Upcoming Exhibitions and Galleries

Current Exhibitions

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Upcoming Exhibitions and New Galleries

Framing Nature: Gardens and Imagination

Ann and Graham Gund Gallery (Gallery LG31)
March 15–June 28, 2026

A plot of land, a relaxing retreat, a formal landscape, a place of constant labor: gardens can carry a range of associations, especially in the world of art. Framing Nature: Gardens and Imagination brings together art from across the MFA’s global collection to explore striking similarities and differences across time and place.

The exhibition features both beloved favorites and previously unseen treasures, all centering the garden as a fertile place for human creativity and imaginative possibility. Works ranging from enchanting tapestries and intricately detailed Chinese scrolls give the illusion of garden spaces. Modern and contemporary prints, drawings, photographs, and paintings bring visitors on an immersive journey through a variety of cultivated and natural worlds. Visitors can look at how we relate to the outdoors, shape garden spaces through cultivation, care, and labor, and express this universal human impulse through art.

Framing Nature coincides with the 50th anniversary of Art in Bloom (May 1 through May 3, 2026). This beloved tradition pairs art with floral interpretations created by New England area garden clubs, professional floral designers, and volunteers.

Unbraid: Hair, Clay, and Craft 

Lizbeth and George Krupp Gallery
March 21–July 26, 2026

Hair is a potent carrier of meaning in our everyday lives. It marks identity and heritage, signifies health and age, and is a form of personal expression. In Unbraid: Hair, Clay, and Craft, three contemporary artists have found hair a rich medium for experimentation across media.

Adebunmi Gbadebo (born 1992) embeds locs from friends and family into vessels she makes, using materials gathered at the site where her ancestors were enslaved. In video and ceramics, Jennifer Ling Datchuk (born 1980) uses hair as a metaphor to interrogate gendered stereotypes of women and girls, especially those of East Asian descent. Sonya Clark (born 1967), who has long incorporated hair across her varied practice, invokes it here in indigo-saturated lithographs depicting cornrows and plaits, hairstyles closely associated with Black identity.

All three artists use hair to disentangle knotty histories and interweave familial and cultural inheritances. Their works ask us to consider this ordinary-yet-powerful material whose form and significance shape us in profound ways. As Clark says, “hair is power … it is a fiber that you can tell a story with.” It is, she tells us, “the fiber that we grow.”

Fazendo a América: Rosângela Rennó and Histories of Memory and Migration in Brazil

John F. Cogan, Jr. and Mary L. Cornille Gallery
April 4–August 2, 2026 

Brazilian artist Rosângela Rennó (born 1962) uses images from private and public archives as well as anonymous photographs, recontextualizing them into immersive installations that address notions of memory while generating new layers of meaning. Her work compels viewers to look closely at what is missing as much as what remains.

Fazendo a América, Rennó’s first solo show in a U.S. museum in nearly 30 years, presents six installations created over the last quarter century, each revealing the power, and fragility, of archives. The artist’s investigative approach brings to the forefront marginalized histories—including Latin American political unrest movements and the legacies of military dictatorships—and interrogates official narratives to uncover how photography can both document and obscure lived experiences.

The newest work, commissioned by the MFA for this exhibition, looks at Brazilian immigrants to the U.S. and their impact on the urban landscape. Comprising 48 portraits—more than half of which depict Brazilians living in Greater Boston—as well as a special bilingual newspaper conceived by the artist in tribute to Brazilian Times, it highlights the role photographs play in preserving and connecting histories that may be forgotten or overlooked. This and Rennó’s other installations on view invite visitors to consider their own personal and institutional archives, asking what is recorded, kept, and remembered, and by whom.

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude 

Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art, Level 2
April 4–August 2, 2026 

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim brings together multimedia works by 12 contemporary artists who critically engage with representations of the nude in Western art history. Responding to objectification, exploitation, and erasure embedded within these images, they confront entrenched gender structures and power dynamics in work that resonates with present-day issues of bodily autonomy, agency, and accountability.

