What's on in Boston

MIT List Visual Arts Center · Free

Over 500 original works from the collection hung salon-style. The Student Lending Art Program is an MIT tradition letting students borrow artwork for free; the display is open to all.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The Swedish-Brazilian artist's playful, politically barbed work from 1960s–70s America, built on his idea of art as "a fusion of 'pleasure' and 'insight'" and made to be handled by its audience.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Hatshepsut, Akhenaten and Tutankhamun through the art of Egypt's 18th Dynasty (1550–1292 BCE), when royal patronage drove a wave of societal and artistic change. Ann and Graham Gund Gallery.

Harvard Art Museums · Free

A journey through drawings by groundbreaking 19th-century artists who left the studio to look outside for inspiration, showing how a close relationship with nature shaped artistic vision.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Six decades of lyrical painting by Suzanne Jackson (b. 1944), shaped by a deep respect for the natural world and a belief in the interconnectedness of all living things.

MassArt Art Museum · Free

Articles 25 and 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights spelled out in gold Mylar letter balloons, which deflate over the run of the show. Stephen D. Paine Gallery.

MassArt Art Museum · Free

Mathematically distorted sculptures that warp familiar symbols of American identity, including new works originally conceived for the US Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale.

Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston

Weems's Blues and Pinks 3 recrops and tints Charles Moore's photographs of the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade into bruise-coloured panels. Third Floor Lobby.

Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston

Ward's sculpture Savior shown with video of his 1996 Harlem performance Pushing Savior, turning a shopping cart pushed through the streets into civic ritual.

Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston · Free

At the ICA Watershed in East Boston (not the Seaport building), two US premieres by Lucy Raven: the film Murderers Bar and the rotating light sculpture Hardpan. Free; ferry from the ICA.

Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts · Free

Animation as laborious, hand-won image-making: work by Harvard students, faculty and visiting artists, tracing the Carpenter Center's experimental animation tradition back to its 1963 opening.

Harvard Art Museums · Free

The first major US exhibition by Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Pınar Öğrenci, pairing her 2024 film and five collages on Ruhrgebiet mining life with historical photographs from the Busch-Reisinger.

Harvard Museum of Natural History

Jaws from Harvard's collections, underwater photography by Keith Ellenbogen and the science of shark skin recast the ocean's most misunderstood megafauna as more menaced than menacing.

Boston Athenæum

For the USA's 250th, rare material from George Washington's own library — including his copy of Paine's Common Sense — alongside early Declaration printings and WWII posters. Rotates through 2026.

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

Rare pamphlets, broadsides, maps and engravings from David M. Rubenstein's Americana collection trace how print carried the ideas behind the Declaration of Independence, marking its 250th anniversary.

MIT List Visual Arts Center · Free

In Pap Souleye Fall's practice, technological error is a space of refuge one can slip into, concealed from larger systems of control.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Jews as patrons, collectors and subjects in 17th-century Amsterdam, where Rembrandt lived in the heart of the Jewish district and drew commissions from his neighbours.

Boston Athenæum

Constantine Manos spent nine months in 1974 photographing Boston's streets for the Bicentennial. Fifty years on, the flea markets, protests and ball games return to the Calderwood Gallery.

Massachusetts Historical Society · Free

Handwritten copies of the Declaration by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, a rare Dunlap broadside, letters and diaries trace how the document grew from draft to founding text.

MIT List Visual Arts Center · Free

An anniversary display tracing the List's origins in the Hayden Gallery, founded 1950, and four decades in the Wiesner Building since it opened on 1 October 1985.

Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston

More than 50 works Fotene Demoulas and Tom Cote helped bring into the ICA Collection, with Laura Owens, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Olga de Amaral, Sarah Sze and Lorna Simpson.

Old State House

Boston's flagship semiquincentennial show, made with the Massachusetts Historical Society and anchored by a rare 1776 Boston broadside of the Declaration of Independence.

Harvard Art Museums · Free

A University Teaching Gallery installation asking what art is, why it matters, and by whom its history is written — objects chosen to be studied by Harvard students and open to all.

MIT Museum

Instruments and artworks spanning 340 years across four sections - Earth Time, Mechanical Time, Electric Time, Atomic Time - tracing how precise timekeeping became a negotiated human construct.

Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston

A new multi-panel installation by the Baltimore painter, whose "long-form painting" breaks Yosemite's Tunnel View into interrelated canvases. Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser Gallery.

Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston

The Ugandan-born artist premieres new ceramic and wood sculptures staging a queer wedding, each figure cast as bride, groom or guest, watched over by charred-wood ancestors.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

In the Fenway Gallery, Israeli video and installation artist Michal Rovner responds to the Book of Esther with her own scroll works, shown alongside the Museum's Rembrandt-era Esther exhibition.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Dutch paintings, tapestries, Persian textiles and Jewish ceremonial objects trace how the biblical heroine Esther became a shared symbol for Jewish and Protestant communities in the 1600s Netherlands.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The livre d'artiste as a revolution in book-making, seen through Picasso, Miró and Dalí — extravagant, experimental volumes that turned the printed page into an art form.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum · Free

A jackal with glowing eyes keeps watch from the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Facade, filmed with a night-vision camera near Rovner's home and evoking Anubis, guide of souls to the afterlife. Free to view outside.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Fifty years of photojournalism by Donna Ferrato (b. 1949), documenting the resilience of women — particularly survivors of domestic violence — from inside shelters and alongside law enforcement.

Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston

A site-responsive commission for the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall by the Algonquin-Anishinaabe artist, made in response to the ICA's own filled-in waterfront site.

Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology

Azadeh Akhlaghi restages eleven pivotal deaths from Iran's history, 1908-1979, as meticulously researched tableaux shot on location - sixteen photographs plus archival material.

Harvard Museum of Natural History

Rare specimens from Harvard's 26-million-object vaults, many on public display for the first time - from George Washington's golden pheasants to the only complete Lewis & Clark bird specimen.

Harvard Art Museums · Free

How did photography construct cultural memories of postwar America? A University Research Gallery show drawn from the museums' American Professional Photographers Collection.