NEW YORK, NY.- This year, the Jewish Museum in New York City presents a slate of timely new exhibitions that highlight works by significant historic and contemporary artists—from Paul Klee to Ruth Patir—and showcase the rich diversity of the Jewish diaspora. The presentations reflect the Museum’s reinvigorated commitment to centering cultural exchange and global ideas, following the opening of its newly transformed collection galleries and learning center this past fall.

2026 EXHIBITIONS

Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds
March 20 – July 26, 2026

Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds marks the first American museum show to focus on the artist’s late work, produced during his last, unsettling decade of life until his death in 1940. Having established his esteemed reputation during a decade-long tenure at the Bauhaus, Klee resigned his position in Dessau in 1931 and was offered another at the academy in Düsseldorf, where he sought to free himself from the demands of lecturing and concentrate on painting. With Hitler’s ascent to power, the National Socialists deemed Klee’s art subversive and degenerate, and dismissed him from his position at the Düsseldorf Academy, referring to him as “a Galician Jew.” Forced into exile as an immigrant in his country of birth, the displaced artist abandoned his uplifting chromatic style of painting, as he confronted the harsh terrain of fascism and soon, in 1935, the effects of scleroderma, a fatal autoimmune disease. In exploring Klee’s late work, the exhibition addresses that which is not only less familiar to an American audience, but also less studied in academic circles in the U.S. than in Europe. The exhibition is accompanied by a range of works from across Klee’s career as a dramatic contrast to this powerful late work.

Women of the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) [working title]
July 17, 2026 – January 3, 2027

This exhibition explores the lasting contributions of the women of the Wiener Werkstätte (1903-1932), a transformative collective including specialists trained in architecture, furniture design, fashion, ceramics, metalwork, and the decorative arts. Born out of the progressive momentum of the Vienna Secession, the Wiener Werkstätte embraced the synthesis of art and life as an essential condition of modernity and sought to use artistic production to birth new attitudes about class, consumerism, and culture. At the start of this new century, Viennese women were poised to take advantage of burgeoning economic opportunities and roles in public life—many did so by becoming professional decorative artists and lending their prowess to the Wiener Werkstätte, despite continuing to face systemic resistance to their activities. This exhibition celebrates these talented women artists who profoundly shaped modernist design languages through the Wiener Werkstätte, both in Europe and beyond.

Fragments of Memory
September 18, 2026 – February 21, 2027

This first-of-its-kind exhibition featuring Jewish and Christian ceremonial objects explores sacred vessels as sites of memory and history, showcasing themes that cut across religions and global communities. Bejeweled and sacred vessels of veneration, medieval reliquaries are at once works of art from their time and place of production as well as physical containers of remarkable beauty. Specially designed and organized for the Jewish Museum’s galleries, Fragments of Memory features reliquaries from the treasury of St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague alongside objects from the Museum’s own collection, as well as 2 private loans, including medieval and early modern Jewish ceremonial objects such as spice containers, charity boxes, burial society beakers, Torah cases, and more. Questions concerning how to represent the divine, enshrine the sacred, activate ritual and evoke beauty are among the driving themes of the exhibition. Works by four contemporary artists address related themes in the present day.

Ruth Patir: (M)otherland
December 18, 2026 – June 2027

Originally created for the Israel Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale and installed as centerpiece of the Jewish Museum’s collection galleries, Ruth Patir’s multi-channel video work brings together ancient archaeology and contemporary digital technology to examine the intersection of gender, motherhood, and the fraught politics of fertility and reproductive rights. Featuring digitally animated Iron Age female figurines—based on archaeological artifacts from 800–600 BCE whose meanings remain uncertain but are often associated with fertility—the work weaves together four videos that draw on Patir’s personal experiences following a gene mutation diagnosis and the ensuing pressures of fertility treatment within a male-dominated medical system. Using recorded conversations with various people in the artist's life, Patir deploys these animated figurines as avatars for herself and the women around her, exploring themes of bodily autonomy, medicalization, and state intervention—particularly in the context of Israel’s state-funded IVF policies. A fifth video, Keening, was created after October 7, 2023, to address collective mourning and rage. Together, the five videos form a layered, poignant reflection on how personal narratives are shaped by political, historical, and cultural forces. This presentation marks the U.S. premiere of (M)otherland. The work will subsequently be on view at the Boca Raton Museum of Art.

CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

Anish Kapoor: Early Works
On view through February 1, 2026

Anish Kapoor (b. 1954) is among the most influential sculptors of his generation. This exhibition focuses on the artist’s early sculptural installations of “pigment works” alongside rarely-seen drawings from the late 1970s through the 1980s. A lesser-known period in the career of a widely celebrated artist known for his bold and adventuresome public art, these intimate and ephemeral works, though included in major collections throughout the United States and Europe, represent a new discovery for many familiar with the artist’s highly visible and decades-long career. Cleaving to a limited palette of reds, blues, yellows and blacks, these stunning sandcastle-like floor-based objects come out of early attachments to Minimalism and Conceptualism, blending visual languages and influences from a multitude of directions. The exhibition also includes a sampling of recent works made with Vantablack, known as the “world’s darkest material.”

Joan Semmel: In the Flesh
On view through May 31, 2026

Foundational feminist painter Joan Semmel (b. 1932, Bronx, NY) has made representations of the body from the female perspective her life’s work. In the 1950s, Semmel began her painting career in Spain, where she was struck by the lack of autonomy for women living under the Franco dictatorship. Living in New York in the early 1970s, her sentiments were reinforced by the burgeoning feminist movement. Semmel turned toward figuration as a mode of directly confronting her concerns around female representation. When she could not secure exhibition opportunities for her large-scale nudes and erotic works, she curated shows of her own work and the work of her peers to critical acclaim. Her first museum solo exhibition in New York features prime examples of her large-scale works from the 70s and 80s in dialogue with the artist’s selections from the Jewish Museum collection, which reflect the art histories and communities that Semmel has built over the last six decades.

Identity, Culture, and Community: Stories from the Collection of the Jewish Museum
On long-term view

Following a comprehensive reimagination, renovation, and expansion of public spaces on its third and fourth floors, the Jewish Museum debuts a new collection installation exploring the points of convergence that have shaped the cultural heritage of the Jewish diaspora across more than 3,500 years. Identity, Culture, and Community: Stories from the Collection of the Jewish Museum features some 200 works in a dynamic dialogue, from ritual objects steeped in history to large-scale contemporary works, curated within a loosely thematic trajectory. Sections exploring ritual and community, persecution and remembrance, the creation of new visual languages, and feminism anchor the space. New acquisitions comprise over 25% of the installation, with works spanning media and time periods. A stunning display of nearly 140 Hanukkah lamps, drawn from the Museum’s holdings, featured in the Museum’s newly renovated Center for Learning complements the breadth of the collection exhibition nearby.