Looking for some inspiration for your next museum visit? This month, we're taking a tour of four of the world's most exciting and innovative museum exhibitions with Tim Marlow, Director of the Design Museum, London.

LACMA, Los Angeles
23 April–24 September 2023

F irst up, the Los Angeles County Museum is showcasing 75 works by women artists who were born or live in what can broadly be described as Islamic societies. The art on show is broad in range and inventiveness, ideologically engaged, and bears witness to rapidly shifting political developments and often accelerated social transformations taking place in lands extending from Africa to Western, Central and Southern Asia, as well as in diasporic communities across the globe.

Women Defining Women In Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond features 42 artists, including familiar names such as Shirin Neshat, Shahzia Sikander, Hayv Kahraman, Shirin Aliabadi, Newsha Tavakolian, and Rania Mater, with works in a variety of media including photography, sculpture and works on paper – all of which are embedded with powerful narratives which speak to both personal and universal concerns. This is an exhibition that clearly seeks to challenge the perception that women artists in Islamic societies are voiceless and invisible.

The Design Museum, London
7 April–30 July 2023

A i Weiwei is many things – artist, filmmaker, activist, writer – but he’s also an architect and a collector, who has long been obsessed by design and the production of the human hand.

Ai Weiwei: Making Sense is the first exhibition to explore Ai Weiwei through the lens of architecture and design and features hundreds of thousands of objects collected by him and displayed in expansive fields on the floor. These are surrounded by a whole range of work including his famous and ongoing series Study of Perspective in which he literally, as well as metaphorically, puts his finger up to major structures of power around the world.

Baltimore Museum of Art
April 5–July 16 2023

T o celebrate the 50th anniversary of the birth of Hip-hop, the Baltimore Museum of Art is holding an exhibition exploring the impact of the genre on contemporary art and material culture.

From its Black and LatinX origins in the Bronx, to its prominence as a global phenomenon, Hip-hop’s influence in the arts has never been fully explored. This show has more than 90 works by some of the most important and increasingly celebrated artists working today, including Derrick Adams, Mark Bradford, Lauren Halsey, Tschabalala Self, Hank Willis Thomas, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others.

The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century presents their work in what is described as a ‘dynamic dialogue’ with fashion and objects, created and made famous by Lil’ Kim, Dapper Dan and Gucci, and the late Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton. One of the claims of the exhibition is that “hip-hop's influence is so significant that it has become the new canon – one to rival western art history” – an idea which increasingly does not seem in exaggeration.

Kunsthaus Zürich
14 April–2 July 2023

S alvador Dalí discovered the work of Alberto Giacometti in 1930 in Paris and immediately believed it to be, in surrealist parlance, “a spark of the marvellous”. Over the next two years, Dalí and Giacometti both imagined surreal places together and drew up plans for gardens and public places.

Giacometti - Dalí: Dream Gardens looks to be an exhibition in which our understanding of two major artists is subtly but significantly changed, in spite of the fact that they ultimately ended up in rather different places – Dalí in LaLa Land and his own dreamworld, and Giacometti in those stripped-back attenuated figures that perfectly summed up the human condition after the existential horrors of WW2.