In 2025, another wave of new museums will come into being. In China, they include Suzhou H+ Museum, designed by Tadao Ando; Suzhou Contemporary Art Museum; and Wuxi Art Museum. Abroad, the list includes Naoshima New Museum of Art in Japan, the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, KANAL–Centre Pompidou in Brussels, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, and Central Asia’s first private contemporary-art museum, in Almaty.
There are also museums returning after expansions and renovations: V&A East Storehouse in East London; the Frick Collection, the New Museum, and the Studio Museum in New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Rockefeller wing; Glenstone Museum in Maryland; the Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne; and the Singapore Art Museum. We have assembled eighteen of the museums most worth watching this year. Suzhou H+ Museum, architectural rendering, image source: online. Suzhou, a city with a history of 2,500 years, is defined by gardens and canals—urban features found only in the Gusu region. During the research and design process for H+ Museum, Tadao Ando visited Suzhou twice. It is the internationally renowned architect’s first work in the city.
The museum stands beside Suzhou’s Shangtang River, surrounded by historic Gusu sites including Lingering Garden, Xiyuan Temple, and Yiyuan Garden. It will contain five galleries and have a total floor area of 8,500 square meters. Ando hopes H+ Museum will become “a jewel-like presence” among Suzhou’s streets and lanes. It is expected to open to the public in the second half of 2025. Tadao Ando’s sketch of Suzhou H+ Museum, copyright: Tadao Ando Architect & Associates. Architectural rendering. To echo Suzhou’s urban gardens and the nearby Shangtang River, Ando designed a “roof garden” and a “water terrace” across three levels of platforms.
The “roof garden” will eventually serve as an outdoor exhibition space for sculptures and other works. Drawing on such elements as borrowed scenery, covered corridors, and water features, the stepped design creates a “three-dimensional garden” in the city, attuned to Suzhou’s landscape of “small bridges and flowing water, white walls and black tiles, historic sites and famous gardens.” H+ Museum, completed exterior. H+ Museum, completed exterior. On the façade and inside, the “poet of fair-faced concrete,” as Ando is often known, continues to work in his signature style and material: walls cast in concrete, left undecorated so that the texture of the material is fully visible.
In the three-dimensional garden, visitors will be able to move through the building according to their own impulses. Its stepped form will diversify their viewpoints, while the interior’s circulation will bring unexpected pleasures and possibilities to the limited space. The museum’s official opening is therefore keenly anticipated. Suzhou Contemporary Art Museum, architectural rendering, image source: online. Unlike H+ Museum, Suzhou Contemporary Art Museum is outside the main urban area, on the picturesque shore of Jinji Lake.
The museum occupies 48,800 square meters, with approximately 11,300 square meters of gallery space, making it a substantial complex. Its series of roof forms, reminiscent of the eaves of traditional Chinese architecture, answers the Ferris wheel in the CBD district. Construction of the exterior walls is now largely complete, and the museum is expected to begin trial operations for the public by the end of 2025. Suzhou Contemporary Art Museum, aerial view. Suzhou Contemporary Art Museum, exterior. Designed by the Danish firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), this building is both ancient and contemporary in spirit. Drawing on Suzhou gardens traditionally linked by covered corridors, the complex consists of nine deftly connected freestanding structures, producing the distinctive effect of “a different view with every step.”
The roofs both express the character of the architecture and cover the outdoor walkways. Pavilions mark intersections in the pedestrian paths, creating multiple nodes across the site and bringing together water and land, city and landscape, culture and history. The façade is formed by curved glass panels designed like bamboo joints, creating an organic whole with the roofs. “Ying Xinxun: Overexposed Golden Velvet,” project view, 2024. “Drawing Society: Flying House,” project view, 2024. “Song Dong: Eating the City,” project view, 2024. “Hu Yinping: Za Ge Long Dong,” project view, 2024. Although the museum itself will not open until the end of the year, the wider park began hosting art projects in early 2024 to warm up the space and site, including “Song Dong: Eating the City,” “Zhao Renhui: Urban Wilderness Detective,” “Youjin Group: Youji Flower House,” “Ying Xinxun: Overexposed Golden Velvet,” “Hu Yinping: Za Ge Long Dong,” “Yang Di: Drifting Memorial,” and “Drawing Society: Flying House”—seven projects in all.
