The most exciting museum openings in 2026 – The Art Newspaper

Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork

Opening April

Value $720m

Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork

Opening 22 September

Value $1bn

Dataland

Opening spring

Value undisclosed

A trio of outstanding museum openings is predicted in Los Angeles in 2026. Maybe essentially the most anticipated is the growth of the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork (Lacma). Its new David Geffen Galleries—designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor and below building since 2020—will virtually double the museum’s complete gallery house with an added 110,000 sq. ft floating over Wilshire Boulevard. The Lacma growth opens in April and in addition features a theatre, schooling areas, eating places, present store and three.5 acres of art-filled public outside house.

A number of miles southeast of Lacma, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork is scheduled to open on 22 September, following eight years of building. The movie director George Lucas, whose intensive artwork assortment shall be housed within the new $1bn museum, has known as the 300,000 sq. ft constructing “a temple to the folks’s artwork”. Designed by Ma Yansong of the agency Mad Architects, the futuristic house in Exposition Park will characteristic greater than 30 gallery areas populated with all the things from Star Wars memorabilia to historic sculptures to digital artwork and immersive recreations of prehistoric cave work.

In downtown Los Angeles, one other huge title is opening a museum—this one situated within the Frank Gehry-designed Grand LA improvement throughout the road from Walt Disney Corridor and adjoining to the Broad (which is present process its personal growth, scheduled to open in 2028). The artist Refik Anadol’s new museum, Dataland, will develop into the primary on this planet dedicated to artwork created with the help of synthetic intelligence. Dataland’s inside, with 20,000 sq. ft of exhibition house, was designed by the structure agency Gensler.

V&A East

Opening 18 April

Value undisclosed

In April, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) opens its third new venue in as a few years, following the reimagined Younger V&A in July 2023 and the V&A East Storehouse in Could 2025. Becoming a member of them in east London, on a riverbank by the 2012 Olympic Park, is V&A East. Its purpose, says the V&A’s general director Tristram Hunt, is to open up the museum’s huge collections of utilized and ornamental arts “in new methods to audiences which have traditionally been underserved by main cultural establishments”.

V&A East will characteristic greater than 500 objects, together with artwork, structure, design, efficiency and style. Guests shall be welcomed by a monumental sculpture by Thomas J. Value and the inaugural exhibition will concentrate on Black British music.

“We’ve labored actually laborious to embed V&A East in native communities,” its director Gus Casely-Hayford advised The Guardian. “This can be a house that belongs to them. These are collections which belong to all of us. Listening to them mirror again the fervour, the aspirations, the aims, in phrases which can be theirs is deeply heartening.”

The museum happened from efforts to regenerate the world after the Olympics and it joins different excessive profile establishments such because the London School of Vogue and the BBC. The general value of the venture, funded by the London Legacy Improvement Company, has been quoted at £1.1bn, however the particular prices for V&A East haven’t been revealed.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Artwork

Opening 6 June

Value undisclosed

The Walmart heiress Alice Walton’s up to date artwork museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, is about to extend its house by 50%. Scheduled to open on 6 June, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Artwork’s long-awaited growth will add 114,000 sq. ft of galleries, studios, cafés and occasion areas. The growth, which was first introduced in 2021 and commenced the next yr, will open a month earlier than the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence—considered one of a plethora of occasions deliberate all through the nation.

The addition was designed by Safdie Architects, the identical agency that constructed the unique constructing in 2011. Whereas the price of the growth shouldn’t be publicly recognized, the newspaper Arkansas Enterprise estimated it at $100m in 2021. New areas will embrace ceramics and digital-art studios for public lessons and workshops and what the museum calls a “home-like lounge for gathering with household, mates and group members”. The campus—which just lately added a medical faculty that guarantees to hyperlink artwork and wellness—may even develop to include an expansive new outside youngsters’s playscape designed by the Philadelphia-based panorama architect Bryan Hanes. The museum, which has free admission, has remained open all through the development course of whereas reinstalling lots of its galleries.

Tashkent Centre for Modern Artwork

Opening March

Value undisclosed

The Tashkent Centre for Modern Artwork (CCA), the one everlasting up to date arts centre in Uzbekistan, will open in a restored 1912 tram depot and diesel station. Sara Raza, a former curator on the Guggenheim in New York who has Uzbek ancestry, is the inventive director and chief curator. She has curated festivals in Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan and designed the curriculum for the primary MA in museum research in Central Asia. Considered one of her first hires was a 19-year-old youth curator—Uzbeks below 30 make up 60% of the inhabitants, she says. The creation of the CCA and the overhaul of its constructing by Studio KO is a part of a drive by Uzbekistan’s Artwork and Tradition Improvement Basis, a authorities company aiming to combine the artwork of Uzbekistan into the worldwide artwork house.

Muzej Lah

Opening summer time

Value undisclosed

A brand new privately owned museum of up to date artwork is scheduled to open this summer time within the foothills of the Julian Alps in Slovenia, towards the fairytale backdrop of Lake Bled and the medieval Bled Fortress.

Muzej Lah is the long-held dream of its founders, the Slovenian philanthropists Igor and Mojca Lah. It should home their assortment, constructed over 30 years and containing greater than 800 post-war works by over 100 artists, together with Anselm Kiefer, William Kentridge, Anne Imhof, Theaster Gates and Hito Steyerl, in addition to Slovenian artists together with the printmaker Zoran Mušič. Igor Lah is the president of Vaider Group, a Swiss maker of glass bottles for drinks, perfumes and cosmetics, and the proprietor of two extra glass-making corporations in Slovenia and Serbia; Mojca Lah is Vaider Group’s treasurer. Their Lucerne-based basis has loaned works from the gathering to museum exhibitions in Madrid and Ljubljana.

Designed by David Chipperfield Architects, the constructing is embedded in a hillside, spans 55,000 sq. ft and options courtyards and terraces. It goals to mirror the topography of the encompassing panorama with sloping roofs of layered tiles. It should home a library, analysis centre and restaurant in addition to house for movies, performances and schooling.

Mosul Museum

Reopening November

Value undisclosed

Mosul Museum is because of reopen 23 years after the Iraq Battle pressured it to shut and 12 years after Islamic State vandalised its sculptures, burned its manuscripts and attacked the constructing. Its painstaking reconstruction was undertaken by the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, the World Monuments Fund, Aliph, the Musée du Louvre and the Smithsonian Establishment.

London Museum

Opening late 2026

Value £437m

Smithfield was as soon as the world’s largest meat market. Now there may be not a lot of it left and 850 years of buying and selling is because of stop in 2028. The southern finish of the complicated will reopen as a brand new residence for the renamed Museum of London, which holds over seven million objects associated to the historical past of town and a wealthy assortment of artwork, together with items by Canaletto and Hogarth, in addition to current works by Jeremy Deller and Steve McQueen. It should develop into the Sixties Poultry Market in 2028.

Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

Anticipated to open in 2026

Value undisclosed

Abu Dhabi’s museumopolis is tantalisingly near completion. TeamLab Phenomena, the Pure Historical past Museum and the Zayed Nationwide Museum all opened in 2025. With the Louvre Abu Dhabi open since 2017, that simply leaves the Guggenheim. Designed by Frank Gehry, it is going to be the biggest of the Guggenheim museums, sitting proudly on a promontory a brief stroll from the Louvre.