Featuring works made since 2012, the exhibition symbolically reaches into the frames—and framing—of the nude as it has appeared within encyclopedic museum contexts. Through performative gestures, archival interventions, and acts of redaction and repair, these artists challenge inherited narratives and expose the structures that have long governed visibility, authorship, and desire. From Xandra Ibarra positioning her critical Turn Around Sidepiece (2018) on a spinning marble pedestal; to Rachelle Mozman Solano undermining the diaries of Paul Gauguin through photography, video, and collage; to Betty Tompkins overlaying familiar art-historical images with the often-disingenuous apologies and defenses from those accused of abuses during in the #MeToo era, nudity becomes not a site of passive display, but a critical tool for refusal, self-fashioning, and redefinition.

The exhibition presents an intergenerational group of artists working across performance, video, painting, sculpture, photography, sound, and collage. Artworks by Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Nona Faustine, Derek Fordjour, Xandra Ibarra, Maya Jeffereis, Gisela Charfauros McDaniel, Joiri Minaya, Rachelle Mozman Solano, Cato Ouyang, Katherine Sherwood, Betty Tompkins, and Salman Toor not only challenge the narrative, but actively infiltrate the established canon from a place of knowledge and resistance.

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

Ann and Graham Gund Gallery 
September 6–December 6, 2026

Maverick Kings: Three Visionary Pharaos 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. Each ruler understood the power of images and used them effectively to advance their agendas during their long reigns.

The exhibition examines the lives and impact of these monarchs through objects drawn primarily from the MFA’s extensive Egyptian collection, one of the largest and highest quality collections of Egyptian art in the world. Five significant pieces will be borrowed from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, including a large statue of Hatshepsut; other loans will come from European and American institutions. Translations of hieroglyphic inscriptions allow these rulers to “speak” to visitors in their own words, and luxurious decorative arts such as jewelry, clothing, and cosmetic implements flesh out the distinctive character of each reign.

Current Exhibitions

The Bold and the Beautiful: 16th-Century Prints and Drawings from the Myron Miller Collection

Clementine Brown Gallery (Gallery 170)
through April 13, 2026

Artistic invention and adventurous experimentation characterized the art of Europe in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Fueled by the rediscovery of ancient Roman sculpture, and by a drive to recapture and compete with its grace, balance, and energy, artists experimented boldly with style and composition. Turning to the inherent drama of the human body as a source of inspiration, they pushed the limits of traditional art in every way. Their innovations spread rapidly, carried by the thousands of prints that introduced audiences all over Europe to the most avant-garde movements in art.

This exhibition—comprised of prints from the Myron Miller collection, many of which are new gifts to the MFA—captures the energy, exploration, and spirit of creativity that thrived in Europe toward the end of the Renaissance. Visitors can explore nearly 70 etchings, engravings, woodcuts, and drawings from a period of Italian, Dutch, and Netherlandish printmaking at its most adept and sophisticated. Works like Hendrick Goltzius’s The Wedding of Cupid and Psyche (1587), which is one of the largest and most dramatic of all 16th-century prints, and contains nearly 80 figures in a virtuosic display of technique, show how artists of the era paid homage to tradition while pushing into past its perceived limitations.

Over the last 25 years, Myron Miller has assembled an incomparable collection of works on paper dating from the Renaissance to the current day. His gift of works—one of the largest donations of early European prints to the MFA in decades—puts an indelible mark on our collection.

One Hundred Stitches, One Hundred Villages The Beauty of Patchwork from Rural China

Edward and Nancy Roberts Family Gallery (Gallery LG26)
through May 3, 2026

In rural Chinese villages today, women are creating dynamic patchwork textiles, as their mothers and grandmothers did before them. This art form, which evolved from ancient Buddhist and Daoist customs of monks dressing in patched rags to project a sense of humility, is rooted in practicality, with the fabrics serving as bed and window covers, door curtains, and children’s clothing. The vibrant abstract compositions demonstrate creativity and fine artistic sensibilities that flourish far beyond the borders of established Chinese art canons.

