The Season for Slow Looking: Ten Museum Exhibitions To Catch Across New England This Summer

Summer is for detours: the long way home, the museum you’ve been meaning to visit, the show you didn’t expect to love. This year, New England’s museums are delivering—threading memory through red string, reimagining archives with nail polish, and suspending boulders, flags, and feminist interventions on a dog day afternoon. Below, our team has put together a list of ten exhibitions for you to escape the heat (or chase it) and fully soak in a New England summer.

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“Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light),” January 18–August 9, 2025
Hood Museum of Art
6 E Wheelock Street, Hanover, NH

In Cara Romero’s first major museum solo exhibition, over sixty works by the Chemehuevi photographer tell a technicolor story of cultural resilience, environmental justice, and Indigenous futurism. Romero is Indigenous to the Mojave Desert between California and Arizona, but her photographs feature subjects from across the country unified by her distinctly mysterious light sources, otherworldly environments, and charged backgrounds. Romero often collaborates with her subjects to create elaborate sets for their portrayal. In The Zenith (2022) a figure wearing a blue coveralls and astronaut helmet floats among ears of white corn. In First American Dolls (2024), Indigenous women are frozen in time in life-size doll boxes wearing traditional cultural attire with “accessories” arranged behind them—a stark commentary on the limited narratives of Indigenous women. After the Hood Museum, the exhibition will travel to Phoenix Art Museum and MOCA Jacksonville. —Jameson Johnson

“The Archive of Lost Memories,”  April 5–June 29, 2025
MASS MoCA
1040 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams

At MASS MoCA, where Randi Malkin Steinberger is presently an artist-in-residence, she uses her space in Building 8 as a studio, an installation, and an archive. Having amassed countless found images since the 1980s, Steinberger offers fresh insight on the matter of conservation. Those excited by photo history will be delighted by the range of image formats—photobooth strips, tintypes, digital photos, slides, and snapshots. Folding, pouring nail polish on, or stitching thread through a photograph might be unthinkable for most photo collectors. Yet Steinberger pushes these found objects beyond their former limit as detritus and creates work that is all the more thought-provoking. As photographs prompt us to imagine the circumstances that surrounded their making, Steinberger’s intrepid transformation of them signals the fact that we all carry a host of beliefs and values within our viewing. Rorschach inkblots, for instance, are intended to reveal and evaluate our interiority, and here, the artist recreates them with nail polish layered onto found photographs. Steinberger shows that what we see is really a matter of how we see. But she does not completely reject archival tradition by any means: Everyday Phone Calls (2016–ongoing) and For This Time Being (2020) examine the artist’s own life with archival precision. —Alisa Prince

“Chiharu Shiota: Home Less Home,” May 22–September 1, 2025
Institute of Contemporary Art / Watershed
256 Marginal Street, East Boston

In her latest work commissioned by the ICA / Boston, featured as part of the Boston Public Art Triennial 2025, Chiharu Shiota engages with themes of home, memory, and loss. She asks how we build a new home with the remnants of our past and the residue of our journey. Two artworks fill the room—both utilizing red thread as a key visual element—that blend together and consume viewers entering the space. Suspended within the artist’s latest iteration of Accumulation – Searching for the Destination (2014/2025) are suitcases of various sizes, a common motif in works about migration, but in this instance tie back to the artist’s own memory of immigrating from Japan to Berlin. Home Less Home (2025) is a field of red and black thread with household furniture nestled within and papers collected from East Boston suspended in the air. Together, the works immerse viewers in a physical web of memory, migration, and home. —Camila Bohan Insaurralde

“GENERATIONS,” May 22–November 30, 2025
MassArt Art Museum (MAAM)
621 Huntington Avenue

Seeing “GENERATIONS” in person revealed a quiet clarity that doesn’t quite translate on the page. The show, drawn from the 2023 Wagner Foundation Fellowship recipients, unfolds not as a collection of works but as a set of discrete, emotionally attuned gestures in dialogue. Each artist brought something distinct, but together the works form a tonal cohesion that feels intentional without being overdetermined. Wen-ti Tsen’s paintings moved me most—the figures suspended mid-action, the brushwork holding motion in place without freezing it. “Suspension” was the first word that came to mind. L’Merchie Frazier’s textiles are exquisite in their detail, with a kind of intimate precision that asks for close looking. Daniela Rivera’s spatial interventions, too, carry weight—not just sculptural, but psychological. The fellowship’s selections feel deeply considered, and the show makes a quiet argument for attention: to texture, to form, to how we move through and with others. —Emmy Liu

“Leaf Litter,” May 24–September 7, 2025
Center for Maine Contemporary Art
21 Winter Street, Rockland, ME

“Leaf Litter” at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art invites viewers into a world where everyday objects become vessels of recollection and imagination. In this solo exhibition, Elizabeth Atterbury employs materials such as wood, clay, and stone to create forms that feel otherworldly—ghostly feet, oversized fans, and a wooden sandal scaled beyond use, to name a few. The sculptural works meditate on, redefine, and challenge how items are recognized and understood. Part of their mysterious allure lies in a feeling of excavation for the viewer. Through Atterbury’s hand, manipulating both hard and soft materials, the treatment of tactile surfaces, and the careful arrangement of the artworks in the space, they seem to reveal themselves. The elusive sculptures in “Leaf Litter” provoke this summer’s Mainers (local and transient) to explore how the fundamental nature of something can be inherited, altered, or forgotten.  —Kaitlyn Ovett Clark

