The approaching 12 months brings a wave of formidable cultural openings. Some have been years in growth, whether or not stalled by funding shifts, planning battles or the sheer complexity of constructing at scale. Now coming into their remaining phases, they promise a bunch of recent museums, huge subterranean expansions and revived studios to a cultural panorama that’s quickly increasing in scale, ambition and attain.
Throughout the U.Okay., momentum is robust: Cardiff prepares to welcome its first modern artwork museum, whereas in London, the V&A East joins the lately opened V&A Storehouse on the Stratford Waterfront. In St Ives, the Cornish seaside city lengthy related to Barbara Hepworth, the artist’s once-disused Palais de Danse – a former cinema and dance corridor she bought in 1961 as a second studio – will reopen practically fifty years after her loss of life.
Abu Dhabi’s Frank Gehry–designed Guggenheim is lastly nearing completion, whereas the Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork, based by Star Wars creator George Lucas, opens in September after migrating via two earlier proposed websites earlier than lastly settling in Los Angeles. And in Benin Metropolis, the Museum of West African Artwork stays suspended in uncertainty, its meant opening overshadowed by political disputes and contested visions of cultural possession.
Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (month unconfirmed)
Greater than a decade within the making, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, designed by the late Frank Gehry, is now nearing completion on Saadiyat Island. Set inside the island’s fast-growing cultural district, the 42,000-square-metre museum would be the largest Guggenheim outpost worldwide, becoming a member of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Peggy Guggenheim Assortment in Venice. Introduced in 2006 via an settlement between Abu Dhabi and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Basis, the mission has been envisioned as a worldwide hub for post-Nineteen Sixties artwork, with a selected concentrate on West Asian, North African, and South Asian practices, alongside housing a big everlasting assortment, and newly-commissed works.
Its opening crowns a transformative interval for Saadiyat Island, which has quickly consolidated its standing because the UAE’s cultural energy centre. Following Jean Nouvel’s Louvre Abu Dhabi (2017), the emirate has lately unveiled two extra main establishments: the Norman Foster–designed Zayed Nationwide Museum and the Pure Historical past Museum. The momentum continues into 2026, with the inaugural version of Frieze Abu Dhabi set to coincide with Sotheby’s first auctions within the emirate.
Creative Museum of Up to date Artwork, Wales (month unconfirmed)
The Creative Museum of Up to date Artwork’s pop-up exhibition, Black Voices from the Museum Assortment, on the Temple of Peace
(Picture credit score: {Photograph}: Dewi Tannatt Lloyd/Amoca)
The Creative Museum of Up to date Artwork (AMOCA) is about to turn into Cardiff’s first devoted modern artwork museum. The not-for-profit, privately based establishment will home round 1,000 works, largely drawn from the gathering of Welsh-Swedish entrepreneur and philanthropist Anders Hedlund. Conceived as a gathering place for progressive follow, AMOCA goals to place Wales inside international modern artwork discourse whereas giving visibility to native artists. Its programme will pair short-term exhibits with rotating shows from the everlasting assortment, with a curatorial concentrate on minority views, subcultures, and rising Welsh expertise throughout various media. Plans for indoor and out of doors large-scale areas, alongside digital experiences, intention to broaden how audiences encounter modern artwork. Past exhibitions, the museum intends to host talks, symposia, youth workshops, and residencies, making a social and academic hub inside the metropolis.
V&A East Museum, London (April 2026)
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of museum)
Opening in April on Stratford Waterfront, the V&A East Museum will be part of the lately opened V&A Storehouse in East London. Designed by O’Donnell + Tuomey, the five-storey constructing will current a mixture of main short-term exhibitions and shows drawn from the V&A’s assortment, connecting international artistic practices with the lengthy historical past of constructing in east London. Round 500 objects will likely be organized throughout thematic sections all through the museum, that take into account questions of identification, illustration and environmental change. These visiting within the early months will even encounter the primary spherical of a brand new commissions programme, which introduces eight east London–impressed works by artists together with Rene Matić and Es Devlin.The museum’s debut present, The Music is Black: A British Story, traces the affect of Black British music on the nation’s cultural life.
James Turrell at ARoS Artwork Museum, Denmark (19 June 2026)
James Turrell, As Seen Under – The Dome (2025)
(Picture credit score: Picture: Mads Smidstrup © ARoS, 2025. From James Turrell’s go to in As Seen Under, June 2025)
James Turrell’s most monumental addition to his acclaimed “Skyspace” collection will open at ARoS Aarhus Artwork Museum in June, finishing the museum’s decade-long enlargement. Turrell started growing Skyspaces within the Nineteen Seventies as chambers that body the sky via exactly formed apertures, creating heightened encounters with mild and notion. As Seen Under — The Dome turns into the biggest of those works to seem inside a museum context. First introduced in 2015 and realised with Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects, the set up anchors ARoS’s new subterranean extension, The Subsequent Stage, which additionally contains the lately opened Salling Gallery and a forthcoming out of doors exhibition space. Set inside a grassy mound beside the museum, Turrell’s hovering chamber, over 50 toes excessive and 130 toes throughout, encompasses a central oculus and the artist’s monochromatic lighting system, reworking the sky into an immersive subject of shifting color.
Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork, Los Angeles (22 September 2026)
Aerial view of Lucas Museum development, September 2025
(Picture credit score: © 2025 Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork. Picture courtesy of Hathaway Dinwiddie. Picture: Pedro Ramirez)
Co-founded by filmmaker George Lucas and his spouse, businesswoman Mellody Hobson, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork will open in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park – lastly materialising after deserted proposals in San Francisco and Chicago and years of development delays. Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD, the museum’s smooth, spacecraft-like type rises above gardens by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA. Inside, 35 galleries, protecting 100,000 sq. toes, draw from a set of greater than 40,000 works, one of many world’s most important holdings of narrative artwork. Work by Norman Rockwell, Frida Kahlo, N.C. Wyeth, and Maxfield Parrish sit alongside landmark illustrations by Robert Crumb, Frank Frazetta, and Jack Kirby. A lot of Lucas’s personal assortment of storytelling will even be displayed, along with Star Wars and Indiana Jones props, costumes, and storyboards.
MANN 2: Museum Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples (mid–late 2026)
(Picture credit score: ABDR)
One of many world’s nice repositories of classical antiquity, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (MANN), opens a significant new department providing 10,000 sq. metres of exhibition area that may permit the establishment to show much more of its huge holdings. Often known as MANN 2, the brand new museum will take form contained in the Actual Albergo dei Poveri, an unfinished 18th-century advanced with a 400-metre façade, among the many longest in Europe.
Alongside main antiquities from the Roman Empire, MANN is custodian of the world’s largest assortment of fabric from Pompeii, now one in every of Italy’s most visited archaeological websites. Of the roughly 400,000 artefacts excavated from the traditional metropolis, about 40,000 are held by MANN, although many stay in storage resulting from restricted area. MANN 2 will highlight the Santangelo Assortment and shows on pioneering archaeologists together with Giuseppe Fiorelli, Vittorio Spinazzola and Amedeo Maiuri, whereas different areas of the huge advanced will home instructing rooms, lodging for the College of Naples Federico II, and more room for the Nationwide Library.
The Palais de Danse, St Ives (mid–late 2026)
Barbara Hepworth on the dance ground, Palais de Danse, March 1961
(Picture credit score: {Photograph} by Studio St Ives. Barbara Hepworth © Bowness)
The Palais de Danse, a Grade II–listed constructing within the centre of the Cornish seaside city of St Ives, is about to reopen practically 50 years after the loss of life of Barbara Hepworth, who purchased the previous cinema and dance corridor in 1961 as her second studio. It was right here that she created a few of her most formidable works – together with Single Type, Winged Determine and 4 Sq. (Stroll Via) – as her worldwide repute grew. Now being remodeled by Adam Khan Architects, the long-disused constructing will return as an area for art-making, efficiency, studying and neighborhood occasions, bringing a key web site from Hepworth’s profession again into public use.
On the decrease ground, reconstructed workshop areas will show her instruments, supplies and studio artefacts, many by no means beforehand proven, alongside the grid-marked ground she used to map out Single Type for the United Nations. Upstairs, the restored 24-metre dance corridor, with its sprung maple ground, stage and glassine screens designed by Hepworth, will host commissions, installations and talks. Outdoors, the yard the place she made the prototype for Winged Determine will open to guests for the primary time. The mission enhances the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Backyard throughout the street, which preserves her house and studio a lot as she left them.
The Museum of West African Artwork, Benin Metropolis, Nigeria
Museum of West African Artwork
(Picture credit score: Courtesy MOWAA, Benin Metropolis)
The Museum of West African Artwork (MOWAA) in Benin Metropolis was meant to open its doorways in November 2025, however as an alternative turned engulfed in political disputes. 5 years in growth and backed by $25 million from donors together with the French and German governments, the British Museum and the Edo State authorities, the establishment was conceived by businessman Phillip Ihenacho as a significant new cultural centre within the metropolis lengthy related to the Benin Bronzes, looted by British troops within the nineteenth century.
Though MOWAA had as soon as been envisioned as a future house for repatriated bronzes, a 2023 presidential declaration transferred possession of the artefacts to Ewuare II, the Oba of Benin, who plans to show them in a museum of his personal. Tensions escalated when the Edo State authorities revoked the land on which MOWAA was constructed and protestors entered the location. In accordance with a press release from the museum, the protests appeared to stem from ‘disputes between the earlier and present state administrations’. Within the absence of the bronzes, the museum is positioning itself as a centre for historic and modern West African artwork.
The primary exhibition resulting from open in November was Nigeria Imaginary: Homecoming, an expanded model of Nigeria’s 2024 Venice Biennale pavilion exploring shifting concepts of nationhood via portray, sculpture, set up, movie and textual content. A brand new opening date has not been confirmed on the time of writing.
Supply: Wallpaper
