2009 in art

• May 31 – Jaume Plensa's concrete sculpture Dream is unveiled at a former colliery site in Sutton, St Helens, England.^[1]
• September 9 – Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark, new building designed by American architect Steven Holl, opens.
• September 24 – René Magritte's painting Olympia (a nude portrait of his wife) is stolen from the museum at his former home, rue Esseghem 135 in Brussels, by two armed men. The stolen work is said to be worth about $1.1 million.^[2][3]
• October 16 – As part of its celebration of the 100th anniversary of Italian Futurism, the Performa 09 biennial, in collaboration with the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, premieres a concert at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art whereby it invited Luciano Chessa to direct a reconstruction project to produce accurate replicas of Luigi Russolo's Intonarumori instruments. This project offers the set of 16 original intonarumori (8 noise families of 1–3 instruments each, in various registers) that Russolo built in Milan in the summer of 1913. These intonarumori are physically built by luthier Keith Cary in Winters, California, under Chessa's direction and scientific supervision^[4]
• October 29 – The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum hosts Rob Pruitt's First Annual Art Awards in New York.^[5]
• November 14 – Nottingham Contemporary opens as the Centre for Contemporary Art Nottingham, a new gallery in Nottingham, England, designed by Caruso St John.
• December 31 — Edgar Degas's 1877 pastel Les Choristes is stolen from the Musée Cantini in Marseille; it will be found in the luggage compartment of a bus outside Paris in 2018.

• April 29 until August 2 - "The Pictures Generation", curated by Douglas Eklund, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.^[6]
• November 13 until February 28, 2010

"Botticelli : likeness, myth, devotion" at the Städel Museum, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.^[7]

• Banksy – Devolved Parliament^[8]
• George Condo - Memories of Bozo's Father^[9]
• Bruce Conkle – Burls Will Be Burls (sculpture, Portland, Oregon)
• Douglas Coupland – Digital Orca (sculpture, Vancouver, British Columbia)
• Ren Jun – Freezing Water Number 7 (sculpture, Vancouver, British Columbia)
• Michihiro Kosuge – Continuation (sculptures, Portland, Oregon)
• Kurt Laurenz Metzler - Urban People on Orchard Road in Singapore^[10]
• Yue Minjun – A-maze-ing Laughter (sculpture, Vancouver, British Columbia)
• Galvarino Ponce Morel – Bust of Bernardo O'Higgins (Washington, D.C.)
• Willy Wang – Statue of Confucius (sculpture, Houston, Texas)
• Patti Warashina – City Reflections (sculpture, Portland, Oregon)
• Statue of Eleftherios Venizelos (sculpture, Washington, D.C.)
• Statue of Lucille Ball (original sculpture, Celoron, New York)