We are now one-third of the way through 2026 and already it is proving to be a year of new institutions in the expanding art world, where reimagined or newly established spaces are offering fresh frames through which to view the entanglement of art, design, science, and technology that has long been an editorial focus of Right Click Save.

The existence of new institutions such as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Arts and Humanities in Oxford—whose public culture program, rich in AI art, opens on April 25, 2026—offer new opportunities for cross-pollination between artists and academics. The hardware at the Schwarzman Centre, which incorporates an immersive audio set-up in its “Black Box” and a concave screen in its “White Box”, do full justice to the complexity and richness of Refik Anadol’s high fidelity aesthetics. It promises to be a space where speculative and emergent art practices fostered by other outstanding institutions such as Goldsmiths, Somerset House Studios, and the School of Digital Arts in Manchester, can meet the archival richness and humanities scholarship of Oxford University.

The long-term societal value of such physical and intellectual architecture lies in uniting artists, scholars, and critically engaged publics in shedding light on the global, indeed existential, issues of our times. This quest for critical insight remains the duty of universities as well as publications like Right Click Save to distill and disseminate.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

The Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Arts and Humanities, Oxford University, opens its public cultural program this week, after six months of establishing academic collaborations with nine university departments: English; History; Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics; Medieval and Modern Languages; Music; Philosophy; Theology and Religion; the Institute for Ethics in AI; and the Oxford Internet Institute.

The centre, the largest single building project ever undertaken by Oxford University—funded by the single largest gift ever given to the university, from the financier Stephen A. Schwarzman—is holding a free-to-all Open Day on April 25. The day features music, art, and pop-up performances across its multiple performance spaces and public areas, alongside the exhibition of new works by Anna Ridler and Refik Anadol.

The center’s openness to public access and exchange—in a university city where academic process has historically happened behind closed doors—is symbolic of a new kind of institutional porosity. At Right Click Save, we are looking forward to the raft of new cultural institutions opening in 2026 that are premised on the free flow of academic, creative, and physical access; of meeting people where they are.

In January, NODE Foundation launched in Palo Alto, bringing digital art to Silicon Valley and with it technically and curatorially ambitious surveys of the work of Larva Labs and Beeple, central figures in the history of crypto art. In March, the New Museum, New York, reopened with a landmark exhibition of art made with technology, with double its previous exhibition space and permanent homes for the experimental and art-preservation practices of NEW INC and Rhizome. On April 19, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a long-standing champion of experiments in art and technology and of the conservation of digital art, opened its new Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries. This week Refik Anadol Studios announced an opening date for the new DATALAND museum of AI arts in downtown LA.

There is more to come with Canyon, a new home for time-based art and its preservation, with evening opening to match the lifestyle of Manhattan’s Lower East Side; a new UBS Digital Art Museum in Hamburg; and the $1bn Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, now scheduled to open in September 2026.

Both Ridler and Anadol, the first Schwarzman Centre Lau Fellow in Creativity and AI, worked with Oxford academics, and university libraries, in making their new works for the center. Ridler’s A Perfect Language of Images (2026), created in collaboration with Dr William Poole from the Faculty of English at Oxford University, is on show in the Great Hall of the Schwarzman Centre. It represents a three-part tribute to “An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language” (1668), an attempt by the Oxford scholar John Wilkins to classify all knowledge through a system of symbols.

For his new work, Archive Dreaming Large Nature Model — Oxford (2026), Anadol developed his Large Nature Model by working with Professor Stephen Harris from the Department of Biology on Herbarium data, as well as the Institute for Ethics in AI, to explore the ethical implications of generative systems. He is also in discussion with scholars from the Faculty of English around future literary datasets and ethical frameworks.

— Louis Jebb, Managing Editor, Right Click Save