Upcoming Exhibitions and Galleries

Current Exhibitions

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Upcoming Exhibitions and New Galleries

Kawada Kikuji: Chizu (The Map)

Herb Ritts Gallery (Gallery 169)
October 24, 2026–July 18, 2027

In 1965, Japanese photographer Kawada Kikuji (born 1933) published Chizu (The Map), a photobook that defies clear narratives or explanations. In it, Coca-Cola bottles litter the ground, haunting vestiges of violence stain the walls and ceilings of the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, ruined fortresses dot the landscape around Tokyo Bay, and relics from deceased soldiers hint at futures that never materialized. By layering and juxtaposing black-and-white photographs, Kawada attempts to embrace the uncertainty of Japanese society in the 1960s and acknowledge the complexity of its relationship to the past and future.

With its highly metaphorical and abstract content, Chizu became one of the most important photobooks in the history of photography. This exhibition explores the full scope of Chizu through the MFA’s extensive archive of images, negatives, notes, contact sheets, and an original copy of the book—all acquired directly from the photographer in 2022. Visitors can contemplate the ambiguity and inexplicability of the world that Kawada’s photographs communicate and draw connections to the image-saturated environment of today.

Places We Carry: SMFA at Tufts Juried Student Exhibition

Edward H. Linde Gallery (Gallery 168)
November 21, 2026–April 18, 2027

This exhibition brings together work from emerging artists who wrestle with themes of migration and identity. Some draw upon their own experiences while others reconstruct the journeys of their relatives, tracing cross-cultural heritage along the way.

Liangsi Wang (Chinese, born 2000) travels to his parents’ hometowns in China, photographing sites that were significant to them as children. Bianca Daher (Canadian, born 2001) researches her family archive, tracing connections and making the gaps visible through paint. Co&Lee (Filipino; Korean American) visualize the barriers of visa applications and immigration through a wall of redacted documents. Antonio Angel (American, born 2003) explores the intersections of migration, memory, labor, and identity through sculpture and performance. Christine Chiang (Taiwanese Canadian, born 1998) turns to her family’s traditional calligraphy and creates ceramic vessels and glazes that reflect the union of cultural traditions and her identity. These artists treat family history and identity as material. Their works ask how lineage can be carried through storytelling, how unfamiliar places could feel like home, and how fragments of experience may be assembled into new forms of belonging.

Organized with support from Tufts University Art Galleries, “Places We Carry: SMFA at Tufts Juried Student Exhibition” is the latest in a series of exhibitions that reflects the Museum’s commitment to the next generation of promising artists and curators. It continues the historic relationship between the Museum and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) at Tufts University, which dates to the school’s founding in 1876.

Renoir and Love

Ann and Graham Gund Gallery (Gallery LG31)
February 28–June 13, 2027

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) created joyful, innovative explorations of love—whether friendship, family, or flirtation—that set him apart from his fellow Impressionists. The MFA is the only U.S. venue for this once-in-a-generation exhibition—the first on this subject—co-organized with the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and the National Gallery, London. Featuring 40 paintings by Renoir from around the world, the exhibition focuses on the period between the mid–1860s and the mid–1880s, when he produced what are undoubtedly his greatest masterpieces. Whether seen up close or from a distance, human connection is at the heart of these works, which portray people from a range of social classes and are set in modern spaces throughout Paris, from the banks of the Seine to cafés and restaurants. The exhibition brings new insights into these beloved works—including Moulin de la Galette (1876) from Musée d’Orsay and the MFA’s own Dance at Bougival (1883)—introducing the next generation to the Impressionist great and his unique emotional connection to themes of modern love and friendship.

Current Exhibitions

Art of the Americas: 1700–1800

Art of the Americas Wing, Level 1
opened June 19, 2026

The MFA’s major reinstallation of the 18th-century Art of the Americas galleries opens on June 19, 2026—just ahead of the 250th anniversary of American independence on July 4. The reimagined displays integrate art from across North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean—including works by Native American and Indigenous makers—to present a broader view of cultural exchange across the continent during a pivotal time in history. The galleries feature more than 400 objects—including icons of the MFA’s collection, long unseen works, and new acquisitions—that range from the monumental to the miniature. This project marks the first reinstallation of these galleries—among the most visited in the Museum—since their public opening in 2010.

