Must-see New York City museum openings and exhibitions in 2026

Surveying twenty-five years of Carol Bove’s career, from her early drawings to an ambitious new series of scrap metal and steel tubing ‘collage sculptures’, this is the American artist’s largest institutional presentation to date. In dialogue with the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda, the artist’s interventions aim to subtly recalibrate the experience of moving through the building, mirroring her ability to coax stainless steel into crumpled or wadded forms that carry an unexpected emotional weight.

Set to examine Marcel Duchamp’s multifaceted career from 1900 to 1968, this exhibition is the first US retrospective of the protean artist’s work since 1973. Featuring approximately 300 works by the artist Willem de Kooning declared a ‘one-man movement’, the show will present major pieces including the Cubist masterpiece Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912) as well as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23), which rerouted painting for the next century. A room will be devoted to his invention of the readymade, a concept that forever altered the possibilities of sculpture.

After four years, the New Museum will reveal its 60,000-square-foot expansion designed by OMA / Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas in collaboration with Cooper Robertson. The inaugural exhibition, New Humans: Memories of the Future, will explore the evolving relationship between humans and technology through the work of more than 150 international artists — including Jamian Juliano-Villani, Pierre Huyghe and Anicka Yi — as well as writers, scientists and other thought leaders.

A court painter to the Spanish King Charles III, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) also produced a body of work that belied his official duties and represented his personal despair about war and power. Dovetailing with the 250th anniversary of the United States, this exhibition at the Hispanic Museum & Library considers the ramifications of the American Revolution as well as the subsequent French Revolution and the Spanish War of Independence on the art of Goya and other artists in his circle. Highlights include a rotating selection of prints from his eighty-two-etching-series Disasters of War (1810–1820) as well loans of his portraits of two major figures of the American Revolution: Admiral Jose de Mazarredo and General Francisco de Saavedra.

Sublime Poetry marks the first comprehensive exhibition in the US devoted to the Italian Renaissance master Raphael (1483–1520). Drawing on major public and private collections — including the Galleria Borghese’s loan of the exquisite Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn (1505-6) — the exhibition brings together more than 200 works of drawing, painting and tapestry. Examining Raphael’s trajectory from his birthplace in Urbino, through his artistic ascent in Florence, to his final and extraordinarily productive decade at the papal court in Rome, the curatorial scope promises to illuminate recent scientific discoveries relating to his practice through the application of state-of-the-art technologies. Particular attention is devoted to the role of women in Raphael’s oeuvre, based on his pioneering use of the female nude model in Western art and his refined treatment of the Madonna and Child subject matter.

Seventy works, from Buddhist and Hindu sculpture to Chinese, Korean and Japanese ceramics, will go view in one of a series of exhibitions dedicated to the Asian art collection of Asia Society’s founder John D. Rockefeller 3rd and his wife, Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller. Acquired between the 1950s and the 1970, the grouping was bequeathed to the museum in 1979. True to the institution’s mission of educating American society about Asian cultures, the exhibition features exceptional examples of historic achievements in Asian art, such as a Tang dynasty sancai-glazed figurine, an engraved and embossed silver stem cup from the same era and a Chola period statue of the Hindu deity Shiva recently gifted to the museum by the Rockefellers’ daughter Hope Aldrich.

Covering five decades of the feminist painter’s excellence in erotic figuration, Joan Semmel: In the Flesh fully lives up to its title. Emerging from a generation of women artists, critics and thinkers committed to articulating women’s perspectives, Semmel painted intimate, unabashed expressions of physicality and desire. Alongside key works from the artist’s Erotic Series of the early 1970s, the exhibition centres on a major piece from the museum’s permanent collection, Sunlight (1978), which places the viewer in Semmel’s first-person perspective, gazing over her own body. ‘I wanted the sensual feeling of how one experiences the body, rather than just how one sees it in the mirror,’ the artist said of the work. Semmel has also situated her project within the New York art world and the women’s movement through works from the Jewish Museum’s collection by Louise Fishman, Joan Snyder, Nancy Spero, Hannah Wilke and Nan Goldin.

Art of Noise dissects how the design of recording and playback media has shaped modes of listening over the past century. Featuring more than 300 works drawn largely from the collections of Cooper Hewitt and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the latter of which organised the exhibition, the presentation encompasses objects ranging from phonographs to the iPod, as well as LPs, radios and sound systems, alongside sound environments designed by the Stockholm-based engineer and multidisciplinary artist Devon Turnbull.

A rare loan from the Galleria Borghese in Rome will bring Caravaggio’s early masterwork Boy with a Basket of Fruit to New York for the first time in decades. Depicting a handsome youth with his shirt slipping from his shoulders and a frank, knowing gaze, the portrait was radical for its time. The composition was famously recreated in the English filmmaker Derek Jarman’s 1986 biopic of the painter. The exhibition juxtaposes the painting with relevant historical works such as Girl with Cherries (circa 1491–95), on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Anchoring the curatorial narrative is Gianlorenzo Bernini’s portrait drawing of Scipione Borghese, the early owner of Caravaggio’s painting and the collector behind the Galleria Borghese, which will also be on view. The basket, indeed, overfloweth.

Commemorating the 40th anniversary of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, this exhibition chronologically surveys how New York City’s material, cultural, and political landscape informed six decades of sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s work. After moving to the city at seventeen in 1922, Noguchi embraced a New Yorker’s identity, growing up to produce some of his most iconic works, ambitious projects, and exploring the creative possibilities of civic engagement. Bringing together more than fifty works and archival materials—including sculptures and project models—the exhibition highlights Noguchi’s interest in space as a medium for open-ended play. Standout pieces include portrait busts of figures from his artistic and social circles, abstract sculptures made in his early MacDougal Alley studio, and a set designed for Martha Graham’s dance Phaedra (1962). Alongside realized projects such as the Sunken Garden at Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza (1961–64), this presentation also reveals newly discovered proposals, from a sculpture garden for the Museum of Modern Art (1941) to toys for the monkeys at the Bronx Zoo (1946) and even a full redesign of Washington Square Park (1961). Noguchi’s imagination continues to shape how we think about what is possible.