An Art Lover’s Guide to Boston

The MFA, as it’s known, is set on Boston’s “Emerald Necklace,” a stretch of scenic green spaces that ring the modern city designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (who also designed Central Park in New York). The majestic museum houses one of the world's most comprehensive collections of American art and has plenty of work from other countries, too. The must-sees include paintings by American artists Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent, Degas’s sculpture of a young dancer, and Renoir’s Dance at Bougival. Kids will enjoy the extensive Egyptian artifacts exhibit, and the museum also regularly hosts art events, lectures, and classes; check this calendar for details.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum comprises the private collection of its namesake, an art collector and philanthropist who founded the museum around the turn of the 20th century. The building is, in many ways, the highlight—it’s modeled on a Venetian palazzo, complete with lion guardian statues and gushing fountains, all lying around a central green courtyard that inspires plenty of Instagram portraits. This is the place to go for historical art in Boston, as the galleries are modeled much how Gardner herself left them—with the notable exclusion of the 13 works that were stolen in 1990, the most costly art heist in history.

A 30-minute drive from Boston proper, deCordova is well worth a detour. It’s a bastion of outdoor and installation art, much of it so big that you would have trouble putting it inside a museum anyway! Wander at your own pace through the forests and meadows that make up the park, stumbling upon sculptures, windows, and immersive installation pieces. It’s a fixture of the New England art scene, and the museum tries to include primarily local artists. In addition to its permanent collection, which counts more than 1,500 individual pieces, the sculpture park features both single-artist and thematic temporary exhibitions.

Boston’s North End was once cut off from the city's downtown by highways, but thanks to the Big Dig construction project (which lasted years, provoking the ire of every Bostonian), that is no longer true. Instead of overpasses, you’ll walk through the Rose Kennedy Greenway to get to the North End’s Italian bakeries and historic sites, a great place to hang out in the summer and enjoy a drink in an outdoor bar or snap photos. The highlight is the Greenway Wall, an old building whose southern face has been taken over by various artists to create large-scale graffiti murals on a revolving basis over the years. Other public art is scattered through the green space, as well.

Forty minutes north of Boston, Salem is well known for being a Halloween hot spot: a place to celebrate among ghouls, ghosts, and (of course) the witches that make the city infamous. But away from the Halloween high season, this town still has plenty to offer—including the Peabody Essex Museum, one of the best places to see art near Boston. It’s more than 220 years old, but this museum carves exciting paths for curation: You’ll see exhibits about Black Atlantic culture next to an installation by a Turkish experimental artist next to temporary exhibitions of Rodin. The best way to get to Salem is on a high-speed ferry from Boston.

It’s a good idea to head across the river to Cambridge or Somerville to tap into the Boston arts scene. Though the former is known for being the home of Harvard and MIT, the creative spirit extends beyond the university walls. Check out Central Square and start at Graffiti Alley, where spray painting is legal; what you see one day may well be covered up by someone else’s work the next. Stick around until the evening for live music at the Middle East, a storied complex of several music venues hosting local and international acts. Alternatively, see a local play at the cozy Central Square Theater.

The Institute of Contemporary Art is the cornerstone of Boston’s Seaport neighborhood, now a buzzing shopping district that was mostly parking lots until a decade ago. It was a great place to build a neighborhood around, though, as the ICA features exclusively temporary exhibitions from some of the biggest names in the contemporary art world that will surely challenge your perception of what art can be in the 21st century. A local secret for free art in Boston is that the museum’s recently-inaugurated Watershed building, across the Harbor in “Eastie,” is always free. If you pay to enter the main building, though, a ferry to the other side is also included in your ticket—a win.

A massive, multi-million dollar renovation brought Harvard University's art museums into vogue again. What used to be three dingy spaces spread across the central campus transformed into a flagship building that is one of the best places to see free art in Boston. It’s been free for all visitors since 2022, and visitors can spend hours wandering through exhibitions as diverse as an Ai Weiwei video installation to a van Gogh self-portrait to ancient Japanese silkscreens. A highlight is also the building itself: from the Lightbox Gallery on the fifth floor, you can see the downtown skyline on a clear day.

Boston has struggled to shake off its reputation as a stodgy place, but some artists are doing their best to create a welcoming, lively art scene. One of the recent initiatives in that direction is an urban park called Underground at Ink Block, which took one of the least-desirable spaces in the city—an interchange between the I-90 and I-93 interstates—into an 8-acre (3.2-hectare) space filled with commissioned murals, walking paths, and fitness classes. The goal is to feature work from Boston’s talented rising artists, and the paintings change yearly, hoping that new generations in the city will be supported in artistic endeavors.