The most exciting museum openings in 2026 – The Art Newspaper

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Opening April

Cost $720m

Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

Opening 22 September

Cost $1bn

Dataland

Opening spring

Cost undisclosed

A trio of prominent museum openings is expected in Los Angeles in 2026. Perhaps the most anticipated is the expansion of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma). Its new David Geffen Galleries—designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor and under construction since 2020—will almost double the museum’s total gallery space with an added 110,000 sq. ft floating over Wilshire Boulevard. The Lacma expansion opens in April and also includes a theatre, education spaces, restaurants, gift shop and 3.5 acres of art-filled public outdoor space.

Several miles southeast of Lacma, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is scheduled to open on 22 September, following eight years of construction. The film director George Lucas, whose extensive art collection will be housed in the new $1bn museum, has called the 300,000 sq. ft building “a temple to the people’s art”. Designed by Ma Yansong of the firm Mad Architects, the futuristic space in Exposition Park will feature more than 30 gallery spaces populated with everything from Star Wars memorabilia to ancient sculptures to digital art and immersive recreations of prehistoric cave paintings.

In downtown Los Angeles, another big name is opening a museum—this one located in the Frank Gehry-designed Grand LA development across the street from Walt Disney Hall and adjacent to the Broad (which is undergoing its own expansion, scheduled to open in 2028). The artist Refik Anadol’s new museum, Dataland, will become the first in the world devoted to art created with the aid of artificial intelligence. Dataland’s interior, with 20,000 sq. ft of exhibition space, was designed by the architecture firm Gensler.

V&A East

Opening 18 April

Cost undisclosed

In April, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) opens its third new venue in as many years, following the reimagined Young V&A in July 2023 and the V&A East Storehouse in May 2025. Joining them in east London, on a riverbank by the 2012 Olympic Park, is V&A East. Its aim, says the V&A’s overall director Tristram Hunt, is to open up the museum’s vast collections of applied and decorative arts “in new ways to audiences which have historically been underserved by major cultural institutions”.

V&A East will feature more than 500 objects, including art, architecture, design, performance and fashion. Visitors will be welcomed by a monumental sculpture by Thomas J. Price and the inaugural exhibition will focus on Black British music.

“We’ve worked really hard to embed V&A East in local communities,” its director Gus Casely-Hayford told The Guardian. “This is a space that belongs to them. These are collections which belong to all of us. Hearing them reflect back the passion, the aspirations, the objectives, in terms that are theirs is deeply heartening.”

The museum came about from efforts to regenerate the area after the Olympics and it joins other high profile institutions such as the London College of Fashion and the BBC. The overall cost of the project, funded by the London Legacy Development Corporation, has been quoted at £1.1bn, but the specific costs for V&A East have not been revealed.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Opening 6 June

Cost undisclosed

The Walmart heiress Alice Walton’s contemporary art museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, is about to increase its space by 50%. Scheduled to open on 6 June, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s long-awaited expansion will add 114,000 sq. ft of galleries, studios, cafés and event spaces. The expansion, which was first announced in 2021 and began the following year, will open a month before the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence—one of a plethora of events planned throughout the country.

The addition was designed by Safdie Architects, the same firm that built the original building in 2011. While the cost of the expansion is not publicly known, the newspaper Arkansas Business estimated it at $100m in 2021. New spaces will include ceramics and digital-art studios for public classes and workshops and what the museum calls a “home-like lounge for gathering with family, friends and community members”. The campus—which recently added a medical school that promises to link art and wellness—will also expand to incorporate an expansive new outdoor children’s playscape designed by the Philadelphia-based landscape architect Bryan Hanes. The museum, which has free admission, has remained open throughout the construction process while reinstalling many of its galleries.

Tashkent Centre for Contemporary Art

Opening March

Cost undisclosed

The Tashkent Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), the only permanent contemporary arts centre in Uzbekistan, will open in a restored 1912 tram depot and diesel station. Sara Raza, a former curator at the Guggenheim in New York who has Uzbek ancestry, is the artistic director and chief curator. She has curated festivals in Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan and designed the curriculum for the first MA in museum studies in Central Asia. One of her first hires was a 19-year-old youth curator—Uzbeks under 30 make up 60% of the population, she says. The creation of the CCA and the overhaul of its building by Studio KO is part of a drive by Uzbekistan’s Art and Culture Development Foundation, a government agency aiming to integrate the art of Uzbekistan into the global art space.

Muzej Lah

Opening summer

Cost undisclosed

A new privately owned museum of contemporary art is scheduled to open this summer in the foothills of the Julian Alps in Slovenia, against the fairytale backdrop of Lake Bled and the medieval Bled Castle.

Muzej Lah is the long-held dream of its founders, the Slovenian philanthropists Igor and Mojca Lah. It will house their collection, built over 30 years and containing more than 800 post-war works by over 100 artists, including Anselm Kiefer, William Kentridge, Anne Imhof, Theaster Gates and Hito Steyerl, as well as Slovenian artists including 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 owner of two more glass-making firms in Slovenia and Serbia; Mojca Lah is Vaider Group’s treasurer. Their Lucerne-based foundation has loaned works from the collection to museum exhibitions in Madrid and Ljubljana.

Designed by David Chipperfield Architects, the building is embedded in a hillside, spans 55,000 sq. ft and features courtyards and terraces. It aims to reflect the topography of the surrounding landscape with sloping roofs of layered tiles. It will house a library, research centre and restaurant as well as space for films, performances and education.

Mosul Museum

Reopening November

Cost undisclosed

Mosul Museum is due to reopen 23 years after the Iraq War forced it to close and 12 years after Islamic State vandalised its sculptures, burned its manuscripts and attacked the building. 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 Institution.

London Museum

Opening late 2026

Cost £437m

Smithfield was once the world’s largest meat market. Now there is not much of it left and 850 years of trading is due to cease in 2028. The southern end of the complex will reopen as a new home for the renamed Museum of London, which holds over seven million objects related to the history of the city and a rich collection of art, including pieces by Canaletto and Hogarth, as well as recent works by Jeremy Deller and Steve McQueen. It will expand into the 1960s Poultry Market in 2028.

Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

Expected to open in 2026

Cost undisclosed

Abu Dhabi’s museumopolis is tantalisingly close to completion. TeamLab Phenomena, the Natural History Museum and the Zayed National Museum all opened in 2025. With the Louvre Abu Dhabi open since 2017, that just leaves the Guggenheim. Designed by Frank Gehry, it will be the largest of the Guggenheim museums, sitting proudly on a promontory a short walk from the Louvre.