11 Must-Visit Museums Opening in 2026

This year highlights a surge of exciting new museum openings and expansions. Some projects that have taken years to develop are now nearing completion, promising innovative new buildings and major expansions, while enriching a cultural landscape that is eagerly growing in size, ambition, and influence. With anticipated unveilings such as the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the V&A East Museum in London, the Memphis Art Museum, and the Drift Museum in Amsterdam, 2026 is an excellent year for travelers to add more art to their adventures. Before planning your trip, make sure to review this list.

1. Guggenheim Abu Dhabi | Abu Dhabi

Designed by Frank Gehry, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will become the largest Guggenheim Museum in the world when it opens this year. Focusing on modern and contemporary art from the 1960s to present, with a special emphasis on art from West Asia, North Africa, and South Asia, it will be part of the Saadiyat Island cultural district, which also includes the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Zayed National Museum. Originally announced 20 years ago, with construction beginning in 2011, the building features innovative shapes and materials, including sustainable elements suitable for the region, while the collection and exhibitions are expected to showcase renowned American artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mark Rothko, and Andy Warhol, alongside celebrated artists from the Middle East like Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Samia Halaby, and Hassan Sharif.

2. New Museum | New York

Reopening to the public on March 21 after a major expansion, the New Museum’s new building, which doubles its exhibition space, was designed by OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas. It features new galleries, an expanded lobby with a full-service restaurant, a larger bookstore, and an expanded Sky Room with panoramic views, complementing the museum’s existing SANAA-designed flagship. The entire museum will open with “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” an exhibition showcasing works by more than 150 international artists, writers, scientists, architects, and filmmakers. The exhibit highlights key moments when dramatic technological and societal changes sparked new ideas about humanity and offered fresh visions of its future. Additionally, the expanded museum reopens with several site-specific commissions made possible by new architectural spaces, including a new piece by Sarah Lucas.

3. V&A East Museum | London

The world’s leading museum of art, design, and performance, London’s V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum) has a vast collection of over 2.8 million objects spanning 5,000 years of human creativity. Following the May 2025 opening of the V&A East Storehouse, where visitors and researchers can access the museum’s objects, books, and archives—including the David Bowie Archive, which contains over 90,000 items from the artist’s life—the V&A East Museum, designed by architects O’Donnell + Tuomey, introduces new curatorial themes centered on contemporary global culture and East London’s creative heritage. The museum’s first major exhibition, “The Music Is Black: A British Story,” opening on April 18, 2026, explores 125 years of Black British music history, showing how it has influenced British culture and had a global impact. Inspired by East London’s lively creative scene, the V&A East Museum unites the worlds of art, design, fashion, music, and performance in a new five-story space.

4. Lucas Museum of Narrative Art | Los Angeles

Opening to the public in September 2026, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will uniquely focus its collection and exhibitions on illustrated storytelling. Designed by Chinese architect Ma Yansong of MAD Architects in a futuristic, organic style that avoids right angles, the building emphasizes flowing, biomorphic, and sculptural shapes that blend nature with the cityscape. The museum will feature a permanent collection and rotating special exhibitions, showcasing artifacts from George Lucas’s films, including props, costumes, and models from Star Wars and Indiana Jones, as well as works by celebrated American illustrators like Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, and Maxfield Parrish; paintings by artists such as Frida Kahlo, Ernie Barnes, and Jacob Lawrence, alongside works by renowned photographers like Gordon Parks and Dorothea Lange; and artifacts dating back to ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman periods, used to explore foundational myths and storytelling traditions.

5. Crystal Bridges Museum of Art | Bentonville

Founded by Walmart heiress and philanthropist Alice Walton, designed by the renowned Moshe Safdie Architects, and opened in 2011, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art showcases a permanent collection of American art spanning five centuries, including works by prominent American artists, along with rotating exhibitions. Safdie’s expansion of the museum, scheduled to open in June 2026, increases the gallery space by 50 percent and adds a dedicated floor for community gatherings with digital and ceramic art studios and maker spaces. In celebration of the opening, the museum received two landmark gifts: the Humphreys Collection, which includes more than 200 works by over 100 artists such as Mary Cassatt, Andy Warhol, and Robert Rauschenberg, making it the largest gift in the museum’s history, and the Walton Collection, featuring 18 major works by women artists including Yayoi Kusama and Alice Neel, donated by Olivia and Tom Walton.