From commercial spaces to natural ecological spaces, from neighborhood and emotional spaces to virtual ones, artists of different ages and working in different media have explored, in their own ways, the possibilities of art and the city of Suzhou. Wuxi Art Museum, main entrance, architectural rendering, image source: online. Wuxi Art Museum is located in Shangxian River Wetland Park. Its design is likewise deeply connected to traditional Chinese culture, drawing on the porous Taihu stone characteristic of Jiangnan. Designed by Ennead, the building is conceived as a space in which “cavities, translucency, and interlocking solid and void spaces generate one another.”
With single-floor ceiling heights exceeding 8 meters, Ennead emphasizes the close relationship between the museum experience and the wetland park’s natural environment. There are no enclosing walls; broad lawns connect multiple entrances and exits. The museum is currently scheduled to open in the second half of 2025. Wuxi Art Museum, overall aerial rendering, image source: online. Wuxi Art Museum, interior atrium rendering, image source: online. The atrium borrows elements from Chinese gardens and courtyard houses: it is enclosed on four sides but has no roof.
Wuxi lies in Jiangnan, where rainfall is abundant. During the plum-rain season, water will fall naturally into the center of the courtyard, as if sky and water had become one. On the third floor, nine scattered spaces, together totaling more than 1,800 square meters, have been turned into a rooftop garden. Visitors will be able to look down from outdoors onto the wetland park, bringing art, landscape, and the museum experience together as an inseparable whole. Naoshima New Museum of Art, architectural rendering, image source: Tadao Ando Architect & Associates. Located on a mountaintop in the Honmura district of Naoshima, the museum has a simple form that merges with its natural surroundings. It is the tenth architectural project Ando has designed for Benesse Art Site Naoshima, and will meet the public in spring 2025.
The museum consists of two underground levels and one aboveground exhibition floor, with a total area of approximately 1,500 square meters. Its exterior is painted black and gray to resemble charred cedar walls, echoing the traditional architecture of the area. At the entrance, a wall of stacked cobblestones frames a sweeping view of the Seto Inland Sea from the Honmura area, giving visitors a sense of the distant horizon while keeping them aware of the museum around them.
Naoshima New Museum of Art, architectural rendering, image source: Tadao Ando Architect & Associates. A skylight in the building’s atrium brings natural light into the underground spaces, casting a soft glow across four galleries and filling the building with quiet and order. The opening exhibition will present works by eleven established and emerging artists from Asia and Japan, including Cai Guo-Qiang, Takashi Murakami, and Do Ho Suh. As Naoshima’s first museum named after the island itself, Naoshima New Museum of Art will show both permanent and temporary works and organize public programs such as lectures and art workshops. It is among the year’s most anticipated new museums as spring begins, offering a deeper interaction among art, nature, and community life.
Grand Egyptian Museum, statue group, image source: online. The Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), near the Giza pyramids in Cairo, is the world’s largest museum devoted to a single civilization. After more than twenty years of construction, it is finally scheduled to open fully in early 2025. The museum occupies approximately 500,000 square meters, with a total building area of about 100,000 square meters and roughly 45,000 square meters of exhibition space.
The museum’s design combines modern architecture with ancient Egyptian elements. Its main entrance takes the form of a pyramid, and its interior contains a vast panoramic window with direct views of the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure. Grand Egyptian Museum entrance, image source: online. View of the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure from inside the museum, image source: online. An 11-meter-high statue of Ramesses II, weighing 82 tons, stands at the entrance. Beyond it, a grand staircase lined with monumental statues guides visitors into the museum’s central areas.
Also at the entrance, visitors can see the world’s only suspended obelisk. At the opening, the museum will display more than 100,000 precious artifacts; approximately 50,000 will be shown to the public after the official opening, and about 30,000 will be exhibited publicly for the first time. Grand Egyptian Museum galleries, image source: online. Tutankhamun’s complete treasure will occupy two galleries, including the famous gold mask and other precious objects. The Khufu solar boat will also go on view. Found near the Giza pyramids, the ancient vessel is thought to have been one of the pharaoh’s means of traveling to the afterlife and is regarded as a national treasure of Egypt.
Some areas are already open, including twelve galleries that tell the history of Egypt from prehistory through the Roman era in chronological order. The exhibition is organized around “kingship, society, and belief,” presenting the relationships among ancient Egyptian rulers, their people, and the gods. Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, image source: online. The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw is located at Plac Defilad, the historic parade square in the center of Warsaw, beside the city’s famous Stalinist landmark, the Palace of Culture and Science. After nearly twenty years of planning and construction, it is scheduled to open fully to the public on February 21, 2025.
