9 Must-See Museum Shows Across the U.S.

Although the less-than-stellar weather has meant summer getting off to a slow start, triple-digit temperatures and heavy humidity are surely in our future. Want to escape the heat? Step into the cool air-conditioned galleries of an art museum, where you can take a mental vacation. Feeling FOMO about the European excursions you’re not able to attend? Gustav Caillebotte’s 19th-century views of Parisian life are a good consolation. And if you’re looking to expand your mind beyond this realm, Anicka Yi and Saya Woolfalk have conjured up alternate realities in mind-bending solo exhibitions. Here are our pick of the best shows to see around the country this summer.

“Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings” at the Morgan Library and Museum
June 27, 2025–January 4, 2026

After a rocky start in the art world—where critics dismissed her high-octane, hyper-feminine style as girlish or superficial—Lisa Yuskavage’s legacy is undergoing a reappraisal. Now 62 and firmly mid-career, she has found renewed critical and market recognition. Her recent painting show at David Zwirner in Los Angeles confirmed her commercial relevance; and a new museum exhibition of her drawings aims to cement her place in the critical canon.

On June 27, the Morgan Library and Museum opens , the first comprehensive museum presentation of her work in just one medium, charting back to the 1990s through now. It’ll be an opportunity to see her work without the effect of her usual color range, as the works on paper are often made with materials with set pigments like graphite, pastel, charcoal, and Conte. The entirety of the museum’s Thaw Gallery will be filled with renderings of Yuskavage’s early explorations of the figure and still lives, and more recent dives into landscape.

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“Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World” at the Art Institute of Chicago
June 29–October 5, 2025

French painter Gustave Caillebotte was a member of the Impressionist group though his style stands out for being decidedly more realistic than some of his fellow artists (think Monet’s brushy waterlilies) and was also closely tied to his love of photography. Caillebotte frequently depicted friends and relatives in scenes set in late 19th-century urban Paris, whether it was famous scenes like Floor Scrapers or the Art Institute’s own Paris Street; Rainy Day.

This exhibition, which originally on view at the Musée d’Orsay last fall, includes more than 120 works—paintings, works on paper, photographs and other ephemera—and showcases a number of lesser-known but important works such as Musée d’Orsay’s recent acquisition, Boating Party, and the Louvre Abu-Dhabi’s The Bezique Game, alongside many works from private collections that are rarely seen by American audiences.

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“Anicka Yi” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
June 29–September 7, 2025

Deep in the heart of Texas, South Korean bio-tech artist Anicka Yi is having a museum show that opens on June 29 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, with several works dedicated to the theme of “karmic debt.”

Yi is known for her deeply imaginative conceptual artworks that toe the line between artwork and scientific exploration. Often, she blends uncommon mediums together, such as fragrance, musical instruments, and homemade robotics. Two of the pieces prominently featured in the show in Houston include an animatronic sculpture that moves in a manner meant to emulate prehistoric lifeforms, and another is a fully programmed software designed to keep Yi’s studio practice ongoing after her death.

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“Queer Lens: A History of Photography” at the Getty Center
June 17–September 28, 2025

Photography has long served as both a mirror and a weapon for the LGBTQ+ community—capturing, affirming, and at times rescuing queer life from erasure. “Queer Lens” at the Getty traces this layered history from the mid-19th century to the present, veering from the hyper-stylized, baroque portraits of Pierre et Gilles and David LaChapelle to Weegee’s raw street reportage. A 1966 photograph of the “Sip-In” protest at Julius’, Manhattan’s oldest gay bar (still open, still slinging cheeseburgers and brews), is especially resonant. So, too, are images of early pride events, long before corporate floats and branded sponsorships, when protest signs were handmade and clothing logo-free.

This hits differently in light of this year’s pride season, as the cowardly banks and big-box retailers—who once latched on to pride to vacuously virtue-signal and shill their wares—have retreated, fearing retribution from the current administration. But we don’t need them, and never did. As these images make clear, queer communities have always created space for themselves—and will continue to persevere, with or without corporate approval.

