November 2026
Three long runs end: Harvard's Swimming with Sharks on 8 November, the Athenæum's Imagined Nation, with George Washington's copy of Common Sense, on the 14th, and the MFA's Rembrandt and the Jews on the 29th, the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. Leilah Babirye's ceramic wedding party stays at the ICA until January; MassArt shows Robert Lazzarini's Venice Biennale sculptures free.
Museum of Fine Arts, BostonCloses 29 November
Rembrandt lived in the heart of Amsterdam's Jewish district and took commissions from his neighbours. The show looks at Jews as patrons, collectors and subjects in the Dutch Republic.
Boston AthenæumCloses 14 November
George Washington's own copy of Paine's Common Sense, from his personal library, shown with early printings of the Declaration and Second World War posters, in a selection that rotates.
Institute of Contemporary Art / BostonUntil 18 January
New ceramic and wood sculptures by the Ugandan-born artist stage a queer wedding, each figure cast as bride, groom or guest, with charred-wood ancestors watching over the party. A wedding you can attend without buying a present.
Harvard Museum of Natural HistoryCloses 8 November
Jaws from Harvard's collections (the real kind, not the Spielberg kind), Keith Ellenbogen's underwater photographs and the science of shark skin, making the case that sharks are more menaced than menacing.
MassArt Art MuseumFree
Familiar symbols of American identity, mathematically distorted until they warp out of shape, including new works first conceived for the US Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
MIT Museum
Marshmallow Laser Feast's installations set against 19th-century oceanographic equipment, part of the museum's OCEANS season, with Crochet Coral Reef in the same building.
Isabella Stewart Gardner MuseumUntil 18 January
Jan Steen stages Esther's confrontation with the king as a drunken banquet, smashed glasses everywhere. The Gardner's first major show of 17th-century Dutch art, ending on its own young Rembrandt self-portrait; the Boston Globe called it "a revelation".
Peabody Museum of Archaeology & EthnologyUntil 21 March
Azadeh Akhlaghi restages eleven deaths from Iranian history, 1908 to 1979, with actors, and puts herself in every scene; look for her red shawl. The Boston Globe wrote "One look, and you keep looking", but doubted staged scenes count as testimony.
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 Museum
Harold "Doc" Edgerton's stroboscope and high-speed flash photographs from the 1930s, freezing motion in factories and the natural world, reprinted from the original negatives.
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.
MIT List Visual Arts CenterFree
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
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.
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 ArtsFree
Markele Cullins, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Steffani Jemison and Rindon Johnson use performance, installation and screen-based work to turn the gaze into a negotiation rather than a position of mastery.
Carpenter Center for the Visual ArtsFree
Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien, Candice Lin, Cole Lu, and Ayoung Yu and Nicholas Oh treat mythmaking as a way of making and unmaking knowledge, drawing on pre-colonial, diasporic and chimeric traditions.
Massachusetts Historical SocietyFree
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.
Massachusetts Historical SocietyFree
Documents and artifacts from the Adams Presidential Library trace how Americans moved from the weak Articles of Confederation through debates over state versus centralized power to a ratified U.S. Constitution.
MIT List Visual Arts CenterFree
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.
Harvard Art MuseumsFree
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.
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.
Harvard Art MuseumsFree
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston
Teen artists from the ICA's Teen Exhibitions Program explore sonder, the realization that every life is as complex as one's own. Teen Gallery, Seaport Studio.
Isabella Stewart Gardner MuseumFree
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.
MIT Museum
Margaret Wertheim and mathematician Erik Demaine turn fibre art, hyperbolic geometry and marine science into collective climate action, highlighting the threat to coral reefs. Opens with the OCEANS season.
MIT Museum
Immersive installations by Marshmallow Laser Feast set against 19th-century oceanographic equipment, exploring how we make sense of the earth's oceans. Opens with the OCEANS season at MIT Future Fest.
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
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.
MassArt Art MuseumFree
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 MuseumFree
Mathematically distorted sculptures that warp familiar symbols of American identity, including new works originally conceived for the US Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
MIT List Visual Arts CenterFree
Uri Aran's work is at once deeply idiosyncratic and oddly familiar: to follow it is to tinker alongside the artist, to be let in on an invention, or perhaps a shorthand between friends.
MIT List Visual Arts CenterFree
Blending documentary sensibility with poetic construction, Hao Jingban makes moving-image installations that are emotionally precise, historically incisive, and formally experimental.
Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston
Anniversary show revisiting nine exhibitions and initiatives from the ICA's history, from its 1936 founding as the Boston Museum of Modern Art through thirteen homes and its 1966 Warhol survey.
Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston
Thirty-second video portraits by Joan Logue since the 1970s, with new work filmed in Gloucester, MA, from the ICA/WGBH Contemporary Art Television Fund. First Floor.
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.
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.
MIT Museum
The restored original 33-inch Starship Enterprise model built for Star Trek: The Original Series in 1964, on loan from the Roddenberry family for its East Coast debut.
Harvard Art MuseumsFree
Tracing the artistic lineage of Filipino-American painter Alfonso Ossorio through a body of works that resonates across generations, in the Modern and Contemporary Art galleries.
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 MuseumsFree
How did photography construct cultural memories of postwar America? A University Research Gallery show drawn from the museums' American Professional Photographers Collection.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Seven decades of bold woodblock prints by the Japanese artist Naoko Matsubara, made across Kyoto, Boston, Toronto and Tibet and spanning nature, motherhood, music and theatre.
Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston
Eight teen artists from Artists for Humanity use color to tell stories and express emotion, at the ICA's Teen Gallery, Seaport Studio.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Joiri Minaya layers fragmented imagery from art history, science and pop culture to challenge stereotypes of Black and Brown women from tropical regions, and how exoticism and colonialism shaped them.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Kawada Kikuji's 1965 photobook Chizu, in which Coca-Cola bottles, ruined fortresses and the stained walls of the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome resist any single narrative of postwar Japan.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.
