Exhibitions in Boston

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.