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Duccio di Buoninsegna, “The Virgin and Child with Saints Dominic and Aurea,” c. 1312 – 1315, tempera and gold on panel (photo courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Pack A Suitcase, See Some Art

If money was no object, here's where art critic Nancy Tousley would travel this holiday season

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All my holidays are busman’s holidays. I travel to look at art at every opportunity within reason. If the sky was the limit this holiday season, here is where I’d go, starting in Canada then hopping the border and crossing the pond.

Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver

There’s a buzz right now around Firelei Báez, the Dominican-born, New York-based painter. Her exuberant, brightly coloured work draws on folklore and mythology to address colonial histories, diaspora and politics of place and heritage. Her eponymously titled exhibition is on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery through March 16. 

In North Vancouver, see the Jamaican-Canadian Tau Lewis’s outdoor sculpture commission on the façade of the Polygon Gallery. The multimedia work takes the form of a thick flowering vine made from all manner of objects found, given, altered and recycled. South of the border, Lewis has a solo show of new work, Spirit Level, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, through January 25. Another must see.

Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina

Beads in the Blood/ mīgisak mīgohk: A Ruth Cuthand Retrospective, on now through March 28 at the Mackenzie Art Gallery, showcases the biting wit and unsettling beauty of work (from 1983 to 2024) by a wise and influential artist of Plains Cree and Scottish ancestry, who confronts the enduring effects of colonialism with the enduring strength of Indigenous people. 

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, on now through March 2 at the National Gallery of Canada, crosses generations and continents to survey the intricate connections between textiles and abstract art over the past 70 years. Included are 130 works by more than 45 diverse creators, such as Anni Albers and Jeffrey Gibson, who test the divisions between art and craft. 

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

This great museum is an overflowing cornucopia. For starters, the four niches on the Met’s exterior hold a commissioned work, Long Tail Halo, by South Korean artist Lee Bul in which two tall twisting figures and two abstracted animals evoke guardians whose accumulation of forms build upon layered histories to express our present time. It’s on view through May 27, 2025.

Inside in the galleries, Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 is the jewel in the crown, a rare opportunity to see exquisite early Renaissance paintings, which helped to define Western painting, alongside sculpture and fine objects. The more than 100 works are by a remarkable group of Sienese artists, none of whom survived the plague of circa 1350 yet had an immeasurable impact for centuries. 

I’d also want to see Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now, through Feb. 17, which looks at how Black artists and other cultural figures have engaged with ancient Egypt from the 19th century to the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the present. And then there is Mary Sully: Native Modern, through Jan. 12, a self-taught artist whose vivid, intricately patterned colour-pencil drawings combine her Dakota heritage with the aesthetics of urban life to create abstracted portraits of people such as Fred Astaire and Gertrude Stein. 

Of course, once you get inside the Met you might not want to tear yourself away from its riches for at least week.

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, the artist’s first solo exhibition at MoMA, gives a new perspective on the six decades of the Swiss-born American photographer’s career after the publication of his landmark photobook, The Americans, in 1958. A towering influential figure in American photography, Frank divided his time between New York and Nova Scotia, after he bought a house in Mabou in 1970, and died there in 2019. Make a point of seeing this show, on view through Jan. 1, if you’re interested in photography. 

Then settle in with Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), a film montage that ticks off 24 hours in local real time through thousands of film and television clips culled from 100 years of moving images. It’s at one and the same time a brilliant, tour-de-force montage and a functioning timepiece. I’ve watched about 12 hours of it at different venues, including the Art Gallery of Alberta. It is mesmerizing.

Tate Modern, London, England

Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit is the first major UK exhibition of work by the provocative American artist who made installations, out of stuffed animals and textiles, as well as drawings, collages, performances, and videos. In Kelley’s 2012 obit, critic Holland Cotter called him “a pungent commentator on American class, popular culture and youthful rebellion." Amen. On view through March 9.

The powerful photography of the inimitable South African “visual activist” is on view in Zanele Muholi, through Jan. 26. Muholi documents and celebrates the lives of South Africa’s Black lesbian, gay, trans, queer and intersex communities, with some of the most strikingly beautiful images being their elegant self-portraits. 

The Louvre, Paris, France

“Fools are everywhere,” says the Louvre. The fool’s “fascinating, perplexing and subversive figure loomed large in the turmoil of an era not so different from our own.” Figures of the Fool: From the Middle Ages to the Romantics parses the many meaning of fools, omnipresent from the 13th to the 16th centuries, who disappear only to return late in the 18th century and throughout the 19th to play a key role in the advent of modernity. Richly complex, the unprecedented exhibition, on view through Feb. 3, brings together 300 works from 90 French, European and American institutions that include illuminated manuscripts, printed books and engravings, tapestries, paintings, sculptures, and objects precious and mundane. 

The Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain

Before the life-like Superrealist sculptures of the 20th century were turning heads, vivid figurative sculptures like those celebrated in Hand in Hand: Sculpture and Colour in the Spanish Golden Age, were giving vivacity and corporeal weight to the divine. Baroque polychrome sculpture’s close relationship to painting is shown off by surrounding nearly 100 sculptures with paintings and engravings that emulate or reproduce them, and classical works that demonstrate the importance of colour in sculpture since Antiquity. On view at the Prado through March 25.

Guggenheim Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain

Hilma af Klint brings a stunning survey of the pioneering Swedish abstractionist whose ground-breaking work was not shown publicly until 42 years after her death in 1932. Made against the background of turn-of-the-century social, political, technological, and spiritual change, Klint’s blend of figure and abstraction creates mystical transcendent paintings that focus the mind and make the world fall away into expectant serenity. On view through Feb. 2, 2025.

MAXXI: National Museum of the Arts of the 21st Century, Rome, Italy

The museum’s collections in art, architecture and photography have a new layout curated by the American conceptual artist Alex da Corte, who captured my rapt attention at the Venice Biennale in 2019. His curatorial stint at MAXXI, The Large Glass, includes a host of international artists in a meditation on contemporary experience. “We may move beyond, with nature as our guide, to a glass age,” da Conte speculates. “Here we may exist everywhere, evolving, while leaving no physical trace.” Something to ponder in the new year.

The rehang, on view through Oct. 26, 2026, includes works by Francis Alys, Alighiero Boetti, William Kentridge, Marisa Merz, Giuseppe Penone, Kara Walker and Luigi Ghirri. 

Palazzo Citterio, Brera Museums, Milan, Italy

And what better way to welcome 2025 than a trip to a brand-new museum of modern and contemporary art. Part of a museum complex called the Grande Brera, and set in a huge 18th-century palazzo, the long-awaited new addition to the complex has been in the planning for 50 years.

The opening this month has offered the first look at a 23-million euro restoration of the storied building and the wooden temple, based on Bramante’s famous Renaissance Il Tempietto in Rome, by the contemporary Italian architect Mario Cucinella, in the courtyard. On view in the galleries are paintings by Boccioni, Modigliani, Morandi, Picasso, Braque and di Chirico, among other artists. Make this an occasion to wander through the whole complex, which includes ancient art and rare books and documents. 

Now’s the time to book that airline ticket! ■

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