“Nature Sanctuary,” June 5–October 24, 2026
deCordova Sculpture Park & Museum
51 Sandy Pond Road, Lincoln

At the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, “Nature Sanctuary” combines original, site-inspired work and existing pieces from six women artists—Venetia Dale, Kapwani Kiwanga, Joiri Minaya, Zohra Opoku, Kathy Ruttenberg, and Evelyn Rydz—that explore the relationship between nature and notions of home. In Opoku’s self-portrait series, a face is partially obscured by blades of grass in a field, delving into the artist’s desire for belonging and the need to conceal. Another piece, a small greenhouse by Minaya, is covered in one-way perforated vinyl, a material often used for advertisements. The vinyl disguises what’s inside the usually transparent structure. There’s also a gorgeous, colorful prism by Kiwanga, who studied Wardian cases, a precursor to the terrariums of today, as inspiration. The structure, with its pink and green reflective panes of glass, looks futuristic perched in the natural environment.  —Jacquinn Sinclair

“Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change,” June 21–September 28, 2025
Newport Art Museum
76 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, RI

With a deep regard for the environment, Bobby Anspach (1987–2022) believed he could change the world by creating sonic and sensorial structures for people to enter into meditative and otherworldly experiences. At the Newport Art Museum, Anspach’s first museum solo exhibition, “Everything is Change,” is a posthumous New England homecoming for the artist who graduated from Boston College in 2011 and gained his MFA from RISD in 2017. Curated by artist Taylor Baldwin, who Anspach studied under while at RISD, the exhibition will feature works from his Place for Continuous Eye Contact sculptures—participatory installations that fuse science experiment, theater, and art. For the historic Griswold House installation, a meditative relaxation room designed by architect and interior designer Lauren Rottet, along with a soundscape from Eluvium, will be in dialogue with Anspach’s scrappy, yet ambitious spirit.  —Jameson Johnson

“Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery,” July 12, 2025–January 11, 2026
Colby College Museum of Art
5600 Mayflower Hill Drive, Waterville, ME

Co-organized by Colby College Museum of Art and the Carnegie Museum of Art, “Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery” spotlights a mid-century surrealist whose archetypal yet autobiographical paintings operate by a distinctive dream logic. In Abercrombie’s stark landscapes and enigmatic interiors, clouds hover like UFOs, trees extend their limbs like dancers, lions play chess, shadows misbehave, and a painting almost (but not quite) replicates the room in which it hangs. Using a moody palette dominated by grays, blues, and greens, Abercrombie created spare scenes punctuated by symbols—doors, moons, hats, cats, brooms—and often populated by a solitary woman, a stand-in for herself. But the real Abercrombie also loved a party, and she and her music critic husband hosted many artists and jazz greats in their Chicago home. In 1977, the last year of her life, she received a retrospective at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center. Now the first nationally touring exhibition of her work promises to make this Magritte of the Midwest better known. —Jacqueline Houton

“Beverly Semmes: Boulders / Flag / Flip / Kick,” July 29–November 23, 2025
Tufts University Art Galleries
40 Talbot Avenue, Medford

This summer, Tufts University Art Galleries presents “Beverly Semmes: Boulders / Flag / Flip / Kick,” a sweeping survey of the artist’s multifaceted exploration of the female form and its representations. Semmes, a Tufts/SMFA alumna, has long challenged traditional notions of femininity through her expansive practice encompassing sculpture, painting, film, performance, and fashion. From her early oversized dress sculptures to her Feminist Responsibility Project series, Semmes interrogates the boundaries between presence and absence, exposure and concealment. This exhibition traces her journey from student installations at Tufts to her most recent works, including fabric installations and ceramics that continue to probe issues of female visibility and societal expectations. Curated by Dina Deitsch, TUAG director, with the artist Camilo Alvarez, and generously supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, this exhibition is a must-see for those interested in the evolving discourse on gender and representation in contemporary art. —Emmy Liu

“Gisela McDaniel: Inina,” August 1–November 16, 2025
The Ogunquit Museum of American Art
543 Shore Road, Ogunquit, ME

There is always something magical about visiting the Ogunquit Museum of Art. Situated right at the tip of a rocky outcropping that collapses into Perkins Cove, one feels like they’ve found some last bastion of culture at the edge of the world. It’s a seasonal museum, open from late April through November, and its design—both the outside and in—make careful use of Maine’s beloved summer, with murals adorning the exterior by L’nu (Mi’kmaq) multi-disciplinary artist Jordan Bennett, a sculpture garden that currently boasts Hugh Hayden’s Gulf Stream (2022) and the back wall of the entry gallery comprised of a floor-to-ceiling window. Since joining the museum in 2022, curator Devon Zimmerman has learned how to use that view to his advantage, organizing shows that nod to the natural environment blooming recklessly outside the glass while playing up contrasts with gestural abstractions and bright riots of color.

Come August, diasporic, Indigenous CHamoru artist Gisela McDaniel will occupy that space with a series of portraits that keep the tradition alive with high-octane palettes and settings rife with flowers, plants, and other natural elements. Visitors heading up earlier will catch “Nicole Wittenberg: A Sailboat in the Moonlight,” a series of paintings and pastel drawings that make similarly exuberant use of DayGlo pinks and tangerines. Regardless of when you go, be sure to check out a selection of contemporary artists from the Spaghetti Western Collection in “Where the Real Lies.” From Bony Ramirez to Sasha Gordon to Dominique Fung, there seems to be as many bright stars in that show as there are twinkling over the Atlantic. —Jessica Shearer