6. Centre for Contemporary Arts Tashkent | Tashkent

Central Asia’s first permanent institution dedicated to contemporary art, research, and cultural exchange, the Centre for Contemporary Arts Tashkent (CCA), is situated in a former tram depot and diesel power station, originally constructed in 1912 in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. Restored by architecture firm Studio KO to connect the country’s rich heritage with global art trends, CCA will host international exhibitions covering visual art, architecture, design, performance, music, and film. Other key features include a café, a dedicated curatorial library in a former kindergarten, and artist residencies in nearby neighborhoods. Opening in March 2026, the inaugural exhibition, “Hikmah,” curated by CCA Artistic Director and Chief Curator Dr. Sara Raza, showcases site-specific works that respond to the building and its architecture, with new commissions and loans from other museums.

7. Dataland | Los Angeles

The world’s first Museum of AI Arts, DATALAND, opens in spring 2026 at The Grand LA, a Frank Gehry-designed cultural complex in downtown Los Angeles. Envisioned as a living museum where human imagination meets machine creativity, DATALAND sets new standards for artistic expression in the age of artificial intelligence. Co-founded by renowned media artist Refik Anadol and artist Efsun Erkılıç, both leading figures at Refik Anadol Studio, the museum will serve as a public repository for large-scale, nature-focused datasets, building a comprehensive collection of AI art while maintaining an artist residency program and online access and learning platforms. The inaugural exhibit presents well-known installations like his first immersive data sculpture, Infinity Room, now enhanced with new AI features. Created as a perfect cube with projected data and light on mirrored walls, ceiling, and floors by Anadol at UCLA in 2014, this latest version offers a first look at the multisensory, perspective-changing experiences visitors can expect at DATALAND.

8. Kanal Centre Pompidou | Brussels

With museum locations in Paris, Metz, Malaga, and Shanghai, the Centre Pompidou is preparing to open its newest site in November. Situated in a former Citroën car factory, a historic Art Deco building along the Brussels–Charleroi Canal, Kanal Centre Pompidou will become one of Europe’s largest cultural institutions. Designed by the consortium Atelier as a multidisciplinary “city within a city,” it includes several unique components, such as the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, which will feature a permanent collection and rotating exhibitions in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou. It will also feature a dedicated center for architecture, landscape, and urban planning; a 400-seat auditorium for performances, dance, music, and film; a rooftop bar with panoramic views; and a restaurant, bakery, library, and playground. Since 2018, Kanal has built its art collection by focusing on artists connected to Brussels or Belgium, acquiring 12 to 13 works each year from 7 to 8 artists, balancing established and emerging talent.

9. Memphis Museum of Art | Memphis

Museum of Art, relocating it to a new building at a new location. Designed by the renowned Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with local architects Archimania and situated on the Mississippi River, the project aims to serve as a world-class civic landmark and “living room” for the city. The design arranges all gallery spaces on a single floor to create a seamless, non-hierarchical experience for over 9,000 collection pieces spanning 5,000 years of art and culture. Unique features and amenities include the Rooftop Sculpture Garden with native plantings, the River Window to showcase the Mississippi River, adjacent River Steps that create a mini-amphitheater for public gatherings, a glass-box auditorium cantilevered over the courtyard, education classrooms, a café, and a museum store.

10. LACMA David Geffen Galleries | Los Angeles

Straddling Wilshire Boulevard, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new David Geffen Galleries building is a single, horizontally oriented structure with an organic, amoeba-like shape, primarily made of architectural concrete and glass. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor, its horizontal layout aims to remove traditional cultural hierarchies by displaying art from different eras and regions on a single, continuous level. At the plaza level, a modern theater will host film screenings and events, while the ground level is for dining, educational activities, and artwork display. Opening in April 2026, the schedule will feature a solo multisensory installation by Tavares Strachan and Youssef Nabil’s photographs and videos. Several monumental works will move to the new campus, including sculptures by Tony Smith and Alexander Calder, as well as the recently acquired Split-Rocker, a 37-foot-tall topiary sculpture by Jeff Koons.

11. Drift Museum | Amsterdam

The Drift Museum, scheduled to open in 2026 in Amsterdam’s historic Van Gendt Hallen industrial complex, renovated by architecture firm Braaksma & Roos, is dedicated to the Dutch artist duo Studio Drift, renowned worldwide for their large-scale, technology-infused, kinetic installations. The museum is designed as an immersive, experiential environment rather than a traditional gallery, intended to inspire awe and foster a stronger bond with the planet and nature. Accessible by electric boat through an indoor harbor, the exhibition hall will feature the captivating works of Studio Drift (Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta), which cleverly explore the connections between nature, technology, and humanity.