December 2026
The Allard Pierson opens White Plays Black, on blackface from minstrel shows to Zwarte Piet, the day before Sinterklaas, and Het Scheepvaartmuseum unveils the Solebay Tapestries. Kusama, de Kooning and Whistler stay on Museumplein into January, a few minutes' walk apart. Eight picks.
Allard PiersonOpens 4 December
From medieval "Moors" and 1840s minstrel shows to Zwarte Piet, the Allard Pierson's theatre collection shows how Dutch stages made blackface normal. Work by Kara Walker and Brian Elstak answers back.
Het ScheepvaartmuseumOpens 12 December
Two royally commissioned tapestries of the 1672 Battle of Solebay, designed by Willem van de Velde the Elder and woven at Mortlake in England. They are the largest acquisition in the museum's history.
Stedelijk Museum AmsterdamUntil 17 January
It starts with the childhood drawings where the dots first appear, then runs through seven decades and more than 300 works, including the 1965 rowing boat of Aggregation. The two Infinity Mirror Rooms give you about 25 seconds each.
RijksmuseumUntil 17 January
Woman I hangs near the Night Watch, but the show is mostly drawing: more than 120 works, starting with a teenage charcoal still life that reads like a photograph. The Guardian called Excavation "a knockout masterpiece".
Van Gogh MuseumUntil 10 January
Whistler's Mother comes from the Musée d'Orsay and the White House Nocturne from Washington, among about 100 works. Lost Painters said the etchings alone justify the visit, but found the rooms too dim for the grey canvases.
H'ART MuseumUntil 14 February
La Blouse roumaine, painted in 1940 in the colours of the French flag, rarely leaves the Centre Pompidou. Thirty-seven Matisses hang with Picasso, Rothko and Barnett Newman; Art's Talk found it "light and accessible", with little text to wade through.
Wereldmuseum AmsterdamUntil 22 August
A guitar signed by Nile Rodgers and Jerney Kaagman's metallic blue catsuit share the floor with a Soul Train room where you dance to the original footage. The show also covers the "Disco Sucks" backlash and the AIDS epidemic.
Foam Fotografiemuseum AmsterdamUntil 20 January
In Yibin I (Bathers), tiny swimmers gather under a boulder on the Yangtze while haze fills half the frame. Four decades of Kander follow, from Chernobyl to Obama against plain grey. Digital Camera World says he uses emptiness "as ingredients".
Foam Fotografiemuseum AmsterdamFree
Two-part Foam project in Amsterdam-West: Yomna El Beyaly solo at Mercatorplein (to 29 Oct) and the group show Al Nisa / Women at MAQAM (to 20 Dec), curated by Romaisa Baddar.
STRAAT Museum
A show tracing graffiti's cultural roots through names, tags, lines and repetition — the building blocks of a visual language born from movement and marking presence.
Museum Van Loon
Four woven tapestries by Malaysian textile artist Marcos Kueh in the Red Bedroom, a last love letter to his father that echoes the canopy of the empty four-poster bed.
Rembrandt House Museum
Over 80 works on paper, from Rembrandt to living artists, tracing how printmakers and draughtsmen kept pushing techniques and materials. Visitors can draw their own work in the gallery.
Wereldmuseum Amsterdam
Steps into the live restitution debate, exploring dilemmas and stories behind contested colonial-era objects.
Van Gogh Museum
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's print series 'One Hundred Aspects of the Moon' shown at the Van Gogh Museum for the first time: warriors, lovers and mythical beings in bold colour.
Nxt Museum
An interactive digital-puppetry installation by The Hague studio YONK, where visitors use gestures to guide animated characters into shared stories.
Rembrandt House Museum
Fifth edition: artists Marije Gertenbach and Shani Leseman take over working studios inside Rembrandt's house, with visitors able to watch them at work from 13 November to 10 January.
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
The annual selection of the best-designed Dutch books of 2025, chosen by a professional and a student jury, in the centenary year of the first selection.
Nxt Museum
A group show with LI-MA tracing the first years of MonteVideo, the Netherlands' pioneering video-art gallery, from 1970s electronic imagery to today's immersive artists.
Van Gogh Museum
The first retrospective in the Netherlands devoted to James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903): painter, printmaker, aesthete and enfant terrible.
Rijksmuseum
A century after de Kooning left the Netherlands for New York, a retrospective of more than 120 drawings with celebrated paintings and sculptures, made with the Art Institute of Chicago.
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Pendleton's first museum exhibition in the Netherlands: eleven paintings and eight large-scale drawings exploring abstract form, most of them never shown before.
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Landmark retrospective spanning more than seven decades of Kusama's work — painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, fashion, collage and happenings.
