This Summer's Art Season asks More Questions Than it Answers

This is a summer when the art in our region is in full bloom. At MASS MoCA, Laurie Anderson probes the age of artificial intelligence while Daniela Rivera literally builds her questions into a floor you walk across. At the Clark Art Institute, 150 European masterworks—never publicly shown—arrive from a collection that one man spent a lifetime building and then gave away. In Stockbridge, Norman Rockwell's museum turns the nation's 250th birthday into an occasion for real reflection, not pageantry. And Edith Wharton's Lenox estate plants contemporary sculpture in the same gardens where she wrote The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome. The summer's art isn't decorative. It's aggressive.

Laurie Anderson + Daniela Rivera, "Hacia Cuando (To When)"

MASS MoCA, 1040 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams

Laurie Anderson—poet, musician, inventor of instruments, one of the great multimedia artists of the last fifty years—has new work in MASS MoCA's Robert W. Wilson Building exploring AI, storytelling, and how we construct meaning from experience. Anderson has spent her career asking what language does to us, how narrative shapes perception, and what we lose when memory gets outsourced to systems that don't remember the way we do. She is also funny—a deadpan performer who has spent fifty years finding the absurdity in the human condition. Her instruments have included a violin strung with audio tape and a suit that talks. The new work brings those questions into the age of machine intelligence, which turns out to be exactly where they belong.

Opening July 11, Boston-based Chilean artist Daniela Rivera presents "Hacia Cuando (To When)": a large inclined floor built from handmade tiles made using pre-Hispanic fresco traditions. Visitors walk across it. The floor works simultaneously as painting, sculpture, and sonic instrument—it amplifies sound differently depending on where you stand, so the space changes based on your position in it. Rivera's subject is the migration of histories, objects, and myths, and the colonial record encoded in materials themselves—in the clay, the pigment, the methods of making. Where Anderson asks how we tell stories, Rivera asks whose stories the materials were already telling before we arrived. The two shows complicate each other in the best way.

Norman Rockwell Museum

9 Glendale Road, Stockbridge

The museum housing the world's largest collection of Rockwell's work—574 original paintings and drawings—has organized its 2026 season around America's 250th birthday. The summer exhibition, "American Stories: From Revolution to Rockwell," traces how visual artists from the Revolutionary era to the present have shaped and reflected the evolving American story. It's a reminder that Rockwell was always doing more than illustration: he was making arguments about who belongs, what dignity looks like, and what the country owes its people. Rockwell's historic studio, moved to the museum grounds, is open through October. The grounds are beautiful, the café is good, and the permanent collection alone justifies the drive to Stockbridge.

"An Exquisite Eye: Introducing the Aso O. Tavitian Collection"

Clark Art Institute, 225 South Street, Williamstown

Between 2004 and his death in 2020, Aso O. Tavitian—born in Bulgaria of Armenian descent, emigrated to the United States in 1961 and built a career in technology—assembled one of the most significant private collections of European art in North America. He then gave all 331 works to a museum in a small Massachusetts college town. Approximately 150 are on public view here for the first time. The collection spans four centuries, roughly 1450 to 1850: Jan van Eyck, Bernini, Rubens, Watteau, Jacques-Louis David, Vigee-Lebrun. Vermeer-school interiors. Flemish still lifes. Portrait miniatures.

The curators' argument is that these works show how thoroughly interconnected artistic traditions were across early modern Europe—how ideas about beauty, form, and devotion crossed borders and centuries regardless of where states were drawing their lines at the time. A full wing devoted to the collection opens at the Clark in 2028. This summer is the preview.

Rudd Art Foundation

159 East Main Street, North Adams

Two blocks from MASS MoCA, the Rudd Art Foundation presents changing exhibitions alongside a permanent collection anchored by six decades of sculptor Eric Rudd's work—plant-based organics, crates, creatures, box columns up to ten feet tall. Since the 1970s, Rudd has been building this body of work in North Adams, quietly, on his own terms. This season brings out permanent collection pieces that have never been shown publicly. One of the most genuinely strange and serious institutions in the region: a sustained private vision, finally made available.

Art Omi

1405 County Route 22, Ghent

This sculpture park features more than sixty large-scale works spread across 120 acres of rolling fields, forested paths, and wetlands in the middle of Columbia County farmland. Along with the field work, this summer Omi's indoor Newmark Gallery presents two solo exhibitions: Nayland Blake's "Haunt: Being the Folly of One Victorya Spectre" and Tschabalala Self's "Pioneer," both opened with newly commissioned performances on the grounds in late June and on view through the season. Art Omi: Dance celebrates its 20th anniversary with a special reunion residency (July 23–August 10), with a free public showing on campus August 8 and a performance at Jacob's Pillow on August 1. The sculpture park is always free.