Community Arts Initiative: Can You Hear the City?

Edward H. Linde Gallery (Gallery 169)
through October 25, 2026

Over the past year, Brooklyn-based artist Kelly Chen (born 2000) has guided more than 150 students through an auditory and visual journey of Boston. Students explored mediums including audio recording, drawing, and mosaic—as well as their own imaginations—to create scenes of city life. The resulting exhibition collects their work in a large-scale collaborative installation in the MFA’s Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art.

Can You Hear the City? marks 21 years of the Community Arts Initiative, through which the MFA partners with community organizations to introduce young people ages six to 12 to the Museum’s collection and the art-making process, while also helping them understand how art can be an important part of their lives. For this exhibition, through the Community Arts Initiative, the Museum is proud to partner with Berkshire Partners Blue Hill Boys & Girls Club, Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, Charlestown Boys & Girls Club, Boys & Girls Clubs of Dorchester, Edgerley Family South Boston Boys & Girls Club, Jordan Boys & Girls Club, Orchard Gardens Boys & Girls Club, Sociedad Latina, United South End Settlements, Vine Street Community Center, West End House Boys & Girls Club of Allston-Brighton, and Yawkey Boys & Girls Club of Roxbury. 

The Community Arts Initiative is generously supported by the Linde Family Foundation.

Reality and Imagination: Rembrandt and the Jews in the Dutch Republic

William A. Coolidge Gallery (The Center for Netherlandish Art’s Gallery for Innovative Scholarship)
through December 1, 2026

In the 17th century, Jews played a critical role in the vibrant visual culture of the Dutch Republic—as patrons, collectors, and subjects of art, particularly in the work of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) and his circle. Living in the heart of Amsterdam’s Jewish district, Rembrandt received commissions from his Jewish neighbors, incorporated them into biblical scenes, and depicted them in character studies.

Organized by the MFA’s Center for Netherlandish Art in collaboration with a seminar of undergraduate and graduate students at Boston University, this exhibition draws on the MFA’s collection of Dutch art and Judaica to explore the different ways Jews interacted with the artistic culture of Holland in the 1600s. Varied objects—from paintings and prints by Rembrandt and his school to one of the oldest surviving pairs of Dutch silver Torah finials (rimonim)—embody the visibility and agency of Jews in the religiously diverse Dutch Republic.

This is the fifth in a series of collaborations between the CNA and its academic partners that draws on the Museum’s deep collection of Dutch and Flemish art in new and unexpected ways, bringing fresh perspectives and diverse voices to the forefront while showcasing cross-disciplinary scholarship. Previous displays include A Modern Art Market, on view from November 2021 through October 2022; Michaelina Wautier and The Five Senses: Innovation in 17th-Century Flemish Painting, on view from November 12, 2022, through November 5, 2023; Thinking Small: Dutch Art to Scale, on view from November 18, 2023, through December 8, 2024; and Curated by Teens: Death as a Constant Companion, on view from December 21, 2024, through November 30, 2025.

Maverick Kings: Three Visionary Pharaohs of Egypt's Golden Age

Ann and Graham Gund Gallery
through December 6, 2026

Maverick Kings: Three Visionary Pharaohs of Egypt's Golden Age focuses on three celebrated rulers of the ancient Egyptian 18th Dynasty (New Kingdom, 1550–1292 B.C.E.). Hatshepsut, Amenhotep III, and Akhenaten—all members of the same family—were innovators who broke new ground, each a maverick whose reign influenced great societal and artistic change in the 18th Dynasty, Egypt's "golden age." Each of these pharaohs is known for their patronage of artists, architects, and craftspeople, who produced distinctive portraits, impressive buildings, and art with a very recognizable style. All of them understood the power of images and used them effectively to advance their agendas during their long reigns.

