On Christmas night, 1776, less than six months after the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed and despite freezing temperatures, driving rain and a strong nor'easter, George Washington led a flotilla of soldiers across a frozen river to a surprise victory the next day over the British near Trenton, N.J. It was this epic moment, which buoyed morale and saved the Revolutionary War from collapse, that Emanuel Leutze memorialized in "Washington Crossing the Delaware" (1851), in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gray clouds darken the sky, but Leutze bathes Washington in light, depicting him as an unflinching leader of a squad of men that purposely includes a Native American and a black man.

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Washington

"Grandma Moses: A Good Day's Work" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum honors the career of Anna Mary Robertson "Grandma" Moses (1860-1961) using words she chose to summarize her contented, never-idle life. Yet maybe one of her paintings provides a better title: "Grandma Moses Goes to the Big City" (1946). It depicts her in a black dress, ready to depart from her home in Eagle Bridge, N.Y., in November 1940, for Manhattan, where Gimbels department store was displaying her works. But only now, many decades later, is a large, urban museum devoting a major monographic exhibition to her work.

Grandma Moses Goes to the Big City

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Philadelphia

A boxy, 11-foot-tall, shingled "2nd Meetinghouse" (2025) opens "A World in the Making: The Shakers" at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia—appropriately. A meetinghouse stood at the center of every village created by the Shakers, the separatist and celibate Christian religious sect founded in the 18th century that was devoted to communal living and simple, functional design. But this rendition is different. It offers the customary plain benches inside, but other interior features, like an iron stove, sit outside. And Amie Cunat, the artist, painted it not the traditional white, but in shocking Yves Klein blue.

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Houston

More Frida Kahlo? The Mexican artist (1907-1954), who died a relative unknown, has been given at least a dozen museum exhibitions in the past decade. Her artworks, exotic looks and troubled biography have inspired legions of artists. Her image, with its trademark unibrow, graces hundreds of commercial products, and she has been celebrated in movies, plays and even a 2022 opera about her and her husband, Diego Rivera, that will take the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in May (accompanied by a related show now open at the Museum of Modern Art). Her star eclipsed Rivera's years ago. For museums, she's box-office magic, ranking with Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet and Warhol.

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The Passion of Jesus ranks among the most common themes in Western art, painted or sculpted by artists too numerous to count, with many striving to create artworks both emotionally stirring and original. In the small Capponi chapel just inside the church of Santa Felicità in Florence, Jacopo Carucci—better known as Pontormo—devised an altarpiece that is among the most imaginative, most stunning visions of a harrowing episode in Christ's final days on earth.

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