The Best Art Exhibitions Happening in 2025

The gallery and museum calendar for 2025 is stacked. Whether you're into contemporary installations, classical painting, or photography, there's a reason to plan a trip around art this year. These exhibitions represent the most ambitious and talked-about shows currently running or opening soon.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York is hosting a massive Joan Mitchell retrospective that spans four decades of the abstract expressionist's work. Mitchell's large-scale paintings have never gotten the institutional recognition they deserve relative to her male contemporaries, and this exhibition positions her firmly in the top tier.

At the Tate Modern in London, a major Yayoi Kusama exhibition expands beyond the signature infinity rooms to explore her earlier avant-garde work from the 1960s. The immersive installations will be there, but so will the paintings, collages, and sculptures that reveal the full depth of an artist often reduced to her most Instagrammable creations.

The Broad in Los Angeles continues its run as one of America's most vital contemporary art spaces with exhibitions featuring works from Takashi Murakami and a deep dive into the museum's growing collection of Black contemporary artists including Mark Bradford, Kara Walker, and Kerry James Marshall.

Budget for it properly, because admission prices have moved. MoMA charges $30 for an adult ticket, though UNIQLO Free Friday Nights open the doors free from 4pm to 8pm if you will stand in a queue. Tate Modern's collection displays are free and only the big ticketed shows cost around £20, so a Tate membership pays for itself in roughly five exhibitions. The Broad's general admission is free, but timed slots are released a month ahead and go fast. Download Bloomberg Connects before you travel, too: it is free, carries guides for hundreds of museums and saves you the audio guide fee.

Photography enthusiasts should head to the International Center of Photography in New York for a Gordon Parks exhibition spanning his entire career. From fashion photography for Vogue to his civil rights documentation to his groundbreaking direction of Shaft, Parks remains one of the most versatile visual artists America has produced.

If you can only make one trip, the Gordon Parks show is the one with the most to teach. Parks bought his first camera in a pawnshop and taught himself. The Fort Scott series, the Harlem gang leader essay for Life, and the 1942 portrait of Ella Watson with her mop and broom sit in the same career as the Vogue fashion work. Seeing them hung in one room is the whole argument for him.

The Art Institute of Chicago is staging a comprehensive survey of Surrealism's global reach beyond its European origins, highlighting movements in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia that are often excluded from the standard art historical narrative. It's a corrective that feels long overdue.

Museums are only half the calendar anyway. Frieze takes over Regent's Park in London every October and Art Basel runs in Basel in June, and both show you what is being made now rather than what has been canonised. Documenta happens once every five years in Kassel, next in 2027, and occupies an entire German city for 100 days.

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions