Summer brings art fun across Houston with lots of contemporary art exhibitions opening. Local artists put on a big show at several galleries this June, but the city also continues to live up to its reputation as a hotspot for international art with shows at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Ismaili Center. Houston gets ready for the World Cup with soccer art and for the United States’ big 250th birthday with art that tells an American story. If that’s not enough, Radio Tave welcomes a trans-dimensional summer art migration.

Ismaili Center Houston’s Art Collection debut (ongoing)
While the Ismaili Center’s magnificent architecture has deservedly garnered international attention, Houston art lovers will want to to journey inside for a stunning and diverse contemporary art collection that’s just recently debuted. Placed throughout the building on every floor, the permanent collection has been organized around seven very human themes, including: community and belonging, environment and sustainability, equity and equality, faith and spirituality, discovery and wonder, quality of life, and pluralism. These pieces come from a diversity of local and international contemporary artists, working in a variety of mediums from traditional paintings to fabric arts and woodwork. Many of the artworks were created specifically for the space.

The Ismaili Center has also opened a dedicated gallery for temporary exhibitions. The inaugural exhibition features two major, interactive projects by Iranian and American interdisciplinary artist, Raheleh Filsoofi. For “Deep Listening,” Filsoofi has transformed a traditional Kermani rug, historically a place of gathering and reflection, into a four-string instrument. Visitors can become participants in making music and community. Exploring some of the same themes, “Imagined Boundaries: A New Vision” features a large cluster of box-like objects. Inside vessel-shaped cutouts, the video faces of members and civil society partners of the Ismaili community across the United States greet visitors to the facility.

"Daybreak," at Laura Rathe Fine Art (through July 12)
Though artists Carly Allen Martin, Sandrine Kern, and Lucrecia Waggoner mostly work in different mediums, this group exhibition showcases a striking commonality — the pieces they create all bring warmth and vitality to any space. Seen together, these pieces seem to capture those fleeting moment of first light. Martin paints canvases with vibrant, energetic brushstrokes. Kern depicts atmospheric waterlily-scapes, and Waggoner creates luminous ceramic vessels that subtly shift with their surroundings.The exhibition considers how these artists use light and joy to expand the landscape into something immersive and luminous.

"Proximity: Constructed Relations" at Spring Street Studios (through September 12)
Artworks can gain new context when put in spacial relationships with each other. This idea becomes the focus of a new group exhibition, curated by Katherine Rhodes Fields, Dean of the Media, Visual, and Performing Arts Center of Excellence at Houston City College. Fields found connections between these very different artworks when interacting with them in a shared studio space.

“Connections surfaced across composition, color, material, and concept, shaping a curatorial approach grounded not in a predetermined theme, but in relationships discovered through sustained looking,” explains Fields. “Rather than presenting each work as a self-contained object, the installation considers how meaning shifts in relation. Forms echo across space, contrasts sharpen perception, and visual conversations emerge between works that might otherwise remain independent.”

“Ink & Image" at Archway Gallery (through July 2)
As part of PrintHouston 2026, the biennial citywide celebration of prints and printmaking, Archway will feature seven Archway Gallery printmakers, along with three acclaimed guest artists, including Liv Johnson, instructor at the Glassell School of Art; Patrick Masterson, master printer and printmaking instructor at Rice University and University of Houston; and Charles Tanner, printmaking artist at Burning Bones Press. The exhibit will highlight the expressive power of the medium and the variety of methods used.

“Erika Blumenfeld: Sky Stone Cycle” at Blaffer Art Museum (through August 1)
See art in action, as award winning Houston based artist, researcher, and writer Erika Blumenfeld begins a residency at two galleries within the Blaffer. As part of her artistic practice, Blumenfeld studies “entanglements” between natural phenomena, ecology, geology, astronomy, and cosmochemistry. For this series she will create new print work that examines how meteors and meteorites can bring the seeds of life to planets. The galleries will also exhibit other Blumenfeld projects, including “Encyclopedia of Trajectories,” in which she re-enacts every meteor event that occurred over a one-year period (5763 total events) as a series of performative drawings in 24-karat gold.

“Phenomenomaly” at Meow Wolf’s Radio Tave (through August 12)
They’re baaaack! Yes, this visual and performance art phenomenon crashes once more through the space/time continuum into our reality. Set in the already trippy visual art experience that is Radio Tave, comes another layer of immersive art that tells a sci-fi story about a group of interplanetary tourists known as the Lil’ Bigg Miss Fitts. All summer long they’ll move through the Radio Tave space, asking visitors for help in triggering an inter dimensional migration of “Flickerwerms.” Small interactions begin to connect as guests move from room to room, eventually drawing a crowd together for a live celebratory performance of local Houston performing artists, the space tourists, and the wondrous dancing Flickerwerms. Each weekend a new Houston artist or group join the celebration, including poet Outspoken Bean; 8-bit Electronic DJ AtariMATT; break dancers, Winners Circle; the Mighty Orq blues band; Texas Dragon, a Chinese lion dance team; and many more.

“Bayou City Stewards: America From Our Perspective” at Houston Museum of African American Culture (through August 29)
Just in time for both Juneteenth and the 250th anniversary of the United States, this exhibition of work from Houston artists, as well as collectors and cultural stewards, celebrates but also confronts ideas of one great American story or history. Through visual artworks, historical artifacts, and storytelling, the exhibition places Black Americans as central architects of the American story.

“No single person holds the entire story; our Bayou City Stewards are living archives,” explains Robert L. Hodge, exhibition curator and interdisciplinary artist. “They embody the power of collective memory and demonstrate how collecting can function as an intentional act of community responsibility. Their collections reflect a shared commitment to place; connecting generations and illustrating the profound impact of Black creativity on this country.”

“The Big Show 2026” at Lawndale Art Center (June 12-August 15)
At this annual show, Lawndale once again celebrates Houston artists, reflecting their commitment to supporting local and regional artists at various stages in their career. As is tradition, this giant group exhibition features new work by artists practicing within a 100-mile radius of Lawndale. This year’s expert juror is Valerie Cassel Oliver, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, who selected 105 works by 93 artists from over 1,000 entries.

“World Cup Soccer Art Show: A Beautiful Game” at Mitochondria Gallery (June 13-July 3)
As Houston welcomes the world to town for the World Cup, even artists have soccer on their minds and on canvases. This group show of artists from across the United States and Africa will showcase art that treats soccer as more than just a game. These works reflect some of the ways soccer shapes communities, fuels identity, and connects people across cultures and generations. The exhibition brings together paintings, sculptures, and mixed media works that illuminate soccer as a global language capable of binding generations, cultures, and distant geographies.

“Hew Locke: Passages" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (June 21-September 13)
“If I wasn’t an artist, I would be a historian,” says acclaimed Guyanese-British contemporary artist Hew Locke, whose work is the focus of this provocative new exhibition, organized by the Yale Center for British Art in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Politics and history certainly meet in the over 40 sculptures, collages, and assemblages featured in the exhibition. From Locke’s sculptural reimagining of commemorative equestrian monuments to charcoal drawings which reinterpret the imperial portraits of Diego Velázquez, these pieces explore the history of colonialism through the lens of contemporary migration and global trade.

“Over the past 30 years, Hew Locke has resolutely broken open deep-rooted conceptions of national identity and examined the visual cultures that they have generated,” says Brittany Webb, MFAH curator of modern and contemporary art. “Wit, passion, beauty and compassion, and deep research inform this work, which directly engages our attention and pushes us to challenge long-held beliefs and reinvent them in thought-provoking ways.”

Photo by Terence Ntsako Maluleke

Mitochondria Gallery presents “A Beautiful Game” (Terence Ntsako Maluleke. Towards Glory. Acrylic on Canvas 116x 100in. 2026).