Exhibitions in Boston

MIT List Visual Arts CenterFreePast

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Museum of Science, BostonPast

A 30-minute VR expedition through 3.5 billion years of evolution, guided by researcher Charlie and her robot Darwin. Ages 8+ and at least 4ft tall; separate ticket required.

Institute of Contemporary Art / BostonPast

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 / BostonPast

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.

Museum of Science, BostonPast

Limited-time hands-on exhibit on wave science, from a pendulum's swing to a giant slinky's pulse. Part of the Museum's Year of Revolutionary Science.

Institute of Contemporary Art / BostonFreePast

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 ArtsFreePast

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 MuseumsFreePast

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.

Museum of Fine Arts, BostonPast

Brooklyn-based artist Kelly Chen led over 150 students through an auditory and visual exploration of city life, resulting in a large-scale collaborative installation marking 21 years of the MFA's Community Arts Initiative.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.