The exhibitions to see in May 2026: the Venice Biennale, Anton Corbijn’s music portraits and Jack White’s first art show

May is when the art calendar and the pop calendar collide. The Met Gala sets the tone on May 4, the Venice Biennale opens a few days later, and half of New York’s galleries wait for Frieze. These are seven shows that open or are on view this month, picked for crossover pull as much as prestige: a Biennale named for a musical key, a retrospective for the photographer behind decades of album covers, a NIGO show built around a recreated teenage bedroom, and the first public exhibition of Jack White’s sculptures. They span Venice, Berlin, London and New York, in order of opening date. Dates are as the venues published them.

NIGO: From Japan with Love, Design Museum, London

The first museum retrospective of NIGO outside Japan runs May 1 to Oct. 4, with a press opening at the end of April. It fills the Design Museum with more than 700 objects, including a recreation of his teenage bedroom, ceramics he hand-threw himself and a life-size glass tea house built for the show. The influences it names are vintage Americana, streetwear, hip-hop, Japanese craft and 1980s Tokyo.

Read moreRoy Lichtenstein’s Whitney Retrospective Says He Saw the Repost Coming

Hypebeast’s walk-through runs from the bedroom replica and a studio built with USM Haller towers to the 1993 NOWHERE shop with Jun Takahashi, early BAPE T-shirts and a London store section lit by Wonderwall’s Union Jack neon. Curator Esme Hawes says it was a surprise even to the team: “We knew that NIGO had a massive collection of fashion and clothing, but it was only when we got to his studio in Tokyo that we realised he had so much more than that.”

In Minor Keys, the 61st Venice Biennale, Venice

The Biennale opens to the public May 9 and runs through Nov. 22 at the Giardini, the Arsenale and sites across the city, after press days on May 6 to 8. The main show was conceived by curator Koyo Kouoh, who died in May 2025, and La Biennale chose to realize it with the team she picked. About 110 invited participants are in the main exhibition, alongside 100 national participations and 31 collateral events, and seven countries take part for the first time.

The title is a musical instruction. Kouoh’s curatorial text says it all:

This exhibition is tuned in to the minor keys and invites listening to the persistent signals of earth and life, connecting to soul frequencies.

Koyo Kouoh, curator, La Biennale di Venezia

The show is organized around motifs it calls “Shrines,” procession, oases and “Schools,” with literary touchstones that include Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Our Biennale opening report has the pavilions, including the Holy See’s FKA twigs and Brian Eno sound pavilion.

Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, Fondazione Prada, Venice

The Biennale’s best off-site pairing is also on May 9, at Fondazione Prada’s Ca’ Corner della Regina palazzo, through Nov. 23. Curated by Nancy Spector, it is the first show to pair the two American artists, with more than 50 works across photography, video, installation, sculpture and painting, new work by each, and a zine of images they swapped. The Fondazione says the artists’ source material includes album covers, record sleeves and rock ’n’ roll posters, and that the title nods to the 1968 Beatles song.

ARTnews traces it to the debut of Jafa’s film AGHDRA (2021) in Harlem, where Prince stayed for all 75 minutes. Spector’s one-line pitch is that both artists are “image scavengers.” Jafa told ARTnews he isn’t surprised by the pairing: “I’m surprised that people are surprised.”

Corbijn, Anton, Fotografiska Berlin

Anton Corbijn’s career in music photography gets a 150-picture retrospective from May 9 to Sept. 20, arriving after its Stockholm presentation. Fotografiska Berlin says it spans 50 years, from Depeche Mode, Tom Waits, U2 and the Rolling Stones to German icons Nina Hagen, Herbert Grönemeyer and Wim Wenders, and notes that within ten days of arriving in London in 1979 he had photographed Joy Division. Hypebeast adds Björk, David Bowie, Brian Eno and Massive Attack, plus his Staged series, in which he dresses as late icons.

He has also made more than 80 music promos and directed Control (2007). Of his grainy black-and-white signature, he says he never went looking for it. In Hypebeast’s words he explained, “Your style is basically your inability to do it any other way.”

Costume Art, The Met, New York

The Costume Institute’s spring show opens to the public on May 10, six days after the Met Gala’s “Fashion Is Art” dress code, and stays up through Jan. 10, 2027. It’s the first exhibition in the new nearly 12,000-square-foot Condé M. Nast Galleries beside the Great Hall. Curated by Andrew Bolton, it brings nearly 400 objects together, organized by the body, from the Classical Body to the Naked Body and the Pregnant Body, and pairs garments with artworks from across the Met.

Mannequins get polished steel heads by the artist Samar Hejazi so visitors see their own reflections. Pairings include a Y/Project suit with a first- or second-century Diadoumenos, and a 1997 Jean Paul Gaultier shirt with a 1971 Joe Brainard drawing. Bolton says the aim is to show that fashion can “expand our understanding of what art can mean.”

Delcy Morelos, origo, Barbican Sculpture Court, London

The Barbican’s Sculpture Court gets its first artwork in ten years, from May 15 to July 31. Morelos’s origo is a 24-by-18-meter ovular pavilion over three meters high, hand-built from clay, soil, hay and plant seed and sewn with cinnamon and cloves, with tunnels as entry points and a central patio. It’s her most ambitious outdoor work and her first major U.K. presentation.

The Barbican calls its inspiration ancestral Andean and Amazonian knowledge, with origo meaning origin in Latin, and celebrates what Morelos calls “the delicate and powerful web of existence.” ArtReview compares it to earlier versions at Dia Chelsea and Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof and notes how silent so large a structure feels.

Jack White, THESE THOUGHTS MAY DISAPPEAR, Newport Street Gallery, London

The most unexpected show of the month is a musician’s first public exhibition. Jack White’s sculptures, installations and furniture run at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery in Vauxhall from May 29 to Sept. 13, with found-object works, some of them interactive, and a remake of his 2015 sculpture The Red Tree. White, born in Detroit in 1975 and based in Nashville, opened Third Man Upholstery in 1996.

ARTnews, citing the Financial Times, says White and Hirst met in 2021 when White opened a Third Man Records store in Soho opposite Hirst’s studio, and White played a guerrilla show from Hirst’s balcony. White is sidestepping the obvious angle:

I’m trying to put music a little bit on the back burner in this scenario,

Jack White, ARTnews, quoting the Financial Times

Also on our radar

Raymond Pettibon’s Nervous Breakdown, a show of 200-plus album covers from the Stefan Thull Collection, is at the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum in Ludwigshafen, Germany, through Sept. 20. It covers his punk artwork for Black Flag and the cover of Sonic Youth’s Goo. Lorna Simpson’s Third Person continues at Punta della Dogana in Venice, and Bold Tendencies’ Euphoria season, with Andreas Gursky among the commissions, opens May 15 in Peckham. Back in the market, New York’s marquee auction week lands in the middle of the month, alongside Frieze New York. For earlier picks, see our April guide.

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