One of ancient Egypt’s few female pharaohs, Hatshepsut (reigned about 1473–1458 B.C.E.) founded the 18th-Dynasty artistic style. She built impressive temples furnished with statues and obelisks bearing her likeness as king, yet she received no credit for her achievements. Years after her death, for reasons still not clear, Hatshepsut’s images were smashed and her name was erased from history, only to be rediscovered by modern Egyptologists. Amenhotep III (reigned about 1390–1352 B.C.E.) was one of Egypt’s most successful rulers; sculpture portraits characteristic of his reign have radiant faces suffused with satisfaction and well-being. Akhenaten (reigned about 1352–1336 B.C.E.), son of Amenhotep III, sought to change Egypt’s religion to worship of a single deity, the Aten, represented by the disk of the sun. Artists depicted him and his queen, Nefertiti, with distinctive body proportions: narrow shoulders, slender high waists, faces with long chins, and elongated skulls.

Drawing primarily from the MFA’s extensive collection of ancient Egyptian art, one of the largest and most important in the world, Maverick Kings explores the lives and legacies of these dynamic monarchs through their art and own words. Visitors can see major monuments to Hatshepsut, including the only royal sarcophagus from the 18th Dynasty outside of Egypt; large statues of deities in animal form, a style characteristic of Amenhotep III’s reign, such as a nearly six-foot-tall statue of a falcon; and a sculpted portrait of Akhenaten’s son, Tutankhamen (reigned about 1332–1323 B.C.E.), who restored the cults of the old gods. Together these objects reveal how, just as we fashion public personas for our own ends today, these three pharaohs created and used their own images to achieve and retain political power. The exhibition also includes objects on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love

Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art, Level 2
through January 18, 2027

For more than six decades, Suzanne Jackson (born 1944) has created lyrical, awe-inspiring paintings shaped by her deep respect for the natural world and persistent belief in the interconnectedness of all living things. As a Black artist, she has said that “it’s political to make an artwork about peace and beauty” as a reflection of “some other ways of being.” The first retrospective devoted to the full breadth of the artist’s career, “Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love” celebrates her groundbreaking vision through more than 60 paintings and drawings that make innovative use of color, light, and structure.

Jackson’s career began in the late 1960s, when she emerged as a central figure in Los Angeles’s African American art scene. Since then, she has drawn on her experiences as a dancer, poet, teacher, and theater designer to inform her visual art. Visitors can see the full scope of this output in the exhibition. Early ethereal compositions on canvas layer luminous washes of pigment with imagery drawn from Jackson’s dreams. Studies of leaves, trees, and mountains reflect the artist’s connection with the natural California landscape she inhabited in the 1980s. Inspired by theater and dance and informed by ancestral and cultural histories, her recent work moves off the wall to hang suspended in the air. Directly engaging light and space, these experimental works amalgamate the experiences and environments that have shaped Jackson’s career.

Picasso, Miró, Dali: Unbound

Lois B. and Michael K. Torf Gallery (Gallery 184)
through January 24, 2027

Bold, experimental, extravagant, and unbound, both literally and in the creative minds that produced them, livres d’artiste had no precedent. At the turn of the 20th century, they revolutionized the book as an art form. Livres d’artiste attracted many famous practitioners—Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí among them—but they were also deeply collaborative ventures. Authors, publishers, designers, and printmakers played essential roles in bringing them to life.

This exhibition introduces the imaginative world of this form through a group of extraordinary works by Spanish artists. Visitors can explore how images, words, and typography intersect, often in intricate ways that defy expectations. Some artists interpreted foundational texts, as Dalí did in his 1974 illustrations for Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism; others partnered with writers to devise images and words in harmony at the outset, as in Juan Gris and French poet Pierre Reverdy’s Au Soleil du Plafond (1955). Rarely on view, and resisting easy categorization, these livres d’artiste invite visitors into a world of artistic ambition in which creativity and the power of collaboration led to some of the most singular and compelling achievements of publishing in the 20th century.

Öyvind Fahlström: Are You Happy?

Lizbeth and George Krupp Gallery (Gallery 264)
through February 21, 2027

Active in the United States during the politically charged 1960s and ’70s, Öyvind Fahlström (1928–1976) created a body of work that both invites audience participation and supplies biting political commentary, reflecting his understanding of art as “a fusion of ‘pleasure’ and ‘insight.’” This exhibition explores the artist’s career through a range of deceptively playful multimedia works—many assuming the form of games or cartoons—that push visitors to consider their own role in politics and society.

