19 Can’t-Miss Museum Shows Across the U.S. in 2026

From Old Masters blockbusters to overdue reevaluations, 2026 is shaping up to be an exceptionally strong year for museum-going in the United States. Across the country, institutions are mounting ambitious shows that revisit canonical figures from new angles. Here we’ve compiled a list of the most compelling exhibitions to have on your radar—from New York and Detroit, to Houston and Atlanta.

“Renaissance to Runway: The Enduring Italian Houses” at the Cleveland Museum of Art
November 9, 2025–Sunday, February 1, 2026

High art meets high fashion at this cross-curatorial show that explores how the two fields have shaped each other across centuries. The story begins during the Renaissance, when clans like the Medici and Sforza wielded fashion as influence, and stretches into the 1900s, when emerging fashion companies in Italy similarly dominated style with quality fabrics and craftsmanship. We’ll be brought up to present day, with a spotlight on how fashion houses such as Versace and Ferragamo have looked to period aesthetics for fresh inspiration. Around 80 ensembles and garments will be on view alongside 40 pieces of fine jewelry, each element staged alongside corresponding art-historical examples from the museum’s wide-ranging collections.

“The One-Two Punch: 100 Years of Robert Colescott” at the Tacoma Art Museum
December 5, 2025–May 2026

The Tacoma Art Museum in Washington unveiled “The One-Two Punch: 100 Years of Robert Colescott” in early December. It’s the first presentation in the museum’s new dedicated gallery for an annual artist award known as “The Current,” and celebrates the centenary of the artist’s birth. Colescott is famous for his vibrant, sometimes exaggerated figurative painting, his reframing of important historical events, and unsparing views of race and identity in America.

“Containing Multitudes” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art
December 20, 2025–August 2, 2026

On America’s 250th year, the Minneapolis Institute of Art is bringing together 95 photographic works from its collection that illustrate the nation’s diversity, beauty, and contradictions. Taking a page from Walt Whitman—whose quote “I contain multitudes” gives the exhibition its title—the show will unpack a sense of pluralism through works by pioneers including Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and Ansel Adams, as well as contemporary practitioners such as Dawoud Bey, Catherine Opie, and Carrie Mae Weems. Long beloved pieces will shown alongside new acquisitions (including a group of images by anonymous amateur photographers, recently gifted to the museum by collector Peter J. Cohen) to expand what MIA curator Casey Riley terms “our understanding of what America is and might be.”

“Frida: The Making of an Icon” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
January 19–May 17, 2026

The MFA hasn’t just brought together 30 Frida Kahlo masterpieces. The museum is also delving into the artist’s legendary status, to try and unpack how she has become art history’s most famous woman, with name recognition that rivals the likes of Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol. An artist of Indigenous descent who suffered from lifelong physical disabilities, Kahlo died in relative obscurity. So how did she become a beloved pop culture figure and brand known worldwide? The show aims to answer that question, while showcasing 120 works by five generations of artists inspired by Kahlo.

“Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation” at the International Center of Photography, New York
January 29–May 4, 2026

Now celebrated as a forerunner of modern photography, Eugène Atget might have been lost to obscurity were it not for American photographer Berenice Abbott. Working as a young studio assistant to Man Ray in Paris in 1926, she met Atget, and took his portrait shortly before his death. She ended up acquiring much of Atget’s archives, working for decades to champion his views of the Paris streets, taken over the course of some 30 years and documenting grand monuments, as well as humble details, before the city’s modernization reshaped much of its landscape. This is the first show to highlight Abbott’s role in cementing Atget’s place in art history, including MoMA’s 1968 acquisition of 1,415 glass negatives and 8,000 vintage prints by the artist, which she had safeguarded since his death.

“Say It Loud: AAMARP, 1977 to Now” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
February 12–August 2, 2026

The ICA takes a look at the art and influence of the African American Master Artists-in-Residence Program (AAMARP), founded at Boston’s Northeastern University in 1977 by artist, educator, and activist Dana C. Chandler Jr. The first-of-its-kind Black artist-run alternative art space grew out of the Black Arts Movement in Boston, offering free studio space and hosting exhibitions, performances, lectures, films, and workshops. Over the past five decades, AAMARP has produced work in a wide range of mediums, from figurative painting to textiles to woodworking to street photography, embracing racial justice and activism. And it still operates as a collective of 13 artists, with work by Benny Andrews, Ambreen Butt, Michael Jones, Stanley Pinckney, and Rene Westbrook, among others, included in the show.

“Village Square: Gifts of Modern Art from the Pearlman Collection to the Brooklyn Museum, LACMA, and MoMA” at Los Angeles County Museum of Art
February 22–July 5, 2026

Before it opens its expansive new Peter Zumthor-designed digs next fall, LACMA is putting on view its rich gift from the Pearlman Foundation, which dispersed its holdings to the L.A. museum, as well as New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Brooklyn Museum, earlier this year. The show will serve as a sort of primer on collecting class in Los Angeles (think: Hollywood-adjacent and in love with California Impressionism) by interrogating, in the museum’s words, “how trends in ‘taste’ inform the museum’s collection.” It’s here you’ll find 50 of the artworks that the Pearlmans gathered over a lifetime. These include landscapes, still lifes, and portraits by the likes of Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Amadeo Modigliani, and Chaïm Soutine, whose (1921–22) kickstarted Henry Pearlman’s collection.

“Agnes Martin: Painting Is Not Making Paintings” at Dia Beacon, New York
from April 4, 2026

Agnes Martin began her career as painter of watercolor landscapes before moving into the abstraction that would come to define her legacy. In doing so, she confronted and challenged the relationship between art, commercialism, and creative independence. This show traces this pivotal shift, focusing on a selection of paintings from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. They reveal the emergence of her nonobjective vocabulary and iconic grid patterning during a formative period before her break from painting in 1967. Among the works on view is 2001’s —an austere canvas with subtle patterning that plays on the viewer’s vision—which captures her notion that “the value of art is in the observer.”

