Seven Exhibitions You Need to See in New York This Spring
From Raphael at the Met to Carol Bove at the Guggenheim, New York's spring 2026 museum season is the strongest the city has offered in years.
New York's museum calendar is stacked this spring. Here are seven exhibitions worth building a trip around, all on view or opening soon.
Raphael: Sublime Poetry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens in March and is the headline event of the year. Seven years in the making, this is the first true Raphael survey the United States has ever seen. Nearly 240 works will be assembled from collections worldwide, including The Alba Madonna from the National Gallery of Art in Washington and Portrait of Baldassarre Castiglione from the Louvre. An entire gallery will be devoted to the portraits alone.
Marcel Duchamp at the Museum of Modern Art opens in April with nearly 300 works spanning the full arc of a career that redefined what art could be. This is the first major Duchamp retrospective since 1973. It will travel to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in October.
Carol Bove at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opens March 5 and gives the artist her largest museum survey to date. Her twisted steel collage sculptures have a physical authority that the Guggenheim's rotunda was practically designed to amplify. Many works have been made specifically for the space.
New York's spring 2026 season is the strongest the city has offered in years. Plan accordingly.
Anselm Kiefer: The Woman Alchemists at Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, runs through September 27. New paintings and sculptures exploring alchemy, mythology, and feminine archetypes at a scale that makes the gallery feel like landscape.
The Art of Noise at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum surveys a century of music-related design, from 1960s radios to immersive listening rooms. Features interactive sound environments by Teenage Engineering and Devon Turnbull. Not strictly visual art, but the cross-disciplinary ambition makes it essential.
Ceija Stojka at the Drawing Center is the first major U.S. retrospective of the Roma refugee who survived three concentration camps before emerging in her late fifties as a prolific visual artist. Her paintings refuse photography's demand for proof and insist instead on feeling.
The Whitney Biennial 2026 opens March 8 with 56 artists curated by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer. Fifteen of the participants work at the intersection of art and technology, including digital art pioneer Samia Halaby. The strongest signal yet that institutional surveys are taking computational practices seriously.