It’s safe to say 2026 is going to be a banner year for art. Museums across the United States are mounting shows to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary. Major retrospectives are honoring contemporary artists and old masters alike. And unsung talents are finally getting their due, including the 19th-century Black and Native American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, the subject of a major exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts.
A great exhibit can make us see an artist in a new light or introduce us to one we somehow overlooked. By consuming art, we’re ensuring these voices live on, something Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, PEM’s George Putnam Curator of American Art and exhibition co-curator, says is key. He hopes that the Edmonia Lewis exhibit “will inspire visitors to think about whose memories we all carry. In other words,” he tells Afar, “we want visitors to walk away understanding the collective responsibility to remember that we all have, so that undersung artists and cultural change-makers like Lewis are never forgotten again.”
Here are the best museum exhibits to plan a trip around this year.
Related: Your Month-by-Month Guide to the Most Exciting Cultural Events in the U.S. in 2026
Frida: The Making of an Icon
The Museum of Fine Art’s Frida Khalo retrospective will showcase not only the Mexican artist but also five generations of artists she inspired.
Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston/Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museum Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society, New York
Frida: The Making of an Icon at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston looks beyond Frida Kahlo’s paintings to examine how she became one of the most recognizable figures in global culture. Featuring more than 30 works by Kahlo, alongside 120 pieces by five generations of artists she inspired (including Judy Chicago, Morimura Yasumasa, and Martine Gutierrez), the exhibition traces the evolution of her carefully constructed self-image—from her own unflinching self-portraits to the many ways her likeness and ideas have been reimagined and adapted by artists, activists, and corporations alike.
Anchored by key works such as Diego and I and Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, the show amplifies Kahlo’s art with archival photographs, clothing, and documents that reveal how she used fashion in particular as a political tool. Departing from the traditional retrospective, The Making of an Icon asks how a once-obscure painter became art history’s most famous woman—and what her image continues to mean today.
Make a trip of it: 10 Houston Restaurants Where You Can Taste the Flavors of America’s Most Diverse City
Nick Cave: Mammoth
From his iconic Soundsuits to his immersive installations, multidisciplinary artist Nick Cave’s work is defined by a fearless maximalism—art that dazzles, provokes, and always goes big. For his first solo show in D.C., he’s transforming the galleries at the Smithsonian American Art Museum into Nick Cave: Mammoth, an experiential, otherworldly landscape—part excavation site, part dreamscape—where resurrected mammoths, reimagined relics, and found objects invite visitors to reckon with loss, memory, and the fragile bond between humanity and the natural world. The question at the heart of the exhibit (the museum’s largest-ever commission of work by a single artist) looks at the mammoths’ extinction and asks how can we adapt and, ultimately, thrive?
Make a trip of it: 4 Days in Washington, D.C.
Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone
Lewis’s Forever Free, made in 1867, is believed to be the first sculpture by a Black American that celebrated emancipation.
Photo by Stephen Petegorsky (L); courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (R)
The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) is hosting the first-ever retrospective for Edmonia Lewis, a boundary breaking 19th-century Black and Native American sculptor whose work addressed themes of emancipation, Indigenous identity, and religious freedom. The show brings together 30 of Lewis’s sculptures—many of which had been lost over time—plus letters and photographs, capturing her full story in a way it has never been told before.
“During her lifetime, journalists and audiences spoke of Edmonia Lewis’s ‘indomitable spirit’ and ‘unconquerable energy’ as she worked, in the face of great obstacles to bring to life her creative vision through sculpture,” says co-curator Jeffrey Richmond-Moll. “We want visitors to appreciate both her extraordinary story, as she transcended barriers of race, gender, and class in her day, and also the remarkable breadth of her sculptural career.”
Make a trip of it: 4 Days in Boston: Century-Old Bookshops, Cocktails Decided by Dice, and, of Course, Lobster
Tracey Emin: A Second Life
My Bed, by Tracey Emin, is the artist’s take on a bad breakup. It’ll be on view at the Tate Modern.
Photo by Prudence C/The Saatchi Gallery, London
One of Britain’s most celebrated and provocative contemporary artists, Dame Tracey Emin takes a fearless approach to her work, pouring her own trauma and vulnerability into her paintings, videos, sculptures, and installations.
With A Second Life, the Tate Modern presents the largest ever survey of her work, spanning four decades and featuring more than 90 pieces—beginning with works from her first exhibition (photographs of her art school paintings that she destroyed) and moving on to her 1990s breakthroughs, including My Bed, an installation capturing an alcohol-fueled meltdown following a breakup, and finally onto sculptures and large-scale paintings made more recently after she suffered through bladder cancer. In the press release, Emin noted that the show will be “a bench mark” for her: “A moment in my life when I look back and go forward. A true celebration of living.”
