Let’s start with the obvious: yes, the pies are there. The cakes, the candy-colored gumball machines, the sundaes with whipped cream swirled to perfection — all rendered in Thiebaud’s signature thick, sugary impasto. But Art Comes from Art, the new retrospective at the Legion of Honor, is not about dessert. It’s about lineage, legacy, and the surprisingly radical idea that influence is not theft — it’s love.

One doesn’t just encounter Christine Sun Kim’s work — you overhear it, even in silence. In All Day All Night, her first solo museum exhibition in New York, Kim reclaims sound as a battleground, a playground, and most provocatively, a site of Deaf resistance.

You don’t view an Erwin Pfrang exhibition so much as submit to it. And The Ghosts Ask, currently on display at David Nolan Gallery, feels like a séance disguised as a sketchbook — equal parts excavation, interrogation, and metaphysical staring contest.

Hosted at the Harry Ransom Center, this lovingly assembled journey through the history, politics, and cultural power of children’s literature is less a nostalgic pat on the head and more a reminder that the stories we read before we can name our wounds are often the ones that shape them most.

Let’s be clear: Aloha Nō is not your resort-brochure Hawai‘i. There are no leis, no lū‘aus, no gentle ukuleles wafting in the background. The Hawai‘i Triennial 2025 shreds that postcard and sets fire to the idea that paradise is apolitical. Curated with sharp clarity and deep cultural conviction, Aloha Nō reclaims the language of welcome — not as a tourist slogan, but as an assertion of place, resistance, and Indigenous futurity.

There are exhibitions that decorate a museum, and then there are exhibitions that haunt it. Behold, the sprawling, soul-charged retrospective of María Magdalena Campos-Pons at the Getty, does the latter — not with theatricality, but with reverence, ritual, and the weight of centuries humming beneath every installation.