Exhibitions in Boston

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.

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.

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.