NEW YORK, NY.- The Whitney Museum of American Art announces three new exhibitions to its fall 2025 calendar. Opening on October 18, High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100 celebrates the centennial of one of the most cherished and storied works in the Whitney’s collection, Alexander Calder’s magnificent Circus. With over 100 wire sculptures and objects, Calder’s Circus highlights the themes of movement, balance, suspense, and ephemerality that would later define Calder's signature mobiles. Artist Grace Rosario Perkins’s first New York City solo exhibition, Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers, also opens on October 18 with nine dynamic mixed-media paintings created over the past three years, including two new works on view for the first time and made specifically for this exhibition. Opening on October 10, Ken Ohara: CONTACTS showcases Ohara’s innovative photographic experiment, made between 1974–76, where he mailed a preloaded camera to strangers across the U.S. and instructed them to document their own lives before passing the camera along. During this process, Ohara relinquished authorship, decentralized his point of view, and facilitated the creation of uniquely personal and democratic portraits of American life at a time of economic and political unrest. In addition, two new online commissions by Robert Nideffer and Frank WANG Yefeng will launch on whitney.org.

Previously announced Sixties Surreal is a sweeping, ambitious, revisionist look at American art from 1958 to 1972 through the lens of surrealism, both inherited and reinvented. Opening on September 24, the exhibition features the work of over 100 artists who embraced the psychosexual, fantastical, and revolutionary energy of an era shaped by civil unrest, cultural upheaval, and boundless experimentation.

Presentations that feature renowned holdings from the Museum’s collection will also be on view. Highlighting the Whitney’s commitment to an inclusive and representative view of American art, these exhibitions focus on various mediums, from painting and sculpture to large-scale installation to video and digital art.

NEWLY ANNOUNCED EXHIBITIONS

High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100
October 18, 2025–March 2026

High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100 celebrates the centennial of one of Alexander Calder’s most iconic works and one of the most beloved works in the Whitney’s collection, Calder’s Circus (1926–31). This exhibition brings together over 100 objects from this installation, along with more than twenty related works, including drawings, archival material, and film. High Wire is the Whitney’s first exhibition dedicated to Calder’s Circus since moving to 99 Gansevoort and celebrates its enduring impact on 20th-century art.

In 1926, Calder began constructing his miniature multi-act spectacle while living in Paris, using commonplace materials—wire, fabric, cork, wood, string, and found objects—to create a cast of acrobats, animals, and other circus performers including clowns, a sword swallower, and a ringmaster. The figures were brought to life through performances that Calder staged for audiences of artists and friends, among them Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and Isamu Noguchi. These dynamic performances were set to music, complete with lighting and narration by Calder, and could last up to two hours—representing a radical new form of performance art. Calder stored the Circus in a set of five suitcases and would continue to present the work on both sides of the Atlantic.

A touchstone for Calder’s artistic development, Calder’s Circus reveals his early fascination with movement, balance, suspense, and ephemerality—concepts that would shape his pioneering invention of the mobile and define his sculptural practice in the decades that followed. This exhibition situates the Circus within Calder’s experimental engagement with this popular form, drawing connections between its energetic interplay and his later abstract works.

The Whitney holds a special relationship with Calder and his legacy. Calder’s Circus entered the Museum’s collection in 1983 following a major public acquisition campaign and has been a highlight of the Whitney’s holdings ever since. The Museum is the largest public repository of Calder’s work and hosted his major retrospective in 1976.

Organized to commemorate one hundred years since the inception of Calder’s Circus, this exhibition offers a rare opportunity to experience the full scope of a work that continues to enchant audiences and illuminate the foundations of Calder’s visionary practice.

High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100 is organized by Jennie Goldstein, Curator of the Collection, and Roxanne Smith, Jennifer Rubio Assistant Curator of the Collection.

Ken Ohara: CONTACTS
October 10, 2025–February 8, 2026

Ken Ohara: CONTACTS is the first U.S. institutional solo exhibition of Japanese-born, Los Angeles–based artist Ken Ohara (b. 1942). Featuring 22 photographs and 4 accompanying documents from his groundbreaking series CONTACTS (1974–76), this exhibition showcases Ohara’s innovative photographic experiment, where he mailed a preloaded camera to strangers across the U.S., instructing them to document their own lives before passing the camera along. During this process, Ohara relinquished authorship, decentralizing his point of view but rather facilitating and cocreating a uniquely personal and democratic portrait of Americans and American life at a time of economic and political unrest.

The resulting “contact sheets,” a recent acquisition to the Whitney’s collection, are shown in chronological order and offer intimate glimpses into the lives of participants across thirty-six states. The exhibition explores themes of human connection and the collective synchronicities of mundane life, utilizing the groundbreaking analog photography of the 1970s and contemporary image-sharing culture.

Ken Ohara: CONTACTS is organized by Eli Harrison, Curatorial Fellow, Whitney Museum of American Art.

Grace Rosario Perkins: Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers
October 18, 2025–February 8, 2026

Grace Rosario Perkins: Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers marks the first solo museum exhibition in New York City for Grace Rosario Perkins (Akimel O'odham/Diné, b. 1986, Santa Fe, New Mexico). The presentation brings together approximately ten recent works—primarily large-scale paintings made between 2022 and the present, including two created specially for this exhibition, as well as a new sculpture on view for the first time.

The title of the exhibition draws from imagery that connects the artist’s family to their tribal homelands in the southwestern United States. Perkins’s vibrant and densely layered works are shaped by an intuitive, dynamic process of addition and removal. Working with acrylic, spray paint, and collage, she often incorporates wide-ranging materials that speak to both individual and collective memory, including found objects and personal belongings such as photographs, jewelry, pages from books, fabric, plastic bags, plaster, and botanicals. Guided by diaristic encounter, DIY ethos, spirituality and plant medicine, Perkins references popular and material culture, language, music, and sports as they converge with more intimate reflections on grief, love, and hope.

Through abstraction, Perkins resists reductive representations of Indigenous identity, instead presenting an expansive vision rooted in both ancestral knowledge and rooted in both ancestral knowledge and the urgencies of now. Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers offers a vital and multifaceted portrait of an artist creating new forms of storytelling.

Grace Rosario Perkins: Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers is organized by Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs, with Rose Pallone, Curatorial Assistant.