The events described in this roundup have taken place.

If any single month sets the tone for the art year, it is May, and May 2026 delivered, opening one of the most closely watched editions of the Venice Biennale in a generation while New York threw open its doors for its busiest art week of the season.

Around the World

All eyes turned to Venice, where the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, opened to the public on May 9 (following preview days May 6 to 8) and will remain on view through November 22. Titled “In Minor Keys,” the exhibition carries special weight: it was conceived by Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian-Swiss curator and director of Zeitz MOCAA, who became the first African woman appointed to lead the Biennale. Kouoh passed away in May 2025, and this edition realizes the vision her curatorial team carried forward, a deliberate turn away from spectacle toward what she described as a slower, more attentive way of looking, organized around motifs of shrines, procession, schools, rest, and performance.

The scale is historic in its own right: roughly 111 artists in the main exhibition and 99 participating nations, up from 86 in 2024. Several countries mounted national pavilions for the very first time, among them Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Sierra Leone, Somalia, El Salvador, Nauru, Qatar, and Vietnam. It was, in every sense, a wider and more global gathering than the art world has seen in years.

In the United States

Back home, mid-May belonged to New York Art Week, anchored by Frieze New York and joined by the constellation of fairs that now orbit it, including Independent, NADA, TEFAF New York, and Esther. Together they turned Manhattan into a days-long marketplace and meeting ground for galleries, collectors, and curators from around the world. And on the first Monday of the month, the culture world’s attention swung uptown to the Met Gala and the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, the annual reminder that fashion, too, is a fine art.

In New Jersey

The Garden State kept pace. At Grounds For Sculpture in Hamilton, the season bloomed in every sense: the gardens filled with irises and daffodils while, on May 17, the institution opened “Opening the Vault,” a collection exhibition of American masters curated by the museum’s curatorial staff team, and continued to present Kiyan Williams’s striking “Ruins of Empire II,” a neoclassical portico built from earth excavated near the source used for the nation’s capital.

Across the state, New Jersey’s museums, including the Newark Museum of Art, the Montclair Art Museum, the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, and the Princeton University Art Museum, anchored a spring calendar that, through initiatives like Garden State Art Weekend, invited the public into more than a hundred galleries, studios, and community art spaces from Bergen County to Cape May.

May proved, once again, that great art is both a global event and a neighborhood one, and New Jersey showed up on both counts.

Corrected on 2 October 2026. An earlier version of this article said “Opening the Vault” was curated by Grace Yasumura, listed Morocco and Moldova among the first-time national pavilions at the Venice Biennale, placed Frieze New York in the first full week of May, and said Qatar unveiled the first new permanent Giardini pavilion in three decades. The exhibition was curated by the museum’s curatorial staff team, the official first-time participants include Equatorial Guinea and Qatar and not Morocco or Moldova, Frieze New York ran 13 to 17 May 2026, and the Giardini pavilion claim has been removed because we could not confirm it.

Sources consulted

Grounds For Sculpture, Opening the Vault: A Look Inside the GFS Collection
La Biennale di Venezia, 61st International Art Exhibition 2026
The Shed, Frieze New York 2026