Summer in New England has always rewarded those willing to wander. This season’s exhibitions stretch across the region’s back roads, former mills, sculpture gardens, and newly opened cultural spaces, offering reasons to spend a day in Providence, a weekend in Vermont, or an afternoon somewhere you’ve never stopped before. Whether you’re seeking outdoor installations, artist-organized exhibitions, immersive video environments, or exhibitions rooted in local histories, these twelve exhibitions are worth hopping in the car or catching the train for.
Omar Bradley (American, 1951–2023), Four Women, Downtown Providence, c. 1970s. Gelatin silver print. On loan from the Valerie Johnson Collection.
“Welcome to the Neighborhood: Mapping Black Providence, 1940s–1970s,” April 4–September 4, 2026
African American Museum of Rhode Island
500 Broad Street, Unit 5B, Providence, RI
The African American Museum of Rhode Island (AAMRI) opened its doors in the spring of 2026, marking the long-awaited arrival of a museum dedicated to Black history in Providence. But what’s more is that AAMRI pioneers a museum model that centers the knowledge and needs of the community in which it exists. With an eye toward professional and personal development, the museum fosters intergenerational exchanges between elders who know Rhode Island’s history through experience and a younger generation of scholars eager to record and amplify it. With its inaugural exhibition, “Mapping Black Providence, 1940s–1970s,” the museum will set the foundation for this mission. The show highlights four decades during which the Black community thrived in Providence by creating and sustaining its own infrastructure, including churches, meeting halls, clubs, and recreational programs. —Alisa Prince
Installation view, “Citadel,” Fall River MoCA, 2026. Courtesy of Fall River MoCA.
“Citadel,” April 10–July 20, 2026
Fall River MoCA
44 Troy Street, Fall River, MA
With “Citadel,” the cheekily named Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art presents the first exhibition in its history to be organized solely by a guest curator: Cory John Scozzari, the director of Cordova, a nonprofit gallery in Barcelona. Despite the title’s fortified or cloistered connotation, the works in the exhibition flow freely between scales, materials, and media. The gallery is dominated by Emily Jones’s inflatable sculpture of a speckled toad sitting on a coin, its materiality distantly recalling the cutaneous respiration of the animals themselves. Nearby, and dwarfed by comparison, are Kambel Smith’s cardboard recreations of historically charged buildings, including Thomas Jefferson’s plantation house at Monticello and Palestine’s Al-Aqsa Mosque. The show’s interest in boundaries and inversion is exemplified by a bulbous brown structure, halfway between artwork and remnant: Frequent visitors might remember it as the sound mirror featured in last summer’s “[see] [saw] [sound] [wave],” but now turned to face the wall, as if talking to itself. —Ramona Ngin
Ella Mahoney (b. 1995, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and Aquinnah, MA), Moshup’s Hand, 2026. Silk painted cyanotype, silk, dye, steel, mermaid’s toenails (Anomia ephippium), and resin, installed at Rock House Reservation, West Brookfield, MA. Photo by Chris Cardoza, Doza Visuals. Courtesy of the artist.
“The Land Tells Our Stories,” June 1–October 31, 2026
Castle Hill on the Crane Estate, Moose Hill Farm, Rock House Reservation
290 Argilla Rd., Ipswich, MA; 396 Moose Hill St., Sharon, MA; Route 9, West Brookfield, MA
In “The Land Tells Our Stories,” curator Tess Lukey invites three artists—May Babcock, Ella Mahoney, and Posey Moulton—to respond to Massachusetts landscapes through site-responsive installations across three locations. Developed as part of the Trustees’ Art and the Landscape initiative, it’s the organization’s first multi-site outdoor exhibition. Spanning Castle Hill on the Crane Estate, Moose Hill Farm, and Rock House Reservation, with a process gallery at Fruitlands Museum, each installation responds directly to its site, drawing out the layered ecologies and histories embedded in the land. Rooted in ideas around placemaking, the exhibition asks viewers to return to familiar natural sites with fresh attention. —Kim Córdova
(top) Theresa Ganz, Trellis 4, 2026. (bottom) Theresa Ganz, Parquet, 2026. Installation view, “Theresa Ganz: Follies and Caprices,” ODD-KIN, Providence, RI, 2026. Courtesy of ODD-KIN.