Fahlström was born in São Paulo, Brazil, to Scandinavian expatriate parents, and grew up in Stockholm, Sweden. His international perspective and experiences as a poet, journalist, and critic informed his approach to art. In the early 1960s, he began to produce interactive objects with magnetic pieces that viewers could rearrange, like words in a sentence, to form new image-phrases and meanings. Ten years later, he undertook a series of colorful, cartoon-like maps—prints and drawings that trace the global flow of money and power through dense infographics.

The centerpiece of the exhibition, Fahlström’s 1966 film Mao-Hope March, documents a performance on the streets of New York, in which Fahlström and friends carry placards depicting the American comedian Bob Hope and the Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong, while a reporter asks passersby whether they are happy. Their responses connect the complex geopolitics of the Cold War era—with its clash between American capitalism, embodied by Hope, and Mao’s Communism—to personal experience, underscoring Fahlström’s belief in the necessity of participation in civic life.

Donna Ferrato: ‘Living with the Enemy’ and the Power of Women

Henry and Lois Foster Gallery (Gallery 158)
through February 28, 2027

Pioneering photojournalist, women’s rights activist, and advocate Donna Ferrato (born 1949) has photographed the lives of women for more than 50 years with unwavering dedication. Documenting the resilience and spirit of women—particularly survivors of domestic violence—she has spent extended time in women’s shelters and traveled with law enforcement responding to abuse calls, determined to shed light on the often-invisible experiences of survivors.

This exhibition features photographs spanning Ferrato’s career. Many are from her 1991 book Living with the Enemy, which inspired a national conversation on domestic violence, sexual assault, and women’s rights. Others come from her 2020 book Holy, which Ferrato describes as representing “the unleashed power of women.” These sensitive photographs offer visitors a portrait of women’s private, professional, and political lives, emphasizing their enduring strength and dignity, as well as the need for protection and empowerment.

Beyond her documentation of domestic violence, Ferrato is also president and founder of Domestic Abuse Awareness and launched I Am Unbeatable, a campaign that spotlights women who have left their abusers. Her initiatives coupled with her photographs have inspired fundraising and education through real stories.

Naoko Matsubara’s Woodblock Worlds

Clementine Brown Gallery (Gallery 170)
through May 16, 2027

Naoko Matsubara (born 1937) creates bold, expressive woodblock prints depicting everything from nature and motherhood to music, dance, and theater. Born on the island of Shikoku in Japan’s Inland Sea, Matsubara grew up in Kyoto and studied at the Kyoto Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1960. There, she began applying her tools directly to woodblocks without preliminary sketches, developing a direct, forthright, and utterly singular style.

This exhibition celebrates the artist’s storied career, now in its seventh decade, by focusing on specific locations that have been transformative for her practice. Kyoto is the city of her childhood. She spent formative early years as an artist in Boston and its surrounds. In Toronto she put down personal and professional roots, and Tibet has been a cipher for her omnivorous love of new horizons. Through works created in and influenced by these sites, visitors can explore the career of an artist who connects craft, communities, and an ever-observant eye on the world.

Just as Matsubara is significant to the MFA—nearly 40 of her prints belong to the collection—the Museum holds a special place in her heart: her meet-cute with her late husband happened in the MFA galleries in the 1960s, while both lived nearby in Cambridge. He, a scholar of 18th-century Japanese ukiyo-e prints, came to give a lecture; she, unmoved by the subject of his talk, came for the sushi and sake. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Banner Project: Joiri Minaya

Eunice and Julian Cohen Galleria (Gallery 265)
through June 21, 2027

Drawing on a wide range of visual sources, Joiri Minaya (born 1990) explores how the identity of Black and Brown women from tropical regions has been imagined, constructed, and commodified. For her “Banner Project” she challenges persistent tropes through intervention, layering fragmented images from art history, science, the internet, and popular culture.

Minaya connects present-day tourism, which promotes a vision of local women and nature as available for travelers’ enjoyment, to the colonial impulses that drew Christopher Columbus to the supposed New World and Paul Gauguin—whose Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98) is a highlight of the MFA’s collection—to Tahiti. This entwining of exoticism and eroticism, and the conflation of women with their tropical surroundings, often says more about the imaginers than their subjects.

The artist uses postcards, Hawaiian shirts, and other imagery coded as “tropical” to underscore how a similar shorthand stereotypes the people who inhabit the Caribbean and Pacific Islands. Rather than perpetuating these stereotypes, she experiments with ideas of transparency and opacity, through Photoshop masking or mesh fabrics, to propose a form of resistance to flattening perceptions.

