With a shared sensibility and approach to design, graphic designer Paula Scher and illustrator Seymour Chwast have transformed their fields of practice. Celebrating the achievements of this remarkably creative couple, whose work is being shown together for the first time, this exhibition includes images in a wide range of formats, selected and installed by Chwast (American, born 1931) and Scher (American, born 1948).

This exhibition showcases diverse highlights from the Museum’s photography collection, tracing the medium’s history as a visual art form.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Ronaldus Shamask (American, born Netherlands 1945) burst onto the runway with thoughtfully spare, minimalist works during a time of buoyant excess. Disregarding trends, Shamask drew on his background in illustration, architecture, theater, and dance as well as collaborations with choreographers and artists to create a timeless body of work that paved the way for the minimalist fashions of today.

Dancing around the Bride is the first exhibition to explore the interwoven lives, works, and experimental spirit of Marcel Duchamp (American, born France, 1887–1968) and four of the most important American postwar artists: composer John Cage (1912–1992), choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009), and visual artists Jasper Johns (born 1930) and Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008).

Winslow Homer’s masterpiece The Life Line (1884) is the center of an exhibition about the making and meaning of an iconic American image of rescue. One of the great popular and critical successes of the artist’s career, the painting engages age-old themes of peril at sea and the power of nature, while celebrating modern heroism and the thrill of unexpected intimacy between strangers thrown together by disaster.