May 31, 2025–April 5, 2026   See approximately 40 Impressionist works from Europe and the United States alike, drawn from the Museum’s rich holdings in this area as well as significant loans. Few artistic movements have captivated the imagination more enduringly than Impressionism, originally a term of derision implying slap-dash facture. The now-beloved bold, bright colors thickly applied with a…

April 5–May 18, 2025   For nearly a century, Young Art, the longest-running program in The San Diego Museum of Art’s history, has celebrated the creative voices of youth artists. This forty-eighth biennial exhibition marks an exciting new chapter as it merges with the strong tradition of the Youth Exhibition from the Museum of Photographic Arts (now MOPA@SDMA), bringing together…

August 2, 2025–February 8, 2026     Experience the powerful sculptures of Eduardo Chillida (1924–2002) in this exhibition marking the one-hundred-year anniversary of his birth. A visionary artist, Chillida’s body of work is closely linked to the landscape and traditions of his Basque Country homeland in northern Spain and frequently invokes the earth, sea, wind, and light, as well as…

March 6–June 1, 2025   This installation pays tribute to a passing generation of Minimalist artists, most notably Frank Stella (1936–2024). Highlighting the Museum’s major Stella, Flin Flon VIII (1970), the selection includes a broad range of work from diverse media, many of which have not been on view before.  Minimalism was both an extension and a rejection of Abstract…

February 15–August 10, 2025     Printmaking has played a central role in the development of the visual arts in modern Mexico, from early devotional engravings of the 1600s to the satirical lithographs of José Guadalupe Posada around 1900. The Muralist movement was inspired by Posada’s “calaveras” (animated skeletons), the Virgin of Guadalupe, and other Christian and nationalist images made…

March 22, 2025–March 21, 2027     A special group of loans from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, will afford visitors to The San Diego Museum of Art an extraordinary view of Dutch society and artistic traditions in the 17th century. By 1600, the Dutch Republic had begun to emerge as an international economic powerhouse. A seafaring nation, albeit…

February 22, 2025–Ongoing     Painting in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century often focused on solitary, contemplative experiences. These were a departure from the very dramatic or “sublime” landscapes of the earlier part of the nineteenth century, and instead of awe or fear, they capture a sense of calm and stillness, even a spiritual connection…

February 8–July 27, 2025 Dutch photographer Ruud van Empel (b. 1958) asks us to look at the world as if for the first time. Hovering between reality and artifice, his photographs offer an impossible density of detail and intensity of color. Van Empel creates these pictures over hundreds and even thousands of hours, constructing them digitally by combining fragments of…

February 1–July 13, 2025   “Although the result is obtained by chemical means, the little work it entails will greatly please ladies.” So wrote one of photography’s inventors, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), about his eponymous daguerreotype in 1839. Daguerre’s words, which associate women with idleness, are clearly misogynistic. Yet in a backhanded way, Daguerre predicted the pivotal role women would play…

October 19, 2024–August 10, 2025       “It is a quest for an architecture of light and lightness, inspired by nature which is about the quality of life as well as being eco-friendly.” —Norman Foster   Norman Foster (British, b. 1935), is one of the most esteemed international architects of our time, with projects worldwide. Among innumerable accolades, he…