Through some 160 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, and ephemera, the exhibition will explore the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life in the new Black cities that took shape in the 1920s–1940s in New York City’s Harlem and nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration when millions of African Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South.

In 1534, Michelangelo left Florence for Rome, never to see his native city again. He was fifty-nine, which many contemporaries regarded as old, but for Michelangelo this move marked the beginning of a dramatic new chapter which would fundamentally shape his experiences as an artist and as a man. This exhibition looks at the last thirty years of Michelangelo's remarkable life, when his return to Rome brought him new commissions and reunited him with some of his closest friends. Forceful preparatory drawings for the monumental Last Judgement fresco as well as the newly conserved cartoon of the Epifania will be displayed alongside studies for Michelangelo's grand architectural projects, including the rebuilding of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Intimate letters, poems and drawings will offer powerful insights into his faith, relationships and experiences of old age.

Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction reveals the myriad ways textiles intersect with and influence world-renowned modern artists and movements. The exhibition delves into dynamic moments when social and political issues have activated textile production and artmaking with heightened focus and urgency. Traced chronologically with 160 works made in a range of techniques, it explores the overlap between abstract art, fashion, design and craft.

Exploring and honouring the history, community, landscape and ecology of the historic rural town in North Wales, the inaugural Ruthin International Arts Festival, themed ‘Elsewhere’, will showcase works from international artists and poets, including Anne Bean and Ansuman Biswas, Yue Minjun, W.N. Herbert, Sean O’Brien, Richard DeDomenici, Tomasz Szrama and Adam E. Holton.

The exhibition presents more than a hundred works by Guercino and artists of the same period, from more than thirty museums and collections, to showcase the artistry of the Old Master in the context of the craft and life of seventeenth-century painters. It brings together, for the first time in four hundred years, the cycle of paintings commissioned in Bologna by Alessandro Ludovisi, the future Pope Gregory XV.