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The coming year brings a wave of ambitious cultural openings. Some have been years in development, whether stalled by funding shifts, planning battles or the sheer complexity of building at scale. Now entering their final stages, they promise a host of new museums, vast subterranean expansions and revived studios to a cultural landscape that is rapidly expanding in scale, ambition and reach.
Across the U.K., momentum is strong: Cardiff prepares to welcome its first contemporary art museum, while in London, the V&A East joins the recently opened V&A Storehouse on the Stratford Waterfront. In St Ives, the Cornish seaside town long associated with Barbara Hepworth, the artist’s once-disused Palais de Danse - a former cinema and dance hall she purchased in 1961 as a second studio - will reopen nearly fifty years after her death.
Abu Dhabi’s Frank Gehry–designed Guggenheim is finally nearing completion, while the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas, opens in September after migrating through two earlier proposed sites before finally settling in Los Angeles. And in Benin City, the Museum of West African Art remains suspended in uncertainty, its intended opening overshadowed by political disputes and contested visions of cultural ownership.
Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (month unconfirmed)
More than a decade in the making, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, designed by the late Frank Gehry, is now nearing completion on Saadiyat Island. Set within the island’s fast-growing cultural district, the 42,000-square-metre museum will be the largest Guggenheim outpost worldwide, joining the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Announced in 2006 through an agreement between Abu Dhabi and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the project has been envisioned as a global hub for post-1960s art, with a particular focus on West Asian, North African, and South Asian practices, alongside housing a significant permanent collection, and newly-commissed works.
Its opening crowns a transformative period for Saadiyat Island, which has rapidly consolidated its status as the UAE’s cultural power centre. Following Jean Nouvel’s Louvre Abu Dhabi (2017), the emirate has recently unveiled two more major institutions: the Norman Foster–designed Zayed National Museum and the Natural History Museum. The momentum continues into 2026, with the inaugural edition of Frieze Abu Dhabi set to coincide with Sotheby’s first auctions in the emirate.
Artistic Museum of Contemporary Art, Wales (month unconfirmed)
The Artistic Museum of Contemporary Art’s pop-up exhibition, Black Voices from the Museum Collection, at the Temple of Peace
The Artistic Museum of Contemporary Art (AMOCA) is set to become Cardiff’s first dedicated contemporary art museum. The not-for-profit, privately founded institution will house around 1,000 works, largely drawn from the collection of Welsh-Swedish entrepreneur and philanthropist Anders Hedlund. Conceived as a meeting place for innovative practice, AMOCA aims to position Wales within global contemporary art discourse while giving visibility to local artists. Its programme will pair temporary shows with rotating displays from the permanent collection, with a curatorial focus on minority perspectives, subcultures, and emerging Welsh talent across diverse media. Plans for indoor and outdoor large-scale spaces, alongside digital experiences, aim to broaden how audiences encounter contemporary art. Beyond exhibitions, the museum intends to host talks, symposia, youth workshops, and residencies, creating a social and educational hub within the city.
V&A East Museum, London (April 2026)
Opening in April on Stratford Waterfront, the V&A East Museum will join the recently opened V&A Storehouse in East London. Designed by O'Donnell + Tuomey, the five-storey building will present a mix of major temporary exhibitions and displays drawn from the V&A’s collection, connecting global creative practices with the long history of making in east London. Around 500 objects will be arranged across thematic sections throughout the museum, that consider questions of identity, representation and environmental change. Those visiting in the early months will also encounter the first round of a new commissions programme, which introduces eight east London–inspired works by artists including Rene Matić and Es Devlin.The museum’s debut show, The Music is Black: A British Story, traces the impact of Black British music on the country’s cultural life.
James Turrell at ARoS Art Museum, Denmark (19 June 2026)
James Turrell, As Seen Below - The Dome (2025)
James Turrell’s most monumental addition to his acclaimed “Skyspace” series will open at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in June, completing the museum’s decade-long expansion. Turrell began developing Skyspaces in the 1970s as chambers that frame the sky through precisely shaped apertures, creating heightened encounters with light and perception. As Seen Below — The Dome becomes the largest of these works to appear within a museum context. First announced in 2015 and realised with Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects, the installation anchors ARoS’s new subterranean extension, The Next Level, which also includes the recently opened Salling Gallery and a forthcoming outdoor exhibition area. Set within a grassy mound beside the museum, Turrell’s soaring chamber, over 50 feet high and 130 feet across, features a central oculus and the artist’s monochromatic lighting system, transforming the sky into an immersive field of shifting colour.
Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles (22 September 2026)
Aerial view of Lucas Museum construction, September 2025
Co-founded by filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, businesswoman Mellody Hobson, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will open in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park - finally materialising after abandoned proposals in San Francisco and Chicago and years of construction delays. Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD, the museum’s sleek, spacecraft-like form rises above gardens by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA. Inside, 35 galleries, covering 100,000 square feet, draw from a collection of more than 40,000 works, one of the world’s most significant holdings of narrative art. Paintings by Norman Rockwell, Frida Kahlo, N.C. Wyeth, and Maxfield Parrish sit alongside landmark illustrations by Robert Crumb, Frank Frazetta, and Jack Kirby. Much of Lucas’s own collection of storytelling will also be displayed, together with Star Wars and Indiana Jones props, costumes, and storyboards.
MANN 2: Museum Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples (mid–late 2026)
One of the world’s great repositories of classical antiquity, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (MANN), opens a major new branch offering 10,000 square metres of exhibition space that will allow the institution to display far more of its vast holdings. Known as MANN 2, the new museum will take shape inside the Real Albergo dei Poveri, an unfinished 18th-century complex with a 400-metre façade, among the longest in Europe.
Alongside major antiquities from the Roman Empire, MANN is custodian of the world’s largest collection of material from Pompeii, now one of Italy’s most visited archaeological sites. Of the roughly 400,000 artefacts excavated from the ancient city, about 40,000 are held by MANN, though many remain in storage due to limited space. MANN 2 will spotlight the Santangelo Collection and displays on pioneering archaeologists including Giuseppe Fiorelli, Vittorio Spinazzola and Amedeo Maiuri, while other areas of the vast complex will house teaching rooms, accommodation for the University of Naples Federico II, and more space for the National Library.
The Palais de Danse, St Ives (mid–late 2026)
Barbara Hepworth on the dance floor, Palais de Danse, March 1961
The Palais de Danse, a Grade II–listed building in the centre of the Cornish seaside town of St Ives, is set to reopen nearly 50 years after the death of Barbara Hepworth, who bought the former cinema and dance hall in 1961 as her second studio. It was here that she created some of her most ambitious works - including Single Form, Winged Figure and Four Square (Walk Through) - as her international reputation grew. Now being transformed by Adam Khan Architects, the long-disused building will return as a space for art-making, performance, learning and community events, bringing a key site from Hepworth’s career back into public use.
On the lower floor, reconstructed workshop spaces will display her tools, materials and studio artefacts, many never previously shown, alongside the grid-marked floor she used to map out Single Form for the United Nations. Upstairs, the restored 24-metre dance hall, with its sprung maple floor, stage and glassine screens designed by Hepworth, will host commissions, installations and talks. Outside, the yard where she made the prototype for Winged Figure will open to visitors for the first time. The project complements the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden across the road, which preserves her home and studio much as she left them.
The Museum of West African Art, Benin City, Nigeria
Museum of West African Art
The Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Benin City was meant to open its doors in November 2025, but instead became engulfed in political disputes. Five years in development and backed by $25 million from donors including the French and German governments, the British Museum and the Edo State government, the institution was conceived by businessman Phillip Ihenacho as a major new cultural centre in the city long associated with the Benin Bronzes, looted by British troops in the 19th century.
Although MOWAA had once been envisioned as a future home for repatriated bronzes, a 2023 presidential declaration transferred ownership of the artefacts to Ewuare II, the Oba of Benin, who plans to display them in a museum of his own. Tensions escalated when the Edo State government revoked the land on which MOWAA was built and protestors entered the site. According to a statement from the museum, the protests appeared to stem from ‘disputes between the previous and current state administrations’. In the absence of the bronzes, the museum is positioning itself as a centre for historical and contemporary West African art.
The first exhibition due to open in November was Nigeria Imaginary: Homecoming, an expanded version of Nigeria’s 2024 Venice Biennale pavilion exploring shifting ideas of nationhood through painting, sculpture, installation, film and text. A new opening date has not been confirmed at the time of writing.