The museum was designed by the American architect Thomas Phifer and his team. It has a total area of approximately 19,800 square meters, including more than 4,000 square meters of exhibition space. Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, interior, image source: online. The building follows a minimalist language, with a bright white exterior, spacious stairs, and panoramic windows overlooking Marszałkowska Street and the southern part of Plac Defilad.
Skylights bring daylight into the top-floor galleries, joining the interior to its surroundings. As early as October 2024, the museum began preparing for its full opening with a three-week cultural festival. Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, art week, 2024. The festival focused on large-scale sculptures and installations by international and Polish women artists, including Magdalena Abakanowicz, Alina Szapocznikow, Sandra Mujinga, and Cecilia Vicuña.
At its full opening in February, the museum will present more than 1,000 works from its collection, including major works from the late 20th and 21st centuries and works by Polish artists. KANAL–Centre Pompidou, Brussels, exterior. Located in central Brussels, KANAL–Centre Pompidou is an extension of Paris’s Centre Pompidou. It is being created from the historic buildings of a former Citroën automobile workshop and is scheduled to open in 2025.
The site originally covered approximately 215,000 square feet, providing designers with an enormous field for invention. KANAL–Centre Pompidou, interior rendering. The building is being designed by a team comprising Belgium’s noAarchitecten, Switzerland’s EM2N, and Britain’s Sergison Bates architects. The large factory workshop has been transformed into a structure of glass, with different mezzanines and ramps arranged throughout.
The reconstruction is not only a case of reusing a historic industrial building; it also replaces industrial production with artistic production. Its openness and transparency suggest an open city. As an European extension of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the venue will invite artists to create and exhibit there, allowing the transparent structure to become another European landmark for art. Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, architectural rendering. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park, is devoted to visual narrative art across painting, illustration, comics, photography, film, animation, and digital art. It is the world’s first museum dedicated to this subject.
Founded by the renowned director George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, the museum began construction in 2018, at a cost of more than $1 billion, and is scheduled to open to visitors in 2025. Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, architectural rendering. Designed by the prominent Chinese architect Ma Yansong, the museum resembles a spacecraft from a science-fiction film, an apt and distinctly futuristic presence in Los Angeles.
The museum has a building area of more than 110,000 square meters, five full floors, and an eleven-acre landscaped park. Its holdings include concept designs, props, original artwork, and models from the Star Wars series; ancient Roman mosaics; European Renaissance paintings; illustration and comics from the 20th and 21st centuries, including works by Norman Rockwell; sculpture, photography, and installations; and works of new-media art.
Almaty Museum of Art, architectural rendering, image source: online. Located in Kazakhstan, Almaty Museum of Art was founded by Nurlan Smagulov, a Kazakh automotive-industry magnate and philanthropist. Scheduled to open in summer 2025, it will be Central Asia’s first private contemporary-art museum. Designed by the British architecture firm Chapman Taylor, the museum has a building area of 9,400 square meters and a highly modern style.
At its opening, the museum will present more than 700 works from Smagulov’s personal collection, including works by such internationally known artists as Alicja Kwade, Yinka Shonibare, and Richard Serra, alongside works by important Kazakh and Central Asian artists including Almagul Menlibayeva and Shaimardan Sariyev.
Almaty Museum of Art, architectural rendering, image source: online. Almagul Menlibayeva, “The Bodyguards of Yasawi II,” 2010, collection of Almaty Museum of Art. The Thai curator Gridthiya Gaweewong has organized a solo exhibition of the Kazakh artist Almagul Menlibayeva, titled “I Understand Everything.”
Nurlan Smagulov believes that art has the power to change lives. He hopes that Almaty Museum of Art, opening in 2025, will be more than a place for exhibitions: it will also connect Central Asian art with the art of the wider world. V&A East Storehouse, architectural rendering, image source: online. V&A East Storehouse, a branch of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A East Storehouse), is located in Stratford, East London, and will officially open on May 31, 2025.
The new museum will hold more than 500,000 objects spanning creative fields that include vintage football shirts, the archive of the Glastonbury Festival, Schiaparelli haute couture, Elton John’s performance costumes, and samurai swords. The building was designed by the award-winning architecture firm O’Donnell + Tuomey. V&A East Storehouse, architectural rendering, image source: online. David Bowie collection at the V&A. The new museum will also house the David Bowie Centre, scheduled to open to the public on September 13, 2025.
The collection contains more than 80,000 objects related to Bowie’s career, including handwritten lyrics, stage costumes, photographs, musical scores, film stills, instruments, and album covers. Together, they reveal the full arc of Bowie’s career and his important influence on the history of music, performance, and culture. The Frick Collection. The Frick Collection is one of New York’s best-known private museums. Located at 1 East 70th Street, it consists of the private collection of the American industrialist and collector Henry Clay Frick.
Its holdings include masterpieces by celebrated artists across several centuries: Vermeer’s “Mistress and Maid,” Velázquez’s “Philip IV, King of Spain,” El Greco’s “Saint Jerome,” and a rare self-portrait by Rembrandt; Titian’s “Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap,” Bellini’s “Saint Francis in the Desert,” Turner’s “Dieppe,” and Manet’s “Bullfight,” as well as furniture, decorative objects, and other works from various countries. The interior fountain before renovation. Architect Annabelle Selldorf and the Frick Collection under renovation. In 2021, Selldorf Architects undertook a major renovation and upgrade of the mansion, which had opened to the public in 1935. The project preserves its historic character while introducing modern elements, and the museum will reopen this April.
The renovation covers 60,000 square feet and adds 27,000 square feet, including a new wing and an auditorium beneath the 1977 Russell Page garden that can seat 220 people. While preserving the mansion’s historic character, the architectural team has introduced more contemporary elements. Renovated galleries. The second floor of the Frick Collection will open to the public for the first time. A new gallery will display works rarely shown publicly, as well as recent additions to the family’s art collection.
The renovated first floor will primarily provide space for future special exhibitions. Other additions include a conservation studio and an education center. To celebrate its reopening, the Frick Collection will present a special exhibition, “Vermeer’s Love Letters,” from June 18 to September 8, 2025. For the first time, the exhibition will bring together three masterpieces by Vermeer: “Mistress and Maid” from the Frick Collection, “The Love Letter” from the Rijksmuseum, and “Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid” from the National Gallery of Ireland. The Frick’s reopening will be one of the New York art world’s major events of the year.
The New Museum at 235 Bowery. Photograph: Dario Lasagni. The New Museum, at 235 Bowery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is a highly experimental contemporary-art institution. Founded by Marcia Tucker in 1977, it was New York’s first museum devoted exclusively to contemporary art. Unlike institutions such as MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which maintain permanent collections, the New Museum has none. It focuses instead on the newest artists and their work, historically overlooked artists, and work by established masters.
Judy Chicago, “Herstory” exhibition view, 2023, New Museum, New York. Photograph: Dario Lasagni. Since moving to its current site in 2007, the museum has presented a series of major exhibitions, including a survey of Keith Haring, one of the most important figures in street art; a solo exhibition by Faith Ringgold, the Black woman artist who told stories through quilts; and a presentation of work by the pioneering video artist Pipilotti Rist.
New Museum at 235 Bowery, expansion rendering, source: OMA Instagram. The New Museum’s architecture reflects the bold, innovative aesthetic of the art it represents. Designed by the Japanese firm SANAA, it is a seven-story, asymmetrical stack of silver metal boxes. The museum is currently undergoing a 60,000-square-foot expansion. The addition uses streamlined, angled forms to contrast with the original building’s stacked boxes. Its façade is made of laminated glass and metal mesh; triangular openings puncture the upper sloping walls, some leading to terraces.
The expansion is being designed by OMA and Shohei Shigematsu. It will nearly double the museum’s area and add three new exhibition floors and a larger bookstore. The museum is scheduled to return to the public in the second half of 2025. Studio Museum exterior. Photograph: Albert Vecerka/Esto. The Studio Museum in Harlem, at 144 West 125th Street in New York, focuses on artists of African descent. Its permanent collection contains more than 2,000 paintings, photographs, sculptures, and mixed-media works, including pieces by such masters as Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, and Romare Bearden.
Since its founding in 1968, the museum’s artist-in-residence program has supported more than 150 artists, including Kerry James Marshall, Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Many have gone on to command prices in the hundreds of millions and occupy a place in art history. Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Bayou,” 1984, Studio Museum collection. Tom Lloyd, “Moussakoo.” Photograph: John Berens. Designed by the renowned architect David Adjaye, the renovation will create five floors and 82,000 square feet of space. It is the museum’s first renovation since its founding in 1968.