Bold Performance

Summer 2026 is not a normal summer for live performance in the RI region—and this region's summers are never normal. The Martha Graham Dance Company is at Jacob's Pillow for its hundredth anniversary. Yo-Yo Ma is in residency at Tanglewood, working through what it means to be American right now with the patience of someone who has been doing exactly that for fifty years. Geoff Sobelle is in a field in Chatham on the Fourth of July doing something no one can quite summarize. And Weird Al Yankovic is making his Tanglewood debut, which is either the most surprising sentence in this magazine or the most inevitable, depending on your perspective.

PS21: Center for Contemporary Performance

2910 State Route 66, Chatham

PS21 operates on a 55-acre campus in Chatham and is, in the view of people who pay close attention to these things, the most underappreciated major cultural institution in the RI region. Ten world and US premieres this summer. Geoff Sobelle's "Clown Show" opens the Fourth of July weekend—a world premiere built from clown logic and contemporary dread, which in 2026 turns out to be more or less the same thing. Later in the season, 600 HIGHWAYMEN present "Five Years" (August 28–29), a commission assembled from thousands of short clips of rural New York life gathered over half a decade. Ordinariness accumulates until it becomes something else entirely. The season closes with Commonground (September 4–7), a participatory festival whose centerpiece, "SUPERDRUM X," involves 100 self-playing drums. If you go to one thing this summer that you can't fully explain to someone who wasn't there, make it something at PS21. Season continues through September 7.

Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival

358 George Carter Road, Becket

The 94th season is organized around "Groundbreaking Women in Dance," and the anchor is the Martha Graham Dance Company returning for its 100th anniversary—seven performances in the Ted Shawn Theatre presenting defining works alongside En Masse, a new commission believed to incorporate a recently recovered Bernstein composition written for Graham. Graham's connection to the Pillow dates to 1916. Also this summer: A.I.M by Kyle Abraham with live music by Jason Moran and Nico Muhly in a US premiere; Paul Taylor Dance Company for the first time at the Pillow in seven years; San Francisco Ballet returning for the first time since 1956. Most outdoor programming is free, which at the Pillow means world-class dance on a summer afternoon with nothing between you and the Berkshire hills. Season continues through August 23.

Tanglewood

297 West Street, Lenox

Yo-Yo Ma curates "We the People: Our Shared Past, Present, and Future"—a week of performances and conversations with the BSO that examines the country from a perspective that is genuinely hard to fake when you have spent 50 years playing in it. James Taylor holds down the Fourth as he always has (July 3–4). On July 21, Weird Al Yankovic makes his Tanglewood debut on the "Bigger & Weirder" tour with special guest Puddles Pity Party. Say what you will: the man is a five-time Grammy winner and the biggest-selling comedy recording artist in history, and he has never played this stage before. Also on the popular series: Cynthia Erivo, Carrie Underwood, and Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue. The lawn is the great equalizer. Bring a blanket, arrive early, and let the summer do its thing. Season continues through September 2.

Music Mountain

225 Music Mountain Road, Falls Village, Connecticut

Founded in 1930, Music Mountain is the oldest continuously operating summer chamber music festival in the United States. Gordon Hall—a wooden room on a mountaintop built for this purpose and never used for anything else—has acoustics that have drawn comparisons to the finest chamber venues in the world. Sixteen Sunday afternoon concerts this season. It is, year after year, the most underattended major cultural institution in the RI region. There is no good reason for this. Season continues through September 13.

The Spiegeltent at Bard SummerScape

Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

A vintage mirrored traveling tent on the Bard campus, programmed every night with music, comedy, cabaret, dancing, and drinking. Adrienne Truscott is the season emcee; July 24 is her night. SummerScape's main stage produces Strauss's Egyptian Helen with the American Symphony Orchestra (July 24–August 2) and the Bard Music Festival's eleven-concert deep dive into Mozart (August 7–16). Both are worth the drive on their own. The Spiegeltent is the one you'll be talking about in September. Season continues through August 15.

Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center

14 Castle Street, Great Barrington

Named for the Mahican word for "the place downstream," the Mahaiwe has anchored Great Barrington's cultural life since 1905. Its 700-seat theater is one of those rooms that makes everything sound better than it has any right to. Tab Benoit brings his Soul of the Swamp Tour on July 12; the Met Opera Live in HD simulcasts run through the season; and the summer classic film series "100 Years of Movies" is back for another year. Music, dance, theater, opera, comedy—in a beautifully restored room at the center of a town that knows exactly what to do with it.

Hudson Hall

327 Warren Street, Hudson

Sunset concerts aboard the Schooner Apollonia on the Hudson River, Handel on the Hudson series (July 11 and August 8). The Hudson Jazz Workshop's 20th anniversary concert on August 9, with pianist Armen Donelian, saxophonist Marc Mommaas, and guitarist Steve Cardenas.

Stissing Center

2950 Church Street, Pine Plains

A restored century-old brick building in the center of Pine Plains, seating 270, programming everything from bluegrass to Beethoven, "Bollywood to burlesque," flamenco, film, and free children's programming all summer.