“Isamu Noguchi: “I am not a designer” at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta
April 10–August 2, 2026

Call him a sculptor, architect, or designer—or call him none of that at all. Isamu Noguchi was never one for categories or convention, and a thoughtful reexamination of his boundary-spanning practice is always welcome. The interactive show’s nearly 200 works span set designs for Martha Graham, furniture pieces for Knoll and Herman Miller, a house model he built with architect Kazumi Adachi, as well as other prototypes for unrealized projects. One highlight is the playground commission he designed for the High Museum in 1976—the only Noguchi playground built in the U.S. in his lifetime. After originating in Atlanta, the show will travel to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, in September 2026, then the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York in February 2027.

“Marcel Duchamp” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
April 12–August 22, 2026

Look, you really only need the two words of this show’s title to sell art fans on this show. But if you want to get your mouth watering, consider: It promises 300 works of art, and it is the first major Duchamp show since 1973. This is a big one. (It is co-organized with the Philadelphia Art Museum, where it will be on view October 10, 2026 through January 31, 2027; the Centre Pompidou and Grand Palais will present a version of the exhibition in Paris in spring 2027.)

“Matisse’s Femme au Chapeau: A Modern Scandal” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
May 16–September 7, 2026

More than 120 years after Henri Matisse’s Femme au Chapeau (1905) debuted at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, the historic painting is getting another major outing. This time, though, it comes with a storied history. Where it once scandalized French audiences for its boldly expressive palette, the canvas is now better known for marking a shift in Matisse’s Neo-Impressionist leanings and activating Fauvism, in turn upending the artistic traditions of the day. This exhibition will trace the painting’s journey from the Paris Salon to art-historical infamy, exploring its creation, context, and impact. Part of it will also spotlight the work’s subject, Amélie Matisse, who famously remarked of the portrait’s reception: “I am in my element when the house burns down.”

“Keith Haring in 3D” at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
June 6, 2026–January 25, 2027

We know Haring best for his spirited murals and paintings, but the artist’s work was far from two-dimensional—literally. At this show, which documents his often overlooked practice as a sculptor, you will find a range of works that Haring created in 3D, from monumental sculptures to painted skateboards. Begun in the early 1980s, Haring’s sculptural pieces gave his dynamic characters a fresh tactility, while offering him canvases on a new scale. He applied his signature motifs to objects including cars, boomboxes, and old television sets; he created large totems and sculptures with metal and wood. Visitors to the exhibition will get to move around and alongside these works, inviting an expanded kind of public engagement and reflection the artist always sought.

“Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions” at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York
June 26–October 4, 2026

There’s so much to say about art and Tarot. From the looks of it, the curators are doing it right, giving room to the history while also bringing us up to date by exploring its fascination for artists today. Expect displays unlocking the origins of the famed fortune-telling system, in a section called “Renaissance Symbols,” curated by Joshua O’Driscoll and Frank Trujillo. Then, in a second, “Modern Visions” section, curators Claire Gilman and Esther Levy turn to Tarot modernist distillation, when the familiar-looking Rider-Waite Tarot Deck appeared around 1909, with art by Pamela Colman Smith. The modern part of the show also promises great figures of 20th-century art who found inspiration in Tarot, from André Breton to Betye Saar. I fully endorse the exclamation point the Morgan has included in the title!

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“Georgia O’Keeffe: Architecture” at the Detroit Institute of Art
September 13, 2026–January 3, 2027

If you think of O’Keeffe mainly for her flowers or her animal skulls, the Detroit Institute of Arts hopes you will get to know her buildings. From the Art Deco-adjacent glam of her 1920s skyscrapers to the eerie and tranquil adobe houses and barns she painted out West, you can pass through her entire life via the subject of architecture, which is what this show promises to do.

“Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley” at the Blanton Museum of Art
September 13, 2026–January 17, 2027

Step into what feels like a wholly created universe filled with fascinating objects that fuse art, design and technology with a touch of the fantastical. This marks the first mid-career survey of twin brothers Nikolai and Simon Haas, who founded their Los Angeles studio in 2010. The show, which was organized by the Cranbrook Art Museum in Michigan, presents 15 years of their colorful, otherworldly and often biomorphic sculptures. The brothers, who are Austin natives, said they take inspiration from their childhood city’s energy and imagery.

“Roy Lichtenstein” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 
October 14, 2026–April 2027

The Whitney announced this celebration of the centennial of American Pop art great Roy Lichtenstein way back in 2023, but still hasn’t revealed any details about the highly anticipated exhibition. The artist is best known for mimicking the Ben-Day dot printing process used for comic books and controversially copying the work of comic artists.

“Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
2026

After its current run at the SFMOMA and a stop at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the first retrospective for Suzanne Jackson will touch down on the East Coast to wrap up its run at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. (The three venues co-organized the show.) Over her six-decade-plus career, Jackson has developed into a master of color and light, and the 81-year-old has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. Ortuzar Projects in Tribeca hosted her first New York solo show in 2019, and her recent hanging paintings, which she calls “anti-canvases,” appeared in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. But the retrospective dives deeper, highlighting the breadth of Jackson’s work in poetry, dance, and theater design. It also gets into the history of Gallery 32, the exhibition space she ran out of her Los Angeles studio from 1968 to 1970—David Hammons, Betye Saar, and Senga Nengudi showed there—as well as her role as artistic coordinator for the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), a spiritual successor to the WPA Art Project.