10 exhibitions in the US worth traveling for in 2024

29.12.2023 - 20:39 / lonelyplanet.com / Henri Matisse / Art

At the USA’s leading museums, a spirit of friendly competition prevails for creating the most compelling yet crowd-pleasing displays that will make news – and draw crowds.

In the new year, this will make all museumgoers winners.

In the coming months, institutions across the country will offer new contexts for artists whose work you think you know by heart. Historical objects and subjects will get fresh interpretations, and up-and-coming creators whose work is currently known only to insiders may have their breakout moment.

In chronological order, here are 10 museum exhibitions across the USA that are worth traveling for in 2024.

SFMOMA, San Francisco
On view: now through September 7 

For six decades now, Japanese polymath Yayoi Kusama has been exploring the concept of the “infinity room.” These meditations on perception, the cosmos and existence itself combine bold colors, three-dimensional forms and mirror-generated optical illusions to transport viewers to an all-encompassing aesthetic universe. They’ve become a worldwide phenomenon – and in the exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love they have landed in Northern California for the first time. Featured works including the brand-new Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love (2023) and the famous LOVE IS CALLING (2013) will be on display at SFMOMA through next fall. Be sure to reserve advance tickets the minute they go on sale: as ever, these installations are already the hottest tickets in town.

St Louis Art Museum, St Louis
On view: February 17–May 12, 2024

Henri Matisse lived for decades near the Mediterranean, and a spectrum of blues carries through his entire oeuvre, largely inspired by the reflection of light off the water. Yet the new exhibition Matisse and the Sea at the St Louis Art Museum is somehow the first ever to offer a thorough overview of how Matisse depicted, learned from and looked to the sea – from the south of France to Tahiti – throughout his career. With the SLAM’s Bathers with Turtle (1907–8) as a highlight, the exhibition travels across both Matisse’s output and the world itself, with works by this 20th-century master in various media, depicting the sea as a subject and as a thematic motif.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
On view: February 25–June 28, 2024

Years in the making, the highly anticipated show The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism reflects the Met’s efforts to place the work of Black artists in a new light. Expect works by Harlem Renaissance artists including Charles Alston, Archibald Motley and James Van Der Zee – largely drawn from the collections of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) – to hang alongside those of European contemporaries such as Henri Matisse, Edvard