This exhibition presents nearly 20 kaleidoscopic Chinese patchwork textiles, which are rarely seen outside the villages where they are made. The textiles, coming from the Hebei, Shanxi, Shandong, Gansu, and Shaanxi provinces, reveal a wide variety of compositions, patterns, and techniques, which reflect local styles and individual aesthetics alike. Visitors can explore the historical impacts on materials and designs, and discover the personal histories and artistic intuitions behind the works. Improvising with available cloth, riffing on patterns, and injecting their own creativity, the makers have produced stunning and inspiring imagery. Though viewers familiar with American quilt patterns may be surprised to notice many similar designs, these Chinese works represent a tradition all their own.

Nancy Berliner, Wu Tung Senior Curator of Chinese Art and exhibition curator, traveled to many villages in northern China, interviewing artists and collecting the works on view here for the MFA’s collection directly from the makers and their descendants. Photographer Lois Conner accompanied her, documenting the multiple trips through images and film—featured in the exhibition—of the artists, villages, and objects in their original environments.

One Hundred Stitches, One Hundred Villages is accompanied by the first English-language publication on the art of Chinese patchwork textiles, authored by Berliner and with photographs by Conner.

Generously supported by the Tan Family Education Foundation.

Kelly Taylor Mitchell: mouth wide open 

Edward H. Linde Gallery
through April 26, 2026

In 2022, Atlanta- and San Juan–based artist Kelly Taylor Mitchell (born 1994) traveled to Brazil’s Bahia region, home to one of the largest populations of maroons or quilombolas, descendants of formerly enslaved people who self-emancipated. There, she attended the annual festival of Iemanjá (Yemayá), which celebrates the Candomblé orixá, or goddess of the sea. She witnessed this and other ever-evolving spiritual traditions, in which elements of West African Yoruban rites and European Catholicism have fused. Mitchell also encountered religious artworks and participated in processions and offerings.

In this exhibition, Mitchell’s works converse with the powerful, ocean-oriented objects and ritual performances she saw in Bahia. An ongoing project of diasporic mapping across the American South and the Caribbean, the artworks are sites of reunion between the artist, her own forebears, non-biological kin, and greater divinities. Though their true activation only occurs in private, on view here, they help us imagine performing similar communions of our own.

This exhibition is generously supported by the Tufts University Art Galleries at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (SMFA) and is part of the SMFA’s ongoing Traveling Fellows program, presented in collaboration with the MFA.

Divine Color: Hindu Prints from Modern Bengal

Lois B. and Michael K. Torf Gallery (Gallery 184)
through May 31, 2026

Vivid prints of divinities are part of daily life for Hindus in India and around the world, used for worship in homes, factories, and offices, as well as for adornment on cars, calendars, computers, and shop counters. The art world has historically overlooked these images, often called “calendar art,” because they are inexpensive and mass produced. But they have a rich and fascinating history in and influence on Indian art, religion, and society.

Divine Color: Hindu Prints from Modern Bengal explores these popular prints’ origins and powerful impacts. When Indian artists encountered the new printmaking technology of lithography in 19th-century Calcutta (today Kolkata), then the capital of British India, they used it to reinvent devotional art. Depictions of Hindu gods became more realistic, colorful, and accessible than ever before. Shrines in homes across the economic spectrum came to host these images, mixed and matched according to a family’s taste. Though the lithographs of Hindu gods created by Bengali artists were not expensive, they were valuable in other senses. Sold in the bustling bazaars of Calcutta where presses competed to attract customers, the prints served an important role in home worship, satisfied the artistic sensibilities of a Bengali society that had absorbed European fine art values, and helped to spread new political ideas. The exhibition considers how lithography gave these artists—who produced thousands of prints that traveled quickly across the nation—a means to change not just devotional but also artistic, political, and social life.

A highlight of the exhibition is the MFA’s collection of 38 vibrant lithographs from 19th-century Calcutta. The MFA is one of only two American museums that collects this material. This exhibition, the first of its kind in the United States, features more than 100 objects, including other prints, paintings, sculpture, and textiles from the Museum’s South Asian collection and select loans.

