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Exhibitions on view during the month of July have a unique material charge. A supermarket is remade entirely in felt, a playground takes over the Great Hall of the National Building Museum, AI is treated as both image engine and cultural problem, while modernist architecture in post-independence West Africa is revisited through the buildings that helped shape public life.
Elsewhere, buttons, bar interiors, kinetic light, mountain landscapes, and found materials carry bigger questions about labor, power, and how display can change the way we read everyday forms.
Some of the exhibitions highlighted in earlier radars and listings on our dedicated events guide remain on view, giving designboom readers more time to encounter them around the globe.
Architects Of Liberation: Modernism In Western Africa
MoMA’s Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa looks at modern architecture as part of a broader political and cultural shift, tracing how newly independent nations used buildings to imagine public life beyond colonial rule.
Spanning work across Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Togo, the exhibition brings together drawings, models, archival photographs, new films, and commissioned images to revisit a period of intense architectural production, with particular attention to the first generation of trained African architects and the civic spaces, schools, housing, and cityscapes they helped shape.
name: Architects Of Liberation: Modernism In Western Africa
museum: MoMA
location: New York, USA
dates: July 5th — January 2nd, 2026
Centre International du Commerce Extérieur du Sénégal (CICES), Dakar, Senegal. 1971–74. Jean-François Lamoureux (b. 1943) and Jean Louis Marin (b. 1943). 1974 | image by Michel Fegyveres
Lucy Sparrow: The Beginning of Convenience
At the Momentary, Lucy Sparrow turns the supermarket into a full-scale felt archive of late twentieth-century convenience culture. The Beginning of Convenience recreates a 1980s and 1990s Walmart-inspired grocery store through more than 20,000 hand-sewn replicas, from frozen dinners to beauty products.
Sparrow uses softness and humor to look at how domestic routines, consumer habits, and ideas of efficiency were packaged for everyday life. The exhibition also brings viewers into Sparrow’s working process through a replica of her Felt Cave studio and a documentary following the making of the show.
name: Lucy Sparrow: The Beginning of Convenience
artist: Lucy Sparrow
museum: The Momentary at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
location: Arkansas, USA
dates: July 18th, 2026 — July 11th, 2027
plush bananas for The Beginning of Convenience | image courtesy Lucy Sparrow
The Playground
Inside the National Building Museum’s Great Hall, Snarkitecture turns the playground into an architectural experiment at the scale of a public interior. The Playground brings familiar elements of parks and play spaces indoors, using nine interactive zones to explore movement, construction, and shared space through materials such as plywood and scaffolding.
Following the studio’s earlier installations The Beach and Fun House, the project treats play as a design tool, asking how built environments can invite people to climb, gather, rest, and move through space together.
name: The Playground
architects: Snarkitecture
museum: National Building Museum
location: Washington DC, USA
dates: July 3rd — August 3rd, 2026
Snarkitecture, The Playground | visualization courtesy National Building Museum
Tomás Saraceno. Ancestral Futures
Air, webs, and the politics of extraction come together in Tomás Saraceno’s Ancestral Futures at Haus der Kunst, where the artist’s long-running research into Aerocene and Arachnophilia expands into a new collaboration with Indigenous communities from Red Atacama and Las Salinas Grandes in northern Argentina.
Through air-fueled sculptures, multi-species habitats, and spatial environments, the exhibition connects fragile ecological systems with the social pressures behind the global energy transition, asking how architecture, art, and science might support different ways of living with the worlds around us.
name: Tomás Saraceno. Ancestral Futures
artist: Tomás Saraceno
museum: Haus Der Kunst
location: Munich, Germany
dates: July 17th, 2026 — February 7th, 2027
Tomás Saraceno, The Sanctuary of Water, 2026 | image © Studio Tomás Saraceno
At the Petersen Automotive Museum in LA, Joshua Vides has turned a gallery of cars into a walk-in black-and-white drawing.
The Los Angeles-based artist’s exhibition, Flat Out: The Art of Joshua Vides, takes over the Armand Hammer Foundation Gallery with five hand-painted vehicles, tire stacks, gas pumps, wall graphics, and oversized garage signage, all rendered in his crisp monochrome line-work.
The space reads at first like an auto body shop stripped of color. Familiar objects of car culture are still there, but Vides flattens them into something closer to a full-scale sketch, using black lines to trace seams, shadows, panels, and edges across every surface.
name: Flat Out: The Art of Joshua Vides
artist: Joshua Vides
museum: Petersen Automotive Museum
location: Los Angeles, USA
dates: June 20th, 2026 — July 5th, 2027
Joshua Vides, Flat Out: The Art of Joshua Vides, installation view | image © Petersen Automotive Museum
Ai Weiwei: Button Up!
Buttons become a measure of labor, empire, and political memory in Ai Weiwei’s Button Up! at Factory International, where the artist turns an everyday fastening into a monumental material record.
Centered on a vast new installation made from thousands of buttons sourced from a defunct British manufacturer, the exhibition looks across two centuries of global history through the linked forces of industry, colonialism, craft, and control.
Alongside large-scale works in Lego, film, sculpture, and installation, Ai uses repetition and accumulation to make systems of power feel both intimate and physically overwhelming.
name: Ai Weiwei: Button Up!
artist: Ai Weiwei
museum: Factory International
location: Manchester, UK
dates: July 2nd — September 6th, 2026