Alma Thomas
Studio Museum in Harlem, New York
Opens July 14

It is the prerogative of the president of the United States to decorate the White House, both the offices of the West Wing and the residence of the East Wing, however he likes. (It has always been a he, so far.) When he took office in 2009, the incumbent and his wife made it known that they preferred modern and contemporary art, particularly abstract art, to the cowpoke landscapes and rodeo scenes favored by his predecessor. In the White House family dining room, a late work by Robert Rauschenberg hangs over the sideboard, but pride of place is given to an abstract painting, a numinous burst of color: Alma Thomas’s Resurrection (1966), sun yellow on the periphery, darkening as it condenses to a deep green nucleus. It sits at the head of the table.

As a young woman Thomas, who lived from 1891 to 1978, enrolled at Howard University, America’s most prestigious historically black college, to study home economics. She switched to painting, becoming the first student ever awarded an art degree, and spent the next four decades teaching art at a segregated junior high school. Not until her seventies could she devote herself to painting full time. What she then produced were shimmering, musical abstractions, made through cunning arrangement of short, jazzily irregular brushstrokes of solid color. They’re of a piece with the hue-happy art of her fellow abstractionists active in 1960s Washington — Anne Truitt, Sam Gilliam, Gene Davis — but Thomas’s more rhythmic, accented compositions also recall the divided color of Seurat and Signac a century beforehand. Which is not to say that Thomas was anything other than modern. March on Washington, a transitional painting from 1964, sees civil rights protesters dissolve into a multiracial jumble of brushstrokes; Splash Down Apollo 13 (1970), one of several glorious and moving responses to America’s space missions, radiates a full spectrum from a golden core.

In the 1960s and 1970s, to be a black abstract painter was a fraught enterprise. It was not merely the white art world that expected black artists to represent a supposedly monolithic culture; among African- Americans, too, art with an advocatory stance was far more in favor. That was certainly the case at the Studio Museum; the painter Howardena Pindell recalls that when she brought her abstract work to Harlem, the museum’s director told her to “go downtown and ‘show with the white boys.’” (Not that downtown was disposed to abstract art by African-Americans either.) Thomas never saw her race or indeed her gender as impediments to her contribution to American art, and this show, co-organized and first seen at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, continues a welcome effort to rebalance the history of American abstraction. In any event, as Americans wonder whether their next president will decorate the White House with the dictatorial bling familiar from his reality shows, the Studio Museum exhibition should remind us where black abstract painting belongs: not just in the home of the head of state, but in every collection serious about the history of American art.

 
Manon de Boer
Secession, Vienna
Opens July 1

A substantial new outing from the soft-spoken Dutch video artist, whose filmic portraits give dreamy, seductive form to the process of artistic creation. These six new films make a case for the importance of leisure in a professionalized world, and for an unburdened subconscious that can inform active, conscious pursuits. Also at the Secession this month: the sculptures of the San Francisco artist Vincent Fecteau and the poppy canvases of Jacques Derrida's favorite painter, Valerio Adami.

 
Amy Sillman
Portikus, Frankfurt
Opens July 2

The wry Brooklyn artist, materfamilias of the history-reformatting painters in MoMA’s much-debated “The Forever Now,” is now a professor at this town’s august Städelschule. Her stroppy, improvisatory paintings, in which body parts often impinge on abstract fields of turquoise and mauve, have lately been informed by her side hustle in animation — Sillman’s drawings on her iPad feature stuttering loops in which figures are in a constant state of change.

 
Versailles and the American Revolution
Château de Versailles
Opens July 5

Guillotines have their uses, but if you ask Hannah Arendt, the more important revolution of the late 18th century was the first one. This landmark show — staged in the palace’s Galeries des Batailles, for which Louis XVI commissioned a painting of the Battle of Yorktown — musters art, correspondence, and propaganda to explore France’s support for US independence, plus early Americans’ views of a royal house soon to fall. Also at Versailles this summer: Olafur Eliasson, whose optical effects may pale in comparison to the Hall of Mirrors.

 
Liverpool Biennial
Tate Liverpool, FACT, and elsewhere, Liverpool
Opens July 9

Britain's most important biennial coalesces this year around six themes, or “episodes,” intended to interweave narratives from the city’s past, present, and future. While some episodes are predictable (“Monuments from the Future” and “Technology”), others are less so; we’re watching how “Chinatown,” an ode to the oldest such immigrant community in Europe, plays out against a chilling new backdrop of post-Brexit nationalism and suspicion.

 
I Will Go Where I Don't Belong
Fiorucci Art Trust, Stromboli, Italy
Opens July 15

Concurrent with a rococo solo show now up at Rome’s Fondazione Memmo, the anthropologically inclined French artist Camille Henrot is organizing an unorthodox group exhibition on an Aeolian volcano. The artists she’s invited range from the fierce, seventysomething Egyptian painter Anna Boghiguian to the young, celestial video artist Rachel Rose, and many events are taking place in private homes across the island.

 
Nathalie Du Pasquier
Kunsthalle Wien
Opens July 15

Since the disbanding of Memphis, the Milanese architecture and design collective she cofounded, Du Pasquier insists she has moved on from textiles and prints. (Though she has still found time recently for collaborations with American Apparel and with Hay, Scandinavia's answer to Muji.) This first institutional retrospective turns to the paintings she has been making for the last three decades, notably geometric abstractions more conceptually grounded than her famed “decorated surfaces.”

 
Ed Ruscha and the Great American West
De Young Museum, San Francisco
Opens July 16

Our man in Los Angeles heads north for this expansive exhibition, featuring just under a hundred works rooted in the landscape of California and the desert. Sunsets and service stations, mountains and motels, the open road and the Sunset Strip: in Ruscha's vision of the west, the natural environment and the built one are all but identical.

 
Amar Kanwar
NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore
Opens July 30

The New Delhi-based documentarian, one of the most important video artists to emerge in the 1990s, has spent five years working on “The Sovereign Forest,” a manifold investigation of the environmental devastation wrought by mining giants in eastern India. As the conflict has evolved, the work has too; Kanwar’s archive of the present is in a constant state of revision.