Make a trip of it: 4 Days in London and Hotels We Love in London
Raphael: Sublime Poetry
For the first time, you won’t have to travel to Europe to see the greatest paintings of Raphael, the supreme High Renaissance artist. This March, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art will unveil the first ever major exhibition of his work in the USA, Raphael: Sublime Poetry, showcasing more than 200 of his paintings, drawing, tapestries, and decorative artworks. The curators spent seven years pulling together the show; many of the pieces have never been shown together, offering a new perspective of his tragically short career (he died at 37).
Highlights include Portrait of Baldassarre Castiglione, now in the Louvre, considered one of the greatest portraits of the High Renaissance, and Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn, housed in Rome’s Galleria Borghese. The National Gallery’s The Virgin and Child with Infant Saint John the Baptist in a Landscape (The Alba Madonna) will be paired with Raphael’s sketches for the piece, held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Lille.
Make a trip of it: 4 Days in New York City—How to Have the Perfect Long Weekend, According to Locals and Hotels We Love in New York City
Echolalia
Musician Björk gets honored by her hometown with an exhibition at the National Gallery of Iceland, in Reykjavík.
Photo by Alexander Jung/Shutterstock (L); photo by Viðar Logi (R)
Best known as a pop star, Björk has spent five decades proving she’s something far bigger: a visionary, multidisciplinary artist pushing music, technology, and fashion into uncharted territory. Her upcoming exhibition at the National Gallery of Iceland in Reykjavík—her hometown—is titled Echolalia, a term for the repetition of another’s words, and it unfolds across three immersive installations.
The first draws from her forthcoming 11th studio album, while the second, Ancestress, presents a hypnotic film meditation on life’s cyclical nature, featuring masked musicians and dancers, including Björk and her son. The final work, Sorrowful Soil, pairs footage of the erupting Fagradalsfjall volcano with a sound installation: a 30-voice chorus singing a nine-part requiem she wrote in mourning of her mother.
A fourth gallery hosts Metamorphlings, a retrospective of Björk’s longtime collaborator: mask maker and visual artist James Merry. The show’s opening lines up with the start of the Reykjavík Arts Festival, a biennial bringing together major international artists alongside leading Icelandic voices, giving you plenty of reason to linger in the land of fire and ice.
Make a trip of it: Off the Tourist Trail in Iceland and Hotels We Love in Iceland
Keith Haring in 3D
Keith Haring Untitled (Buick art car), 1986: enamel on 1963 Buick Special
Courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art/Keith Haring Foundation
Dates: June 6, 2026–January 25, 2027
The pop artist Keith Haring is best known for his primary-colored graphic prints—dancing bodies, barking dogs—that now adorn everything from Urban Outfitters socks to H&M tees. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is shining a light on his lesser-known three-dimensional works in a major exhibit that coincides with the debut of its massive, 114,000-square foot extension, nearly doubling the museum’s size.
“Keith Haring in 3D feels like the perfect show to inaugurate the museum’s expansion because Haring’s work was deeply rooted in openness, access, and community,” says Victor Gomez, assistant curator, contemporary art. “Our expansion has been focused on creating more spaces for people, ideas, and dialogue, and Haring’s practice was driven by those same values. Launching the expanded museum with an artist who challenged traditional boundaries and believed art was for everyone just felt right.”
The show includes massive wood and metal sculptures, towering totems, and numerous unconventional canvases adorned with Haring’s signature squiggly figures and colorful lines: skateboards, boomboxes, clothing, and even a 1963 Buick Special. “One of the goals of this exhibition is to move beyond the instantly recognizable and reintroduce Keith Haring as a deeply experimental, wide-ranging artist,” says Gomez. “My hope is that visitors leave with a renewed sense of curiosity about [him] and a deeper appreciation of his seriousness and impact as an artist. Ideally, the exhibition also inspires visitors to tap into their own creativity and make art.”
Make a trip of it: The Country’s Most Underrated Fall Foliage Route
RM x SFMOMA
Those who follow RM, the rapper, producer, and leader of K-pop group BTS, on social media know that he’s an avid art lover and collector. He’s vlogged from Art Basel and gushed over Calder sculptures at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and Pissarro paintings at the Musée d’Orsay. Now Bangtan Boys obsessives and art fans alike will get a peak at his prized pieces with RM x SFMOMA, an exhibit featuring works from his personal collection paired with paintings from the museum (including ones by Mark Rothko, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Paul Klee).
Many of RM’s pieces are by Korean artists, such as abstract painter Yun Hyong-keun and calligraphist Kim Jeong-hui, and are being shown publicly for the first time. In a statement, RM said that “we live in an age defined by boundaries.” This show aims to blur those lines. He continued: “I don’t want to prescribe how these works should be seen; whether out of curiosity or study, all perspectives are welcome. My only hope is that this exhibition can be a small but sturdy bridge for many.”
Make a trip of it: 4 Days in San Francisco: Floating Parks, Parrot Spotting, and a Revitalized Hippie Neighborhood and Hotels We Love in San Francisco