Rijksmuseum
Photographer and filmmaker Kadir van Lohuizen documents the Dutch energy transition: towering wind turbines, thick undersea cables and colossal platforms on the open sea.
Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
First museum solo show of Lebanese photographer Myriam Boulos, 19th Foam Paul Huf Award winner: a collective diary centred on her series Sexual Fantasies, mostly made in Beirut.
Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
The Chinese photographer's first major solo show outside China: recent series on family, youth and daily style in Xinjiang, where fashion becomes a lens for social observation.
Allard Pierson
A World Pride show drawing on the archaeology, book and theatre collections to surface forgotten LGBTIQ+ stories across history.
Eye Filmmuseum
The first comprehensive Dutch exhibition on Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl, gathering early, little-known and newly commissioned film works about ordinary lives in late-capitalist society.
Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
Four decades of Nadav Kander's photography, from his Prix Pictet-winning Yangtze River series to portraits of Obama and David Lynch, drawn together by fragility, time and quiet intensity.
Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography
The first European museum show of a rediscovered set of 75 photographs by fashion pioneer Adolphe de Meyer, documenting his life in Venice's Palazzo Balbi-Valier between 1904 and 1909.
Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography
A first Dutch introduction to Andrzej Steinbach's meticulously composed photography, treating seeing itself as an aesthetic problem across typologically organised series.
Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography
The French-Algerian artist's first solo Dutch museum show, presenting digital collages built from hundreds of photographs that explore migration, motherhood and displacement.
Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam (Dutch Resistance Museum)
37 paintings and two sculptures by Hella de Jonge exploring war, family trauma and collective memory rooted in her Jewish family's history.
H'ART Museum
Over eighty works from the Centre Pompidou trace Matisse's hunt for balance between colour, form and simplicity, alongside Picasso, Rothko and Barnett Newman.
Oude Kerk
South Korean artist Mire Lee installs a moving, almost-living structure of silicone, steel, motors and liquids exploring desire, decay and transformation.
Amsterdam Museum
Iconic 17th-century cityscapes showing how Amsterdam depicted itself as a wealthy, innovative world power as it transformed into a global trading hub.
STRAAT Museum
Photographer Henry Chalfant's documentation of graffiti culture, curated by SUSO33 with archival material from the Dutch Graffiti Library linking his lens to the Dutch graffiti scene.
Het Scheepvaartmuseum
An installation of more than a thousand knitted strips in gold and crimson conjures the ghost of the East Indiaman Amsterdam: gold for trade and prosperity, red for colonialism and exploitation.
Rijksmuseum
Twenty-four worn, altered and reused garments dating from 1640 to 1930, from embroidered 17th-century mules to a dress passed down through generations of the Six family.
Joods Museum (Jewish Museum, Jewish Cultural Quarter)
The golden age of magic through its Jewish illusionists, from Harry Houdini to Hans Klok, with tricks visitors can try themselves.
Allard PiersonFree
Free mini-show in the museum's Studio on Dutch DIY cassette culture, from VPRO's Radiola Improvisatie Salon to the Carcassettes label, with clips to listen to.
Amsterdam Museum
Stories of people and power: how Amsterdam's grand canal houses were financed through colonial trade and plantation slavery, told through residents and descendants of the enslaved.
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
The Stedelijk's biennial group show, this edition on collectives such as Hackers & Designers and Image Acts, from artworks and social design to manifestos and printed matter.
Museum Willet-Holthuysen
Explores how two of the house's 18th-century residents built their wealth on plantation trade, with an audio tour guided by a descendant of an enslaved woman from Suriname's Jagtlust plantation.
Het Scheepvaartmuseum
Choreographer Sedrig Verwoert traces dance in the diaspora, pairing a travelogue of his research into Winti, Kawina and Tambu in Suriname and Curacao with the dance film Strange Fruit 2.0.
Het Scheepvaartmuseum
Five years of photographing the coastline from northern France to the southern Netherlands: Vanfleteren's sea shifts room by room from glassy calm through misty drift to storm.
Joods Museum (Jewish Museum, Jewish Cultural Quarter)
Five years of acquisitions in the Art Gallery, from contemporary art to objects of Jewish firms and societies and personal mementoes of Holocaust victims.
Allard Pierson
A theatre-history show on crossdressing, the Slingelandt theatre and revue star Louisette, exploring how costume and staging reshape identity.
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Kexin Hao turns the corridor around the historic staircase into a body, with large anatomical drawings that read institutions as organisms, from lungs to kidney stones.
Wereldmuseum Amsterdam
A tribute to disco's roots in Black, Latino and queer underground clubs, with tracks, videos, art, fashion and design celebrating freedom.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.
