Black Gold Museum

The Black Gold Museum in Riyadh showcases over 350 artworks from more than 170 artists worldwide, examining oil’s transformative effect on societies through modern and contemporary art.

Planning your visit

The Black Gold Museum at KAPSARC in Riyadh takes an unusual position for a museum in an oil state: it examines what oil has done to societies through art rather than through industry. Over 350 works by more than 170 artists worldwide address extraction, wealth, labour, environment, geopolitics and the cultural transformation that hydrocarbons produced — a critical and international body of work, in the country that has been most defined by the resource.

The setting is part of the interest. KAPSARC, the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center, was designed by Zaha Hadid as a cluster of interlocking honeycomb cells, and it is among the more significant contemporary buildings in Saudi Arabia.

The museum is one element of Saudi Arabia's broader cultural opening, and visiting it offers a view of how the kingdom is choosing to narrate its own foundation to itself and to visitors.

Bookable options include entry tickets with tours from Riyadh, and architectural and cultural tours of the KAPSARC campus that treat the Hadid buildings as the subject alongside the museum. Current availability is listed below.