The Six Most Anticipated Museum Openings of 2026

Most Anticipated Museum Openings

From a George Lucas Sci-Fi Marvel in Los Angeles to a Millennia-Old Aboriginal Monument in Australia, These Are the Cultural Destinations Worth Building Your Year Around

Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, futuristic curved green-roofed building in Los Angeles landscape 

Six museums are opening in 2026 that travel writers, art critics, and cultural travelers have been circling on their calendars for years — some delayed by pandemics, some by construction ambition that exceeded original estimates, some by the sheer scale of what was being attempted. Together they represent the most concentrated single-year expansion of the world’s cultural infrastructure since the Louvre Abu Dhabi changed the conversation about where great art institutions could exist. These are not museums you visit because they are convenient. These are museums you travel specifically to reach.

1. Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

Los Angeles, California — Opens September 22, 2026

George Lucas spent fifty years collecting art while making the films that defined modern visual storytelling, and the result is a 300,000-square-foot building in Exposition Park designed by MAD Architects’ Ma Yansong — a structure whose undulating green-roofed curves rise from the former parking lot with the unmistakable authority of a building that was designed to be photographed from the air and experienced at ground level as a physical argument that architecture is itself a form of narrative. The founding collection spans 40,000 works — Norman Rockwell, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Jack Kirby, and the full archive of Lucas’s own production art including original Star Wars concept paintings, storyboards, and props — held within 100,000 square feet of gallery space, two cinemas, a library, and a restaurant facing the Exposition Park rose garden. The September 22 opening date makes this the year’s final major cultural opening and, by most accounts, the one the global art world has been most loudly anticipating.​

2. Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

Saadiyat Island, UAE — Opening 2026

The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi was announced in 2006, promised for 2012, delayed repeatedly, and is now, after two decades of anticipation and a construction finale visible on satellite imagery, completing its doors. Frank Gehry designed it as the largest Guggenheim in the world — a building whose scale exceeds even the Bilbao original — on Saadiyat Island’s cultural district alongside the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the newly opened Zayed National Museum, creating the most ambitious concentration of world-class cultural architecture built in the 21st century in any single location. The collection focuses on modern and contemporary art from the 1960s to present, with a deliberate emphasis on artists from West Asia, North Africa, South Asia, and Indigenous communities globally — a curation philosophy that positions the museum not as a Western institution transplanted to the Gulf but as a genuinely new perspective on what a global modern art collection looks like when assembled from a non-Western editorial position.​

3. V&A East Museum

Stratford, East London — Opens April 18, 2026

The Victoria and Albert Museum is the world’s greatest design and decorative arts institution, and its expansion into East London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is the most significant geographical extension of a major British cultural institution in a generation. The five-story V&A East Museum, designed by Dublin-based O’Donnell + Tuomey, opens on April 18 alongside the V&A East Storehouse that debuted in 2025, completing the East Bank cultural complex that also includes a new Sadler’s Wells performance space and the BBC’s creative headquarters — a deliberate repositioning of London’s cultural center of gravity toward the east end of the city. For travelers who have walked the V&A in South Kensington and wondered where the institution’s contemporary ambition lives, the East London museum is the answer, with programming architecture that treats design, fashion, digital creativity, and cultural making as continuous rather than historically segmented.

4. LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries

Los Angeles, California — Opens April 2026

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been dismantling its old campus since 2020 for the transformation designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor — a project of such architectural seriousness that it has been simultaneously celebrated as one of the great museum designs of the century and questioned for the scale of what it required the institution to sacrifice. The David Geffen Galleries opening in April 2026 represent the first completed phase of that transformation — a sinuous black building whose forms reference the La Brea tar pits immediately adjacent, connecting the natural history of the site to the cultural institution built above it. For Los Angeles, a city that has never had a museum building fully worthy of its collection and its cultural ambitions, the LACMA transformation is a civic moment comparable to what the Guggenheim was for Bilbao — the point at which a city’s art institution becomes a destination rather than merely a repository.

5. New Museum Expansion

Lower East Side, New York — Opened March 21, 2026

The New Museum on the Bowery is New York’s most intellectually serious contemporary art institution — the museum that consistently takes the position that contemporary art has not yet been decided and treats the gallery as a laboratory rather than a showcase. Its expansion, designed by OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, doubles the museum’s exhibition space with 60,000 additional square feet, adds a new triple-height lobby that opens the institution fully to the Bowery streetscape, a ground-floor restaurant, and an expanded Sky Room with panoramic Lower East Side views — completing the ambition of one of New York’s most architecturally inventive cultural buildings. The opening exhibition, New Humans: Memories of the Future, announced as the institution’s statement of intent for its expanded era, extends the New Museum’s record of showing work that the established museum world has not yet decided to exhibit.

6. The Aboriginal Cultural Monument

Australia — Opening 2026

The sixth museum on BBC Travel’s list is the one most unlike the others — not a glass-and-steel statement building in a world city but a monument to a civilisation that has been on its land for at least 65,000 years, making it the oldest continuous culture on earth and the least represented in the world’s major art and cultural institutions relative to that depth. The opening of this dedicated Aboriginal cultural institution in 2026 — in the same year that Australia marks 40 years since the Uluru handback to the Anangu Traditional Owners — creates the specific opportunity for international travelers to encounter Indigenous Australian culture on its own curatorial terms rather than through the colonial-institution framing that Australian museums have historically imposed. This is the museum whose opening most directly answers the question that the other five, for all their architectural brilliance and art historical significance, do not: what does a civilisation that existed for sixty-five millennia before museums were invented want to say when given the space to say it on its own terms.

Why 2026 Is the Year That Changes Museum Travel

These six openings collectively represent something larger than an exceptional year for institutional debuts — they are evidence that the definition of what a museum can be, where it can exist, and whose culture it is obligated to represent has been permanently expanded. A filmmaker’s lifelong collection made publicly accessible in a building that is itself a story. The world’s largest Guggenheim assembled from the global south’s perspective. A Victorian institution reinventing itself for East London. The most anticipated redesign in American museum history finally opening its doors. New York’s most forward-thinking gallery doubling its space for the work that hasn’t been decided yet. And the oldest civilisation on earth finally given the institution it always deserved. These are not buildings to add to a list. These are reasons to book the flight.