Scottish Art Highlights: June 2025

It’s degree show season, baby! By the time the June issue reaches you/the streets, you may just be able to catch the tail end of the Degree Show 2025 at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (DJCAD), Dundee. Open for a limited time only (until 1 Jun), this is a celebratory showcase of graduating students’ work spanning a range of media, processes and ideas. Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) and Glasgow School of Art (GSA) unveil their graduate shows to the public on 30 May, closing on 6 and 8 June respectively. For a flavour of what’s in store at GSA, visit the website's art section to read a preview of the exhibition by the students themselves.

Besides degree shows, there’s a few new exhibitions for your radar. Firstly, Garden Futures: Designing with Nature at V&A Dundee (until 25 Jan '26) offers a hope-filled possibility of a greener, more imaginative future through the visionary work of artists, designers and landscape architects. 

Then, atop Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, Fire on the Mountain, Light on the Hill opens at Collective on 20 June, continuing until 7 September. This solo exhibition presents recent work by Amsterdam-based visual and performance artist Mercedes Azpilicueta who is attuned to hidden stories from history, particularly acts of care and resistance. At Collective, Azpilicueta presents Potatoes, Riots and Other Imaginaries (2021), a mixed media installation that is rooted in research on the 1917 Potato Riots led by working-class women in the Jordaan neighbourhood of Amsterdam. Azpilicueta looks at present-day action, too, by platforming Ni Una Menos, a feminist social movement in Argentina.

Resistance, an exhibition dedicated to the art of protest dreamed up by legendary artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen, travels from Turner Contemporary in Margate to Modern Two in Edinburgh. Opening 21 June, Resistance traces the mainstreaming of photography and the power of an image to instigate sociopolitical change in the UK. Lesser-known protests such as the Blind March of 1920 and the 1930s hunger marches led by the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement can be found here. Black-and-white imagery photography also captures LGBTQ+ resistance against Section 28 of the Local Government Act and the fight against fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, including the Battle of Cable Street, East End London.