“Theresa Ganz: Follies and Caprices,” June 7–August 23, 2026
ODD-KIN
89 Valley Street, East Providence, RI
There’s something inherently contradictory about the concept of a formal garden—a place designed for pleasure that demands intensive labor, a site where chaos is weeded out and natural splendor is carefully cultivated and controlled. It’s fertile ground for Providence-based artist Theresa Ganz, who digs into notions of natural and artificial, native and foreign, in this show titled for terms that can refer to both decorative fancies and human foibles. Working across photocollage installation, sculpture, and video, she highlights ornamental invasive species in neon on postapocalyptic-looking trellises and uses vinyl tile to recreate patterns that Thomas Jefferson cribbed from Versailles and made the enslaved joiner John Hemmings install at Monticello. It’s work that reminds me that if Eden was a garden, so was Gethsemane. —Jacqueline Houton
Arghavan Khosravi, Rupture, 2025. Courtesy of the artist
“The Aldrich Decennial: I am what is around me,” June 7, 2026–January 10, 2027
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT
Taking its title from an opening line by poet (and longtime Hartford resident) Wallace Stevens, this inaugural survey of Connecticut’s contemporary art scene is locally sourced straight down to the typeface for the exhibition text (courtesy of Guilford-based design duo Christopher and Kathleen Sleboda). After undertaking more than one hundred studio visits, chief curator Amy Smith-Stewart and curatorial and publications manager Caitlin Monachino are spotlighting work by forty of the state’s artists, all produced during the last decade—Felandus Thames’s shimmering beaded portraits, Arghavan Khosravi’s surreal sculptural paintings, Lula Mae Blocton’s prismatic and pattern-packed abstractions, and much more from a roster of artists ranging in age from thirty-one to eighty-nine. Think of it as a once-in-a-decade chance to experience the Nutmeg State’s art in a nutshell (if said nutshell happened to accommodate 8,000 square feet of gallery space and a sculpture garden). —Jacqueline Houton
Miles Greenberg, TЯUTH, installation view at the Current, 2023. Three-channel video (color, sound), 15 minutes. Photo courtesy of The Current.
“Miles Greenberg,” June 20–October 17, 2026
The Current
90 Pond Street, Stowe, VT
Located all the way up in Stowe, Vermont, the Current has been offering some of the most exciting summer contemporary art programming in the region for years. This season is no exception, with New York–based Canadian artist Miles Greenberg making his Vermont debut. The self‑titled solo exhibition features the immersive video installations TЯUTH and LE MIROIR, the latter of which is on view in the United States for the first time. Each installation is rooted in a live durational performance that Greenberg subsequently modified and translated into multi‑channel films. While one can’t fully grasp the physical rigor that Greenberg and his collaborators put their bodies through, the exhibition is arranged to provide an embodied experience—heightening intensity through scale, sound, and spatial arrangement—to offer echoes of the transformative endurance at the core of his practice. —Jessica Shearer
Katarina Burin, Untitled, 2026. Cement, brass, vinyl cushions, plants. Courtesy of Bundy Modern.
“At Sixes and Sevens: Sculpture at the Bundy Modern,” June 20, 2026–ongoing
The Bundy Modern
361 Bundy Road, Waitsfield, VT
Set across the grounds and galleries of the Bundy Modern in Waitsfield, Vermont, “At Sixes and Sevens” brings together ten artists whose site-specific sculptures and installations grapple with the promises and contradictions of modernity—yes, culture and aesthetics. Built in 1962 as a residence and exhibition space for Modernist sculpture, the Bundy Modern was designed by Harvard GSD architect Harlow Carpenter. Carpenter also played a key role in realizing Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard, completed the same year through a gift from his parents, Alfred St. Vrain Carpenter and Helen Bundy Carpenter.
Organized by artists Gregory Gómez, Daniela Rivera, David Snyder, and E Tubergen, the exhibition sprawls across eight acres of the Bundy Modern’s property, embracing a wide range of materials, scales, and moods. The works are often elemental, including cast cement, clay, timber, fabric, and earth, and there is playfulness and experimentation alongside moments of unease. Katarina Burin’s cast-cement seating and Constanza Alarcón Tennen’s clay vessels give way to Oscar Rene Cornejo’s imposing dark wood fence and Coral Saucedo Lomeli’s Agua Viva, a terracotta “stream of life” that appears more like a drainage system excavated directly into the ground. —Jameson Johnson
E. Saffronia Downing, earthenware, stoneware, porcelain, glaze, colored pencil. Courtesy of Maine Museum of Innovation, Learning, and Labor.