The Banner Project: Mark Thomas Gibson

Eunice and Julian Cohen Galleria (Gallery 265)
through June 22, 2026

Describing himself as an “American history painter,” Mark Thomas Gibson (b. 1980) draws inspiration from sources as wide-ranging as comic books, Renaissance paintings, and late 19th-century editorial caricatures. For his “Banner Project,” he created the largest-scale expansion yet of his Town Crier series, which builds on a tradition of collective address before the modern period, when “town criers” publicly announced laws and news.

Gibson began his series in 2021 as a way to digest and archive the politics of our fast-moving times. The Crier is typically rendered in graphic lines and ink washes and decked in Revolutionary-era clothing; his words blare like news headlines, matching the pace of endless digital “doomscrolling.” Here, unfolding over three banners that resemble the panels of a comic strip, Gibson’s handmade drawings compel visitors to slow down when reading. In many ways a stand-in for Gibson—a Black man, a history buff, and a concerned citizen—the Crier takes on the role of Paul Revere astride his horse, hanging on for dear life and while shouting a galvanizing message. The banners also feature Gibson’s take on the American flag—a striking reenvisioning that explores its symbolism, promise, and reality and implores reflection on American history.

Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography

Herb Ritts Gallery (Gallery 169)
through July 13, 2026

The ubiquity of camera phones today has very much made all the world a stage. In the modern city, photographers are now less concerned with surreptitiously capturing an image and much more likely to collaborate with their subjects in the street. Drawn to photography’s narrative potential, many employ the camera as a tool of transformation, taking everyday pictures from the ordinary to the strangely beautiful or even ominous.

Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography explores the evolving techniques photographers have used to record the human experience as it has played out in populous urban spaces—from Harlem and Los Angeles to Tokyo and Istanbul—over five decades. Photographs from the 1970s through the ’90s by the likes of Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Dawoud Bey, Stephen Shore, and Yolanda Andrade appear alongside more recent work by artists such as Luc Delahaye, Katy Grannan, Amani Willett, Zoe Strauss, and Martin Parr. These images create a compelling visual conversation that encourages visitors to consider developments in photography as well as changes in cities and societies at large.

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. 

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.

Intentional Beauty: Jewish Ritual Art from the Collection

Bernard and Barbara Stern Shapiro Gallery (Gallery 231)
Ongoing

Bringing together nearly 30 works from the MFA’s collection of Jewish ritual art, or Judaica—most of which are new acquisitions on view for the first time—this gallery explores the splendor of items made for Jewish religious experience, at home and in the synagogue. Treasures of all kinds are on view: metalwork, textiles, paintings, furniture, and works on paper. Created across the centuries, they originate from places as far reaching as Asia, North Africa, Europe, and the United States. Though their meaning and use have always been intrinsically Jewish, their styles and techniques vary greatly, reflecting the artistic language of their surrounding cultures.

With lavish reliefs, engravings, and enamel and niello adornments, a Torah shield by Elimelekh Tzoref of Stanislav (Galicia, modern-day Ukraine) (1781–82) is one of the finest in existence. Its remarkable ornamentation and craftsmanship reflect the importance of the Torah scroll—the handwritten text of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible—in Judaism. Constructed to house the scroll at the now-defunct Shaare Zion Synagogue in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a Torah ark by woodcarver Samuel Katz (about 1920) is rooted in local history: it tells a story about immigration to Boston and the many changes and challenges Jews from the area faced in the early 20th century.

Contemporary works from the United States and Israel, such as kiddush cups, candlesticks, and spice boxes used in the observation of Shabbat, offer innovative takes on Judaica for the home. Older items—including a wood and silver Torah case from Baghdad (modern-day Iraq) (1879) and used in Calcutta, India—act as tangible testimonies to their communities’ histories. Taken together, these objects draw connections that offer a deeper understanding of Jewish values, traditions, and identity across time and geography.

"Intentional Beauty: Jewish Ritual Art from the Collection" is sponsored by the David Berg Foundation. Additional support provided by Lorraine Bressler, the Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Family Foundation, Inc., Lisbeth Tarlow and Stephen Kay, and The Priebatsch Family Fund, in loving memory of Norman Priebatsch. With special gratitude to Marcia and Louis Kamentsky and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation.