As the art world gears up for summer 2026, you can bet on women artists drawing crowds at museums across the world. These include a Frida Kahlo exhibition in London (which has already smashed records with its ticket presales) and the Japanese video artist Mako Idemitsu, who will have a broad survey in Japan.
It’s also a busy season for new museum openings. Paris’s Centre Pompidou, currently closed for renovations, inaugurates a new outpost in Asia after previously launching a space in Shanghai in 2019. Its new venture in Seoul is in partnership with Hanwha Foundation of Culture, and its two shows a year will be drawn from the museum’s collections, with a nod each time to contemporary Korean artists.
Another theme on everyone’s lips is, unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence. Long gone are the days when an immersive Vincent van Gogh experience was a novelty. AI exhibitions are kicking up a notch: Now, artists are using generative technology to create unsettling video artworks and a new museum on the U.S.’s West Coast will even incorporate visitors’ personal data to produce personalized exhibition experiences in real time.
From museums deploying innovative tech to bold new surveys, here are 10 shows to see around the world this summer.
Mrinalini Mukherjee
“Unbound Forms - Women Sculptors of India and Bangladesh”
Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, England
Through Nov. 1
A major retrospective celebrating the Indian artist Mrinalini Mukherjee is a big draw for the U.K.’s northern town of Wakefield this summer. Her 40-year career is on display here in all of its variety and experimentation: from her monumental fiber works to drawings, watercolors, and bronze and ceramic sculptures. Her sensuous and semi-figural forms made out of billowing folds and draping knots of traditional materials like hemp, jute, and cotton are influenced by Hindu spirituality and mythical folklore. These symbols are also found in her mother Leela Mukherjee’s work, also shown here.
Mrinalini Mukherjee’s astonishing career is situated within what independent curator Tarini Malik calls the “matrilineages” of South Asian women sculptors working in the years after independence. To that end, the exhibition also includes works by Meera Mukherjee (no relation), the Bangladeshi artist Novera Ahmed, and pioneering Indian sculptor Pilloo Pochkhanawala. The show paints a picture of a diverse group of women each using vernacular crafts—weaving, casting, and reuse—to redefine what sculpture could be during a period of radical change for the region.
Frida Kahlo
“Frida: The Making of an Icon”
Tate Modern, London
Through Jan. 3, 2027
Frida Kahlo has become so much more than an artist. This sprawling show, which comes to Tate Modern after a first run at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, traces her transformation from Diego Rivera’s artist wife into a cultural icon in her own right. Her artworks here are only part of the story, shown alongside her jewelry, clothes, and photographs as well as more than 200 works by other artists inspired by her. The show serves to prove that her colorful biography—and the adoration around her persona that she inspired—has just as significant a legacy as her work.
The show’s final room is an explosion of “Fridamania,” a collection of tote bags, shoes, mugs, and prints all emblazoned with her monobrowed face and cool gaze, testament to the commodification of the Frida myth. As her works continue to be some of the most sought-after in the market, her selling power for museums, too, is rock-solid: this is the highest pre-selling show in Tate’s history.
Mako Idemitsu
“What a Woman Made”
Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo
Through Sep. 21
The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum has been gearing up for this exhibition for a long time. The museum acquired the complete film and video works of Mako Idemitsu along with her major installation pieces a decade ago and is finally bringing them together in a comprehensive retrospective. Some of them are being shown to the public for the first time since their acquisition.
Idemitsu became an artist relatively late in life. She’d moved to the United States for college, where she met and married the painter Sam Francis, with whom she had two sons. But the constrictions of life as a mother and housewife grated on her, and she bought a camera and taught herself how to film. She went on to build a body of work that was sharply feminist. Her videos critique the role of women in both Japanese and American society and shine a light on the difficulty for women of managing the simultaneous roles of mother and artist. The show takes its title from the seminal 1973 video that brought her to prominence, which explores the treatment of Japanese women in society.
Carsten Höller
“Two”
UCCA, Beijing
July 4–Jan. 31, 2027
Fresh from installations of his work at the 2026 Venice Biennale, Carsten Höller heads this summer to Beijing, where UCCA will exhibit a number of his signature pieces as well as new works designed especially for the space. Höller likes his art to play with the senses, from olfactory installations to optical illusions using goggles that flip the viewer’s vision. Visitors can expect interactive works that plunge them into different perceptual states like slides, carousels, or giant dice to crawl in and out of. This focus could be linked to Höller’s penchant for creepy-crawlies: He’s a trained scientist and worked for many years in Germany as an entomologist before becoming an artist full-time. Höller’s works can feel like a mix between a school science trip and a day at the funfair—both silly and head-scratching. When it comes to a Höller show, visitors are part of the experiment.
“The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision”
Centre Pompidou Hanwha, Seoul
Through Oct. 4
Although the Centre Pompidou in the French capital is currently closed, Paris’s loss is Seoul’s gain. Around 90 paintings and sculptures from the Centre Pompidou’s Cubism collection are on view in South Korea for the inaugural exhibition of this new outpost. A former annex of the city’s 63 Building has been redesigned by Jean-Michel Wilmotte, who added a translucent sheath over the building, turning it into a glowing lightbox in the heart of the city’s financial district.
