Yokohama Museum of Art

Yokohama Museum of Art is open and operating normally. After closing in March 2021 for a large-scale renewal project, the museum reopened in phases starting March 15, 2024, and resumed full operation on February 8, 2025. If you remember reading that the museum was closed, or that it was reopening soon, that information is now out of date: as of this writing the museum is fully open, with every gallery, the museum shop, the cafe, the art library, and the children's atelier back in service.

One of Japan's largest art museums by collection size, Yokohama Museum of Art holds more than 15,000 works (as of March 2025) spanning modern and contemporary painting, photography, sculpture, prints, and crafts from the late nineteenth century to the present. It sits inside Minato Mirai, Yokohama's waterfront redevelopment district, immediately next to Yokohama Landmark Tower, making it one of the easiest major cultural stops to add to a day already built around the district's skyline and harbor views.

The museum opened to the public on November 3, 1989, designed by Kenzo Tange, one of the most influential architects in modern Japanese history. Tange's design gives the building a symmetrical, roughly 180-meter-wide facade fronted by eight-story semicylindrical columns, opening into a 20-meter-high Grand Gallery that remains the museum's signature architectural space. The recent renewal project, led by Inui Architects, updated the building's aging facilities and accessibility while deliberately preserving Tange's original design, so the exterior and the Grand Gallery still look and feel much as they did when the museum first opened.

The renewal unfolded in stages rather than all at once. The museum's initial partial reopening on March 15, 2024, coincided with the 8th Yokohama Triennale, for which it served as the main venue. Additional spaces, including more of the free-access galleries, the citizens' atelier, the children's atelier, the art library, the lecture hall, the museum shop, and the cafe, reopened on November 1, 2024. The full facility, ticketed galleries included, has been back in complete operation since February 8, 2025.

A genuinely useful feature of a visit here is that part of the museum costs nothing to see. The Jiyu Area, sometimes rendered as the Free Area, covers the Grand Gallery entrance atrium, the corridor in front of the third-floor galleries, the foyer, Gallery 9, and the museum's outdoor spaces, all open to anyone without a ticket. For travelers short on time or budget, stepping into the Grand Gallery alone is worth the short detour from Landmark Tower or Mark Is Minatomirai, even without paying for the exhibitions beyond it.

Beyond the free area, the ticketed Collection Exhibition draws on the museum's own holdings, rotating through Western-style painting, Japanese nihonga painting, prints, photography and moving image, sculpture, and crafts. The museum's photography collection is a particular strength, reflecting Yokohama's history as an early center of photography in Japan following the port's opening to international trade in the nineteenth century.

Separately, the museum runs Special Exhibitions, major loan shows that change several times a year and carry their own admission, priced per exhibition rather than a fixed figure. Because these shows rotate frequently and were already changing during the research for this page, we deliberately do not name a specific current exhibition here. Check the museum's own exhibition listings at yokohama.art.museum before you visit to see what is actually on display.

The museum is also a recurring main venue for the Yokohama Triennale, one of Japan's major international contemporary art exhibitions, held roughly every three years. The 8th Triennale in 2024 doubled as the museum's own partial reopening, and the 9th edition is scheduled for 2027. If your trip lines up with a Triennale year, this museum is likely to be busier and more exhibition-packed than usual.

Facilities support a longer visit: a museum shop stocking around 1,000 items, a cafe with a menu that changes with the exhibitions, an extensive art library, and a children's atelier with a playroom, a craft room, a light-and-sound studio, and its own courtyard. Families can use the children's atelier and the free Jiyu Area even on a visit where nobody buys a ticket to the galleries.

Accessibility is a genuine strength here: the museum publishes step-free routes from all three nearby stations, Minatomirai Station, JR Sakuragicho Station, and the Yokohama Municipal Subway's Sakuragicho Station, each routed entirely through elevators with no stairs or escalators required. Set against Minato Mirai's other major draws, a full visit here is a real 2-4 hour time commitment, more than Cup Noodles Museum's hands-on activity or a stop at Red Brick Warehouse, so it suits art-interested travelers, couples wanting a quieter stop, and rainy-day planners more than a family trying to pack in every nearby attraction in one afternoon. The free Jiyu Area gives everyone else a genuine way to sample the building without that time cost.