The exhibitions to see in June 2026: Frida Kahlo, Keith Haring and Prince's Guitar at the Met

June is when the museum calendar swaps spring shows for summer blockbusters, and this year the swap lands in the same month as Art Basel. These are six shows that open or are on view in June, picked for crossover pull rather than prestige alone: a Frida Kahlo blockbuster that ends in a room of Kahlo merch, a Met gallery that hangs Prince's guitar beside a Titian, a Keith Haring show made of sculptures instead of paintings, and a Parisian apartment building you can climb sideways. Five are June openings and one has been open since May. They cover Paris, Bentonville, New York, Basel, London and Venice, in order of opening date. Dates are as the venues published them.

Leandro Erlich, Grand Palais, Paris

Leandro Erlich builds rooms that lie to you, and the Grand Palais is handing him fourteen of them. His first major retrospective in France opens June 2 and runs through Sept. 6, curated by Fabrice Bousteau, and it leans on mirrors, scale shifts and film-set tricks: rowing boats paired with inverted twins in Port of Reflection, clouds made from layered sheets of printed glass, and Bâtiment (2004), a Haussmann-style façade laid flat beneath a mirror tilted at 45 degrees so visitors look like they are scaling its walls.

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The Argentine artist, born in Buenos Aires in 1973, also shows the models and preparatory studies behind the effects, which designboom describes as miniature labyrinths, distorted façades and floating houses. He says the surprise is only the opening move: “That is the moment the experience begins, and becomes interactive.” Artprice notes the installations are highly photogenic yet can't be reduced to a photo, which makes this the rare phone-friendly blockbuster that still rewards putting the phone away.

Keith Haring in 3D, Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, Arkansas

Haring is the painter of the subway drawings, so a show about his sculpture is a real rethink. Crystal Bridges calls Keith Haring in 3D the first exhibition to highlight his work in three dimensions: sculptures, totems and masks, skateboards, clothing, boomboxes, paintings, drawings and a 1963 Buick Special that he covered in orange and blue enamel in 1986. It opens June 6, the same day as the museum's 114,000-square-foot expansion, and runs through Jan. 25, 2027.

The pitch is about his circle as much as his line. Assistant curator Victor Gomez says one goal is to reposition Haring “within the creative networks that shaped his practice, especially the downtown New York scene of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s,” including exchanges with LA2 and Kenny Scharf. Collaborators from Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Grace Jones and Bill T. Jones come up in the museum's text, and a book from Phaidon/Monacelli, edited by Larry Warsh and Glenn Adamson, accompanies the show.

Musical Bodies, The Met, New York

The Met's first major show about instruments and the human body opens June 7 in Gallery 199 and runs through Sept. 27. It gathers some 130 objects in six sections across 4,000 years, from ancient Egyptian rattles and paintings by Titian and Degas to Prince's “Love Symbol” guitar, Liberace's “Piano Keys” suit, a Tom Ford ensemble Zazie Beetz wore to the Met Gala and Nam June Paik's TV Cello. Loans come from the Musée de la musique in Paris, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Royal College of Music in London, among others.

There are screens too, with video of whistler Molly Lewis and tap dancer Savion Glover and an interactive keyboard projection. Curator Bradley Strauchen-Scherer, whose show was seven years in the making, puts the idea plainly: “Each one of us is an instrument, whether it is clapping, tapping, whistling, or singing, and that is at the center of this exhibition.”

Art Basel, Basel

Art Basel is a trade fair, but in Basel it behaves like a citywide show. The 2026 edition runs June 18 to 21, with preview days on June 16 and 17, and brings 290 galleries from 43 countries to Messe Basel, 21 of them newcomers. Hauser & Wirth, Gagosian, David Zwirner and Pace are among the names in the main sector, per The Art Newspaper, and the Premiere section for recent work grows to 17 presentations.

The part to see is outside the booths. Ruba Katrib, chief curator of MoMA PS1, curates Unlimited for the first time, with 59 large-scale projects. She told Art Basel she wanted “artists who responded to, or are responding to, their moment,” both contemporary and historical. Stefanie Hessler's Parcours puts site-specific work along Clarastrasse around the idea of conviviality, and Nairy Baghramian and Ibrahim Mahama unveil public commissions on the Messeplatz and the Münsterplatz. Director Maike Cruse's summary: “For one week, Basel becomes the central meeting point of the art world.” For how the week turned out, see our Art Basel closing report.

Frida: The Making of an Icon, Tate Modern, London

The summer's most anticipated London opening arrives June 25 and stays through Jan. 3, 2027. Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, with Tate Modern, it puts more than 30 Kahlo paintings beside over 200 works by her contemporaries and the artists she inspired, including Diego Rivera and María Izquierdo. Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940) is on show in the U.K. for the first time, per The Art Newspaper, and a Surrealism section covers the Paris show André Breton invited her to in 1939.

The last room is the one people will argue about. “Fridamania” fills it with more than 200 mass-produced objects, from T-shirts and tequila bottles to Barbies and perfume, per Time Out. Tate frames the show as an account of how Kahlo became a global brand as well as a painter. Tate Modern's director of programme, Catherine Wood, recalls that when Tate opened a Kahlo show in 2005 she was one of few women artists in museums: “Now it is interesting to see how Kahlo has shaped the canon for future generations.”

Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys, Venice

The 61st Venice Biennale has been open since May 9 and runs through Nov. 22 at the Giardini, the Arsenale and sites around the city. In Minor Keys was conceived by curator Koyo Kouoh, who died in May 2025 at 57, and La Biennale, with her family's support, chose to realize her exhibition with the team she had picked. The title is musical on purpose. Her curatorial text asks visitors to “shift to a slower gear and tune in to the frequencies of the minor keys,” and describes “songs of those producing beauty in spite of tragedy.”

It is the quietest entry on this list, a Biennale built around listening instead of spectacle. For the later months, see our August exhibition guide.

Also on our radar

The Met's Costume Art is on view through January 2027, pairing 200 artworks with 200 garments. London Gallery Weekend runs June 5 to 7 across more than 120 galleries, per Dazed. Sara Cwynar's Baby Blue Benzo Beta is at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto through Aug. 16, and Mariuccia Secol's Unraveling, a show of textile work made by removing threads, runs at Muzeum Susch in Switzerland from June 11 to Nov. 1.

Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.