The school holidays are here and happily there’s no shortage of exhibitions around the world to appeal to children of all ages (and their grown-ups). From a new commission at London Zoo to playful interventions on Rockaway Beach on New York’s Atlantic coast, and a community garden in South Central Los Angeles, artists are offering alternative history lessons, honoring their heroes, and reimagining the world through fables and games. Immersive and interactive, these projects should have kids dragging you to the art show.

Beasties

‘The Ark,’ Powerhouse Arts, New York, to August 30

Taking his cue from Noah’s floating menagerie, the artist Eric Fischl has turned curator for this exhibition, which sees a cavernous former power station in Brooklyn filled with 90 animal sculptures by contemporary artists. The array of animals includes Maurizio Cattelan’s stuffed pigeons, a felled bronze deer by Rosemarie Trockel, and a clay armadillo by Celia Vásquez Yui. First staged last year in Fischl’s art space The Church, Sag Harbor, NY, this iteration boasts 40 new pieces by artists including Rob Pruitt and Nari Ward. Alongside the animals, there’s a mini wooden ark for kids to play in, too. This gathering of beasts is an implicit call to protect their fragile ecosystems.

‘A swallow does not make spring,’ Annette Messager, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris to September 20

A career-spanning exhibition of work by French artist Annette Messager at one of Paris’s more unique institutions, the Museum of Hunting and Nature, takes visitors down the rabbit hole to consider our relationship to animals – and the animal within. Dotted around the museum’s permanent collection of hunting scenes and stuffed trophies are Messager’s own mischievous taxidermies, alongside assemblages of cuddly toys, and drawings in her deceptively childlike style. Structured like a classical fable over 16 rooms, with titles like ‘Theater of Cruelty,’ ‘Child’s Play,' and ‘Domesticated Savagery,’ this show pulls no punches about the natural world, and while little ones will doubtless be drawn to the plushies, it should give older children much to chew on.

Game on

‘Between Tides,’ Beach 67, Rockaway Beach, New York, USA, to September 13

The movie Marty Supreme (2025) recently put ping-pong on the cultural agenda and now a group of six artists are upping the game’s appeal on Rockaway Beach in Queens, NY. The Public Art Fund’s new project, ‘Between Tides,’ a collection of sculptural tables, located between the boardwalk and the shore, with beachgoers invited to BYOP (Bring Your Own Paddle) and rewrite the rules. This isn’t ping-pong as you know it. By a capsized boat, Moko Fukuyama’s table for instance is caught in the suckers of a monster-cephalopod emerging from the sand, while Las Hermanas Iglesias’s contribution is inlaid with percussion instruments drawn from local cultures that create live compositions during play. Ilana Harris-Babou’s table is an obstacle course littered with ceramic versions of beachside flotsam and Amalia Pica’s eight connected tables allow for multiple games at once.

‘Lina Lapelytė: We Make Years Out of Hours,’ Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany, to October 1; ‘Lina Lapelytė: Serendipity Island,’ Tate Modern, London, UK, to August 31

Lithuanian artist Lina Lapelytė is inviting audiences to play with and in her interactive work at two European locations this summer. Her Chanel Commission in Hamburger Bahnhof’s enormous Historic Hall, We Make Years Out of Hours(2026), presents visitors with building blocks on a grand scale. You can add to her fluctuating cityscape of nearly half a million wooden cubes, raising and demolishing as you wish. Meanwhile, the artist has installed further woodwork at London’s Tate Modern for its annual summer UNIQLO Tate Play series. Serendipity Island (2026) is a labyrinth of wooden barriers in the Turbine Hall, where participants make music from sounds and actions as they move through it.

Through a child’s eyes

Carsten Höller: Two,’ UCCA Beijing, China, to January 31, 2027

At UCCA Beijing, contemporary arts social behaviorist Carsten Höller’s ‘Two,’ is an immersive exhibition billed as a ‘laboratory of doubt.' The show is split into near-identical halves, each with its own entrance and color scheme. It features well-known works that riff on childhood fantasies and playthings – a giant mushroom, mirrored carousels rotating visitors at snail’s pace – as well as new site-specific pieces, like a life-size board game involving dancing spotlights. For adults as much as children, Höller’s inventive (and occasionally unnerving) adaptations of everyday items – from playground equipment to timepieces – make us rethink life’s usual rules. 

‘Camille Henrot: Paper Planes,’ Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark, to December 31

Camille Henrot’s exhibition centers the magical thinking of young children but with an emphasis on what might be learnt from them in terms of how to approach current crises. It’s anchored by the artist’s new film In the Veins (2026), which contrasts the painstaking care of threatened wildlife with the daily rituals of childcare. Accompanying this, on a blue floor subdivided by white lines familiar from school gyms or playgrounds, sculptures include giant abaci twisted into animalistic forms and a pack of dogs leashed to the wall in maypole formation.

Your history

Lauren Halsey: sister dreamer, 1810 W. 76th St. Los Angeles, to September 2027

In a former vacant lot in South Central Los Angeles, an arrangement of Egyptian-style columns over 6-meters-tall marks the entrance to a sculpture park with a difference. Inside, rows of gleaming sphinxes line a path to a central pavilion carved with texts and images, while California lilacs and Mexican marigolds scent the air and water features tinkle. This isn’t an ancient temple however, but a living monument to the people and histories of artist Lauren Halsey’s beloved neighborhood. Here, the sphinxes and hieroglyphics honor members of the artist’s family as well as local Black heroes – people like criminal justice reform advocate Susan Burton, who runs a reentry program for incarcerated women, or Robin Daniels, of the community nonprofit Sisters of Watts. In this spirit of empowerment, Halsey’s own nonprofit, Summaeverythang Community Center, is hosting a program of classes at sister dreamer in July and August, from yoga sessions to botany workshops and music technology courses for children.