The world’s longest-running open-submission art exhibition returns to the Royal Academy’s Main Galleries for its 259th edition, three weeks longer than usual.
The Royal Academy of Arts opens its 259th Summer Exhibition in the Main Galleries at Burlington House, Mayfair, from Tuesday 18 May to Sunday 15 August 2027. The run is three weeks longer than a usual year.
Held every year without interruption since 1769, it is the world’s longest-running open-submission art exhibition. Anyone may enter work, so pieces by first-time exhibitors hang beside work by artists of global renown, many of them Royal Academicians. The hang runs across painting, drawing, prints, sculpture, film and architecture.
Much of the work is for sale. The proceeds support the exhibiting artists and the Academy, a charity that receives no government funding.
Each edition has its own coordinator and a committee of Academicians, so no two hangs are alike. The 2025 edition, coordinated by the architect Farshid Moussavi RA, chose more than 1,700 works under the theme of Dialogues.
Friends of the RA have three preview days before the exhibition opens to the public. It falls in the year the Academy reopens Burlington Gardens with a new double-height gallery by David Chipperfield Architects, built to house the permanent collection.