2025 was not an easy year for museums, particularly in the U.S., as budget cuts and intensifying scrutiny of financial models, governance and programming collided with an increasingly polarized public debate. At the same time, many institutions were forced to confront their own vulnerabilities, from governance scandals to a troubling rise in art thefts, culminating in the clamorous Louvre case in October. A new report from the Mapping Museums Lab at Birkbeck College, University of London—the first comprehensive study of the U.K. museum sector—underscored just how fragile the landscape has become, documenting the closure of 524 museums between 2000 and 2025.

Yet even as the headlines remain bleak, many institutions are treating this moment as a catalyst, testing new fundraising models, corporate partnerships and membership structures while embracing digital and analog strategies to grow audiences and stabilize revenue. Others are looking outward, forging international partnerships and organizing traveling exhibitions that make ambitious programming possible by sharing both labor and cost. What that means is that there is no shortage of major museum shows set to open around the world in 2026. Here are 10 worth traveling for:

The legendary Mexican artist’s 1940 self-portrait El sueño (La cama) (The Dream (The Bed)) recently became the most expensive work by a woman ever sold at auction when it fetched $54.7 million at Sotheby’s, stealing the scene during November’s multibillion-dollar marquee sales. The result sets the stage for Kahlo’s survey at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH)—where the record-breaking masterpiece will also appear—before the exhibition travels to Tate Modern in London. Focusing on her enigmatic and densely symbolic self-portraits, the show examines “the making of an icon,” tracing how Frida Kahlo’s singular personality and potent visual imagination forged an aura and legend that continue to surround her. By fearlessly confronting the darker reaches of her psyche and the emotional intensity with which she experienced the world, Kahlo shaped a mythology that has only deepened over time. Featuring more than 130 works, including many of her best-known paintings, the exhibition will also present documents, photographs and memorabilia from her archives, alongside work by more than 80 of her contemporaries and artists she later inspired.

Marking the final stop on an international tour organized with DAS MINSK in Potsdam, the Barbican in London and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, this highly anticipated Noah Davis survey will arrive on the East Coast at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Charting Davis’s practice across painting, curating and community-building, the exhibition brings together more than 60 works that reveal his rare ability to capture the humanity of his subjects in moments that feel unfiltered yet are dense with emotional and narrative force. Linking personal and collective experiences, Davis offers an empathetic portrait of contemporary urban life, tracing the internal and external conflicts individuals navigate within the societal, political and economic structures that shape their existence. Organized chronologically, the exhibition will feature work made from 2007 until his death in 2015 at the age of 32. Paintings that move fluidly between styles and techniques—depicting dreamlike, joyful and melancholic scenes—will appear alongside experimental sculptures and works on paper that illuminate the conceptual foundations of his career.

At a moment when technologies like A.I. are........

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