“A Common Bond: The Brick Journal,” June 27–October 25, 2026
Maine Museum of Innovation, Learning, and Labor
1 Beech Street, Lewiston, ME
This summer, the Maine Museum of Innovation, Learning, and Labor (MILL) opened its new location in Lewiston, a 22,000-square-foot complex that houses its permanent collection of over 10,000 artifacts relating to the area’s trade traditions—primarily textile production, shoe fabrication, and brickmaking. For the first show in its rotating gallery, guest curator Alexis Iammarino has drawn inspiration from this final craft, and has gathered work from eleven contemporary artists that riff off of the belovedly ubiquitous brick. Shown alongside the 2023 collaborative publication The Brick Journal, “A Common Bond” delves into the materials that have served as the foundation for so many New England towns. While you’re there, be sure to check out early paintings by Reggie Burrows Hodges, also on view at the MILL. —Jessica Shearer
Roquin-Jon Quichocho Siongco, Tai Ulu, 2021. Photograph on canvas and woven works. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist
“Imagining an Archipelago: Art from Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Their Diasporas,” July 11, 2026–June 6, 2027
Colby College Museum of Art
5600 Mayflower Hill Dr., Waterville, ME
Colby College Museum of Art brings together over forty contemporary artists from island communities and their diasporas for this upcoming exhibition. The show posits a metaphorical archipelago that binds geographically distant islands through their aesthetic responses to the imperial legacy of the United States. From this point of interconnection, “Imagining an Archipelago” identifies the distinctions throughout each island’s circumstance as a source of solidarity. Present and former US territories Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, and the Philippines are the focus of the exhibition, driving home the notion that American identity—perhaps all identity—has never been fixed. Centering themes of migration, indigeneity, food, climate change, resilience, spirituality, and self-determination across stories of US expansion, “Imagining an Archipelago” asks how national identity grapples with shifting political landscapes and what becomes of culture amid the expansion of an empire. —Alisa Prince
Drawing of exhibition plans for “Daniela Rivera: Hacia Cuando (To When),” 2026. Courtesy of the artist.
“Daniela Rivera: Hacia Cuando (To When),” July 11, 2026–June 13, 2027
MASS MoCA
1040 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams, MA
When I think of parquet flooring, I recall the dance conventions I attended as a girl that often took place in hotel ballrooms: a makeshift stage, gaudy patterned carpet, and a rectangular wood floor at the center. I think of losing my grip on the slippery surface underfoot, of the cacophony of tap shoes striking the wood. Far removed from the aristocratic interiors historically associated with parquet, these unassuming floors were a fixture of my adolescence—as something I remember through my body.
In “Hacia Cuando (To When)” at MASS MoCA, Daniela Rivera will create her own floor, constructing it from hand-painted tiles to look like parquet, moving fresco from wall to ground. Like the floors I remember, it will accumulate meaning through use. Tilted upward from the gallery floor, visitors will be invited to walk across the installation, with the sound of their movements picked up by contact microphones below. Those movements will leave traces, forming a shared history over time. In October, Rivera will activate the work through an opera that will incorporate the recordings alongside live performance, extending the installation into sound and movement. —Ava Mancing
Kyoko Idetsu, Grave, 2024. Oil on canvas, 63 ¾ x 89 ½ inches. Courtesy of Outer Space Arts.
“Montages: Peter Cordova & Kyoko Idetsu,” July 15–September 19, 2026
Outer Space Arts
35 Pleasant Street, Concord, NH
With “Montages: Peter Cordova & Kyoko Idetsu,” Concord, New Hampshire’s Outer Space Arts is continuing its mission of pairing artists whose practices spark unexpected dialogue. Both Cordova and Idetsu are interested in depicting the way simplified, expressive figures can carry memory, emotion, and narrative. Their works depict the minutiae of the everyday, both within their specific cultures (Cordova was born in the Philippines and lives in San Francisco; Idetsu is from Tokyo) and beyond them, particularly in the case of Cordova’s thoughtful colored-pencil investigations of North American Indigenous peoples. The resulting show is a collection of drawings and paintings that employ abstracted bodies, bright colors, and intimate scenes to deliver a sort of shorthand storytelling, the kind that offers a view into the layered lives we actually lead. —Jessica Shearer