This marks the first major exhibition dedicated to Cubism in Asia in 50 years and covers the span of time between the movement’s emergence in Paris in 1907 to its changes in the post-war years up to 1927. It features all of the names you might expect: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, as well as less well-known historical names like Amédée Ozenfant and Natalia Goncharova. A final section, Korea Focus, hauls the movement into the present day, highlighting the work of contemporary Korean artists whose work has been influenced by early modern Cubism.
“The Aldrich Decennial: I am what is around me”
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut
Through Jan. 10, 2027
It’s an ambitious wager, launching a decennial. The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum has decided to focus its recurring survey on artists living and working in Connecticut, celebrating a state that has hosted and inspired a number of notable artists such as Alexander Calder, Sol LeWitt, and Louise Bourgeois. The title for the inaugural edition, “I am what is around me,” comes from a 1917 poem by Wallace Stevens, a longtime resident of the state, and summarizes the institution’s commitment to fostering artistic practices from the surrounding areas.
After conducting hundreds of studio visits, Aldrich curators have whittled down the list to only 40 participating artists who represent the state’s varied art landscape, with the oldest participating artist born in 1937 and the youngest in 1995. None of the artists has ever had a solo museum exhibition in Connecticut. Spanning the museum’s 8,000-square-foot gallery space, recently renovated three-acre campus, and sculpture garden, this bold event is proof that exciting, experimental art is being made outside of major art centers. Among the names to look out for are Tammy Nguyen, a multidisciplinary artist who moved to the state from New York City in 2021 and whose works on show reflect her closer relationship with the environment. Elsewhere, Kristy Hughes is exhibiting outdoor sculptures at the decennial for the first time.
Sonia Boyce
“Demonstrate”
Queens Museum, New York
June 27, 2026–Jan. 31, 2027
Sonia Boyce’s art has always been driven by collaboration and community, and her new show at the Queens Museum in New York is no exception. Boyce organized two days of events at the museum, bringing together locals, artists, educators, and the American activist group and choir Resistance Revival Chorus to interact through movement and song. She documented those encounters with photographs, film, and interviews, turning it into an immersive installation that places the visitor in the heart of a powerful, celebratory experience. You can catch echoes of her Golden Lion–winning work made for the British pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, including her signature tessellating wallpaper and video works centering Black female musicians. It’s her first museum show in the U.S., after Hauser & Wirth gave her a solo exhibition at the gallery’s Chelsea location in September 2025. Catch her in the States while you can; next year she’ll be back in the U.K. as Tate Britain honors her 40-year career with a major survey.
Pierre Huyghe
“Uumwelt”
The Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Through Nov. 29
Pierre Huyghe’s works have been described as “speculative fiction,” but as we all know, the use of AI has stepped well past speculation and into everyday life—including the art world. For his “Uumwelt” series, he first asked participants to imagine a set of images, before using a neural network—a machine learning model—to collect data from these participants’ fMRI brain scans. That data could then generate pictures based on their brain activity, a kind of imagined reconstruction of their thoughts.
It’s not just the people behind the artworks who are being tracked: In the exhibition itself, a sensor picks up on museum visitors’ gazes, which then activates the work. Huyghe has called it “a collective production of imagination between two kinds of intelligences.” It echoes another major opening happening on the other side of the U.S.: the vast, 25,000-square-foot, immersive and multisensory AI arts museum—a world first—DATALAND in Los Angeles. Founded by artist Refik Anadol, the museum makes an even more conspicuous use of visitor data, via wearable tech that tracks their biometrics. It truly is a brave, uncanny new world, and we’re just at the beginning of it.
Camille Henrot
“Paper Planes”
Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen
Through Dec. 31
The French artist Camille Henrot gets her biggest exhibition in Scandinavia to date at Copenhagen Contemporary this summer. The show brings together a variety of her works spanning film, sculpture, and drawing, including her 2026 film In The Veins, which is being shown for the first time in the region. It explores notions of care and grief in interweaving images of wildlife rehabilitation with those of looking after children. How do you raise children in a world that is losing biodiversity at such an alarming rate that those children will not grow up to see the same natural world as you?
This mingling of issues that are both personal and global also comes through in interactive installation Interphones (2015), where phones equipped with agony aunt–style automated responses gradually become more and more intrusive. Elsewhere, a series of drawings comment on our relationship with animals. This is a deservedly large and thoughtful exhibition for one of the most compelling artists working right now.
“Video Killed the Radio Star”
Mudam Contemporary Art Museum, Luxembourg
Through Oct. 11
The 1980s gifted us more than just shoulder pads and big hair. It was a pivotal period for culture, too. The 1970s’ nascent queer, feminist, and postcolonial movements only gathered steam over the next few years to dominate cultural thought. As part of the Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg’s 20th- anniversary celebrations, this exhibition digs into the museum’s archives to make a case for how the art, music and technology of the era is still echoing in our culture today. Expect Nan Goldin’s luminous photographs capturing the alternative nightlife spaces of the era, like Jimmy Paulette and Tabboo! Undressing (1991), as well as some of Lorna Simpson’s earliest works depicting unidentified Black figures accompanied by arcane text. Meanwhile newer works by contemporary artists like Angharad Williams riff on ’80s pop culture (the Teletubby Tinky Winky presented as Iggy Pop, anyone?).
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