Summer 2025 Exhibitions

Step into the Gardner Museum’s Hostetter Gallery and be transported to an extraordinary, yet familiar, space of wonder with Ming Fay: Edge of the Garden, challenging our conception of gardens as natural spaces. In the Fenway Gallery, visitors will be able to dig into the roots of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s cross-pollination of art and horticulture through an exhibition of archival materials and paintings in Flowers for Isabella. Above our own gardens, Yu-Wen Wu, an Artist-in-Residence at the Gardner Museum, reflects on the vulnerability of the environment and the fleeting beauty of flowers by transforming the Museum’s public art Façade with Yu-Wen Wu: Reigning Beauty, 2025.

Complementing these garden-centered exhibitions, Small Conversation, a sound piece by Lee Mingwei mimicking crickets, cicadas, and frogs, will be featured in the Museum’s Courtyard.

Denman Waldo Ross, (American, 1853 – 1935), Peonies, about 1919. Oil on canvas board. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Ming Fay (American, 1942 – 2025), Close Up of Itchy Ball. The Estate of Ming Fay

Yu-Wen Wu, Reigning Beauty, 2025 [rendering] ©Yu-Wen Wu. Photo: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
 

Ming Fay: Edge of the Garden and Yu-Wen Wu: Reigning Beauty, 2025 are supported in part by Barbara and Amos Hostetter, Amy and David Abrams, the Barr Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, Wagner Foundation, the Barbara Lee Program Fund, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, Fredericka and Howard Stevenson, and Yuchun and Agustina Lee. 

Flowers for Isabella is supported in part by Barbara and Amos Hostetter, Amy and David Abrams, the Barr Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, Wagner Foundation, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, Fredericka and Howard Stevenson, Yuchun and Agustina Lee, and by an endowment grant from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

Yu-Wen Wu: Reigning Beauty, 2025, is featured as part of the Boston Public Art Triennial 2025. 

The Artist-in-Residence program is supported in part by Lizbeth and George Krupp and directed by Pieranna Cavalchini, Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art. Funding is also provided for site-specific installations of new work on the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade on Evans Way. 

The Museum receives operating support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which is supported by the state of Massachusetts and the National Endowment for the Arts.