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“Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe” at the Museum of Arts and Design
Through September 7, 2025

Fans of Saya Woolfalk’s “world building” installation have a lot to dive into here. “Empathic Universe” marks a retrospective of her work, famous for a fictional narrative focused on an imagined race of women known as “Empathics.” Woolfalk creates a signature visual imagery for these women that is a blend of visual symbols and folklore that are rooted in an analysis and exploration of African, African American, Japanese, European, and Brazilian art and stories.

The artist tells her stories with the use of garment-based sculpture, video, paintings, and works on paper.

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“Wrapped Walk Ways” at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
June 28, 2025–January 18, 2026

In 1978, visitors strolling through Kansas City’s Loose Park might well have thought: “we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.” If they chose to follow the saffron fabric road, they’d find themselves immersed in , the temporary outdoor installation by Christo and Jeanne-Claude that transformed 2.7 miles of park pathways into a glowing, otherworldly landscape. As with their many site-specific interventions, the Bulgarian-born Christo and his partner Jeanne-Claude reimagined the familiar, inviting the public into a new, heightened experience of place and scale.

Now, as the 50th anniversary of approaches, the Nelson-Atkins Museum revisits this “fabulous expedition” through an exhibition drawn from the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation’s 2024 gift of preparatory drawings, plans, photographs, and archival materials—much of it ephemeral, yet visually compelling enough to be artworks in their own right. This behind-the-scenes look into the intricacy and artistry of the duo’s process is revelatory, offering a rare glimpse of Christo and Jeanne-Claude in two dimensions.

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“Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg: Glacial Decoy” at the Walker Art Center
June 26, 2025–May 24, 2026

The exhibition, which marks Rauschenberg’s centennial year, pays tribute to the groundbreaking 1979 dance of the same name (), which premiered at the Walker. Brown choreographed the performance, in which four figures in flowing dresses shift back and forth on the stage, against a backdrop created by Rauschenberg. His oversized, rotating black-and-white photographs of everyday objects serve as a way to ground the performers’ dramatic movements in the physical world. The exhibition includes original costumes, video documentation, and archival materials. Further, it kicks off a multidisciplinary series of programs to celebrate the artist’s centennial.

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“Charles Atlas: Hail the New Puritan” at the Bass Museum
Through October 19, 2025

“Hail the new puritan! Righteous maelstrom!” sang Mark E. Smith of The Fall, the English post-punk band who, by the early 1980s, was finding renewed vigor through its unexpected collaboration with renegade Scottish choreographer Michael Clark. The group’s 1984 live television appearance featured Clark’s troupe in their signature cut-out tights (and often bare backsides), merging the raw energy of punk with the formal discipline of ballet and queer subcultural spectacle—polka dots, whether painted on faces or used in fabric for costumes, was also a big thing for some mysterious reason. Their collaboration would later culminate in the 1988 ballet . Experimental filmmaker Charles Atlas was there to capture the scene—or rather, to reinvent it. (1985–86) is not so much a documentary as a fictionalized portrait of Clark’s world, offering an intimate, stylized snapshot of the vibrant collision of dance, fashion, nightlife, and underground culture in 1980s London.

Leigh Bowery, one of Clark’s most audacious collaborators, appears throughout this scene, as performer, muse, and provocateur. With now on view at The Bass, the film offers a timely counterpoint to the major retrospective “Leigh Bowery!” currently on view at Tate Modern in London. The unbridled creativity that flourished in 1980s London—rising up amid economic hardship, social unrest, and fraught sexual politics—feels especially resonant today, as artists once again turn to performance, identity, and community as radical forms of expression.

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“Vermeer’s Love Letters,” at the Frick Collection
June 18–August 31, 2025

Now that one of New York’s all-time favorite museums is back and better than ever, the Frick has another major treat for art lovers this summer. “Vermeer’s Love Letters” is the first show to be held in the museum’s new Ronald S. Lauder galleries. It features three of the beloved Dutch painter’s masterpieces, the Frick’s own , alongside two major loans, from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and from the National Gallery in Ireland. This marks the first time all three are being displayed in a single gallery together. It’s also the first major Vermeer exhibition in New York City in nearly 25 years.

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Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com