Once complete, David Hammons’s “Untitled flag,” 2004, will hang on the façade, while Glenn Ligon’s neon sculpture “Give Us a Poem,” 2007, will be installed in the lobby, visible as soon as visitors enter. The new museum’s opening exhibition will feature the late sculptor Tom Lloyd, whose work also appeared in the Studio Museum’s inaugural exhibition in 1968.
The museum is expected to open in fall 2025. Exterior of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, familiar to many visitors, stands on the eastern edge of Central Park in New York City. Founded in 1870, it is one of the world’s largest and best-known art museums. Its collection contains more than two million works, spanning more than 5,000 years of human history and cultural heritage, from antiquity to the present.
The museum is divided into thematic galleries devoted to ancient Egyptian artifacts, European painting, Islamic art, Asian art, fashion, musical instruments, and other fields. Metropolitan Museum of Art interior. Deity censer (Scentill), Tonava artist, A.D. 1200–1521, collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, scheduled to reopen on May 31, 2025, has undergone a complete renovation. It will total more than 40,000 square feet and display more than 1,800 precious works of African art, ancient American art, and Oceanic art, representing five continents and numerous cultures.
The renovation is led by Kulapat Yantrasast of WHY Architecture, in collaboration with Beyer, Blinder, Belle Architects LLP and the Met’s design department. The wing will also introduce its first dedicated space for light-sensitive ancient Andean textiles, giving visitors a fuller understanding of the diversity of Indigenous cultures.
Glenstone Museum exterior. Glenstone Museum, in Potomac, Maryland, is the largest private contemporary-art museum in the United States. It occupies approximately one square kilometer and was founded in 2006 by the philanthropists Mitchell Rales and Emily Wei Rales.
The museum sits within a roughly 230-acre nature preserve of sculpture gardens, meadows, and woods. Here, art, architecture, and nature are integrated. The collection encompasses important works from the late 20th century to the present, including major pieces by Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, Richard Serra, Simone Leigh, Lawrence Weiner, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Ellsworth Kelly, and Roni Horn.
Glenstone Museum exterior. Jeff Koons, “SPLIT-ROCKER,” 2000, Glenstone Museum outdoor sculpture park. The museum consists of two core buildings: the original gallery, designed by Charles Gwathmey, and the Pavilions, completed in 2018 and designed by Thomas Phifer.
After the expansion, the museum covered 19,000 square meters and contained eleven galleries arranged around a sunken central water court, linked by a glass ring corridor. From this corridor, visitors can see the water court from different angles. Michael Heizer, “Collapse,” 1967, grounds of Glenstone Museum. Richard Serra’s 2004 work “Contour 290” winds through Glenstone’s outdoor meadow. In 2025, the Pavilions will complete another expansion, adding exhibition space and an outdoor installation area before reopening fully on March 20.
The reopening exhibition consists of two major contemporary-art presentations: solo exhibitions by Jenny Holzer and Alex Da Corte. Holzer’s exhibition includes the 1990 installation “The Child Room,” which combines LED elements with marble sculpture. It will be shown publicly for the first time since 1993. Da Corte’s exhibition includes recent neon sculptures such as “Rubber Pencil Devil, Hell House.”
The Potter Museum of Art, renovation concept rendering, showing the new entrance on the University of Melbourne campus. The Potter Museum of Art, at the University of Melbourne, was founded in 1972. It is both a public museum and an academic resource center, with holdings spanning historical, modern, and contemporary art, and a particular focus on Australian Indigenous and contemporary art.
The museum will reopen on May 30, 2025. Led by Wood Marsh Architects, the renovation will add a new entrance on the University of Melbourne campus. Its opening exhibition combines scholarly substance with broad appeal. Titled “65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art,” it will present more than 400 works, including important loans from public and private collections and seven large-scale newly commissioned works by some of Australia’s best-known Indigenous artists.
Singapore Art Museum exterior. The Singapore Art Museum (SAM), founded in 1996, was Southeast Asia’s first contemporary-art museum. Located at Singapore’s cultural landmarks on Bras Basah Road and Queen Street, it has been undergoing a renovation costing 90 million Singapore dollars since 2019. Led by SCDA Architects, the renovation is expected to expand the exhibition space by 30 percent. The new museum will include a 1,200-square-meter “floating” sky gallery, a column-free space intended to give visitors a distinctly different experience.
The museum is currently expected to reopen in mid-2025. Alongside the entirely renovated galleries, visitors will see more digital art and large-scale sculptures by emerging artists.