Explore five centuries of the artifice of identity— from the splendid metamorphoses of classical myths to the posturing and bodily reinvention of contemporary drag culture. Shapeshifting includes approximately 50 prints, drawings, photographs, and artists’ books from the BMA’s collection that explore transformation and masquerade as recurring themes of artistic imagination across time and place.

Beatrice Glow is a New York- and Bay Area-based multi-sensory and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the social history of plants. For her first exhibition in a major U.S. museum, Glow delves into the unseen and unsavory sociohistorical and ecological realities underlying the tobacco industry’s veneer of luxury through her digitally printed and embroidered silk textiles, VR-sculpted and 3D-printed objects, watercolors, and scent experiences.

This exhibition showcases William Cordova’s on the lower frequencies i speak 4 u (2019), a remarkably complex work that originates from the Peruvian American artist’s research into individuals, places, and narratives significant to the Civil Rights Movement that intersect with contemporary social and musical history.

Organized by Carnegie Museum of Art, this exhibition debuts a recent body of work by New York-based artist Elle Pérez.

Including 13 photographs created between 2019 and 2021, Devotions explores relationship building, creating space to reflect on how we navigate ourselves in relation to others and the world. Pérez’s carefully sequenced images dwell in moments of grief and care, pain and pleasure, desire and self-exploration. Amidst recurring motifs of water, touch, and BDSM are also striking choices in proximity, scale, color, and light.

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love will feature more than 45 paintings and works on paper made between 2019 and 2022, that weave together motifs found in historical paintings with recognizable 21st-century moments to create new worlds based in Toor’s imagination. Among the works are several made especially for the exhibition and inspired by paintings in the BMA’s renowned 17th- to 19th-century European collection, such as Sir Anthony van Dyck’s Rinaldo and Armida (1629).