See more work by Joiri Minaya in “Subvert Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude,” on view in the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art through August 2, 2026.

Counter History: Contemporary Art from the Collection

Charlotte F. and Irving W. Rabb Gallery (Gallery 155)
Opened April 15, 2025

How do we remember the past, and how does it inform the present? Artists often question our shared history as they frame ways for us to understand it differently. This new installation of works from the MFA’s collection of contemporary art—including many new acquisitions—offers multiple possibilities to reconsider the past through the art of our time.

Three interrelated thematic sections make up this impactful display. “Monuments” focuses on the ways artists use grand scale, references to painful histories, and images of power and control to speak to collective memory and immortalize the past. As much as museums, libraries, and other repositories officially serve to document the past, many other ways of recording history—from ephemeral chronicles to spoken word, for example—present themselves in “Unofficial Archives.” By documenting injustices, repression, and state violence through individual experience, the work in “Counter Histories” stands against official narratives, as artists aim to set the record straight.

Over several planned rotations, the installation brings together more than 70 artists and 140 artworks. Longtime highlights of the collection by artists such as Mark Bradford, Jeffrey Gibson, Mona Hatoum, Jasper Johns, Alice Neel, Kiki Smith, and Andy Warhol are placed in dialogue with emerging practices and fresh acquisitions by Dana Chandler Jr., Sharon Hayes, Steve Locke, Laurel Nakadate, Tammy Nguyen, and Avery Singer.

Huntington Avenue Entrance Commission: The Knowledge Keepers

Huntington Avenue Entrance
Opened November 14, 2024

Western artists have frequently depicted Indigenous subjects as exotic, anonymous figures frozen in time and represented in poses of subjugation, violence, or reverie. By contrast, Alan Michelson’s The Knowledge Keepers represents two contemporary local Indigenous cultural stewards, Aquinnah Wampanoag member Julia Marden and Nipmuc descendent Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr., posed in dynamic gestures of public address. Michelson’s project is the first in a new series of sculptural commissions for the MFA’s Huntington Avenue Entrance, where contemporary artists engage the site in all of its complexity.

Cast in bronze and gilded in shimmering platinum, The Knowledge Keepers pays tribute to the Northeastern Woodland nations’ reverence for copper, crystal, shell, and silver, materials treasured for both their physical and metaphorical luster. Platinum, with its resistance to corrosion, chemical stability, and role in advanced electronics and spacecraft, translates that tradition into the future.

Marden, an artist and specialist in twining, crafts all of her own regalia. She raises a turkey feather fan in a gesture of honor. Gaines, an Indigenous activist, public speaker, and builder of wetus (traditional homes) and mishoonash (dugout canoes) reads from a page of text in the classical pose of an orator. Michelson’s selection of them as models emphasizes their roles as cultural models. By extension, The Knowledge Keepers seeks to honor and celebrate the beauty, presence, agency, and endurance of the Indigenous nations of Massachusetts.

Beyond Brilliance: Jewelry Highlights from the Collection

Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Family Foundation Gallery (Gallery 104)
Ongoing

Celebrating the universality of body adornment throughout the ages and across cultures, this newly renovated gallery presents highlights from the MFA’s renowned jewelry collection. From ancient artifacts to fine jewelry to designs made by contemporary artists, the presentation connects objects that span 4,000 years by exploring how jewelry can communicate strong messages about its wearer and exemplify the art and culture of its time.

More than 150 objects are on display, including an ancient Egyptian broad collar necklace; 19th-century works by Castellani and Carlo Giuliano; 20th-century designs by Marcus & Co., Tiffany & Co., and Bulgari; René Boivin’s starfish brooch from 1937; and fashion jewelry by Chanel, Dior, and Elsa Peretti. New acquisitions of contemporary jewelry by Christian and Yasmin Hemmerle, Wallace Chan, Anna Hu, and Feng J are also featured.

Championing the breadth and depth of the MFA’s collection, “Beyond Brilliance: Jewelry Highlights from the Collection” features both humble and exquisite objects that together illustrate the timeless human desire to self-fashion, collect, and create.