-before-seen images from the artist’s archive.

Lori Larusso: A Paradox of Plenty
Robyn and John Horn Gallery
August 26, 2025 – May 3, 2026

Kentucky-based artist Lori Larusso’s painting installation playfully tumbles across the space with no regard for centerline. Her installations depict a parade of objects—the everyday, forgettable, or sometimes nostalgic bits that we consume and discard. An upturned shopping cart spills its contents onto the ground like an ironic cornucopia. There is humor as well as reason for reflection as these things take on coded meanings in new contexts.

Uncommon Threads
Berta and John Baird Gallery
October 25, 2025 – April 29, 2026

Uncommon Threads showcases work from the AMFA Foundation Collection by contemporary artists who sew or incorporate various fibers into their drawings, photographs, and sculptures. Using natural and synthetic threads in both traditional and non-traditional ways, they experiment and metaphorically speak of the lines, networks, and webs that link people together. Working in innovative ways, artists such as Maysey Craddock, Howardena Pindell, Anna Torma, and Ursula von Rydinsgvard, among others, collapse the hierarchies between fine art and craft.