The best museums in NYC

Opened in 1880 and situated on Central Park, this iconic New York institution contains 5,000 years of art—from prehistory to the latest in contemporary works—under one roof. Its unparalleled collection comprises more that two million objects that include Old Master paintings, the Ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur and the museum’s famed period rooms.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art took over the Whitney’s former Marcel Breuer-designed home on Madison Avenue after the latter decamped to Mepa in 2015. Since then, The Met Breuer, as it was renamed, has become the Met’s primary showcase for Modern and Contemporary Art.

Frank Lloyd Wright broke the mold on museum design when he completed his building for the Guggenheim in 1959. Since then, millions of visitors have come to the Gugg to gawk at its spiraling rotunda, but they stay for its daring art shows and its collection, which includes Peggy Guggenheim’s trove of Cubist, Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist works, as well as the largest collection of Kandinskys in the United States.

With its mind-boggling holdings of artifacts and specimens from around the globe, the American Museum of Natural History, founded in 1869, tells nothing less than the story of creation, from the Big Bang to the present. Its dazzling highlights include the 94-feet long blue whale in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life and the Hayden Planetarium directed by famed astrophysicist and media personality, Neil degrasse Tyson.

The third largest museum in the Five Boroughs, the Brooklyn Museum follows the encyclopedic template of the Metropolitan Museum with a collection housed in a 1897 Beaux-Art building that includes period rooms, Ancient Egyptian and African Art, and modern and contemporary paintings, sculptures and more.

More than just a museum of modern art, MoMA became the arbitrator of what constitutes modernity when it was founded in 1929, writing the book on 20^th-century art in the bargain. In the 21^st-century, MoMA has re-invented itself, massively expanding to become a global destination equal to the Metropolitan Museum.

Situated in a former public school, MoMA PS1 hosts an international studio program in addition to mounting exhibitions (including career monographs) of cutting-edge artists. Affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art since 1999, MoMA PS1 is also known for its summer series of outdoor parties called “Warm Up.”

Taking its name from the New School, where it was founded in 1977, the New Museum has grown from a single gallery space to a global showcase of cutting-edge art. In 2007, it moved into a purpose-built, seven-story building on the Bowery, designed by the cutting-edge Tokyo architectural firm SANAA.

In 2015, the Whitney Museum finally slammed the door on its status as the also-ran of major NYC museums by moving into a gleaming new building designed by world-class starchitect Renzo Piano. Standing at the foot of the High Line along Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District, the 63,000 square facility boasts three outdoor sculpture spaces providing views of the Hudson and surrounding neighborhood.

Located in Astoria, Queens, the Museum of the Moving Image presents exhibitions and screenings that relay the history and cultural impact of movies, television and digital media. In addition to a state-of-the-art 267-seat cinema, the museum features ongoing installations such as “Behind the Screen,” which examines the filmmaking process.

Besides shining a spotlight on neighborhood artists as well as on Africa-American, Asian and Latino artist from the 20th- and 21st-centuries, this multicultural museum founded in 1971 has the virtue being free.

After more than 40 years in midtown, the International Center of Photography moved in 2017 to expanded quarters on the Bowery, though it won’t be there long: In 2019, it’s expected to relocate once again to an even bigger space in the nearby Essex Crossing development project.

The Museum of Arts & Design is housed in the former “Lollipop Building,” a baroque modernist structure that was considered one of the ugliest buildings in NYC. After a 1998 renovation totaling $90 million, MAD moved in and began to mount lively exhibitions dedicated to the latest in contemporary art and design.

A battle-hardened veteran World War II, the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid at Pier 86 has been repurposed as a floating museum since 1982. With a collection of military aircraft crowding its flight deck, the Intrepid also features the space shuttle Enterprise and a British Airways Concorde.

Housed in the former Gilded-Age mansion of Henry Clay Frick, The Frick maintains a collection of Old Master paintings (including works by Rembrandt, Holbein and Vermeer) on par with the Met’s. The Frick’s holdings also include paintings by Whistler and Renoir as well as furniture and other examples of the decorative arts.

The biggest attraction at the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows Corona Park is undoubtedly The Panorama of the City of New York, an exacting 9,335-square-foot scale model of the five boroughs created for the 1964 World’s Fair. In fairness, though, there’s a lot of other great things to see, especially since the museum doubled its size during a 2013 expansion.

Sure, MoSex is dedicated to elevating porn and erotica to institutional status, but not every exhibit there is presented just for titillation’s sake. Its exhibitions have included serious explorations of such issues as gender and the impact of new technologies on human sexual behavior.

One of two Smithsonian museums in NYC, the Cooper Hewitt—which, like the nearby Frick is housed in a sumptuous former mansion—is dedicated to the field of design, housing a collection of objects that span 3,000 years. Among the ongoing exhibits is the Immersion Room, which allows visitors to interact with digital projections of wallpaper.

Dedicated to Hispanic artists in the U.S and Latin America, this museum located in Spanish Harlem (a.k.a. El Barrio) holds a 6,500-piece permanent collection that ranges from pre-Colombian artifacts to contemporary installations.

In addition to a superb collection of Judaica, The Jewish Museum also mounts important exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. Housed in the 1908 Warburg Mansion, the museum maintains a collection of more than 28,000 works of art, artifacts and media installations

As its name suggests, the American Folk Art Museum celebrates traditional craft-based works, but more than that, it has been instrumental in promoting the work of outsider, visionary and other self-taught artists.

Founded in 1804, the New-York Historical Society is NYC’s oldest museum, and is dedicated to the history of Gotham and its central place in American life, politics and culture. Its collection and library contains more than 1.6 million items including an outstanding cache of Hudson River School paintings, as well as James Audubon's preparatory watercolors for his seminal study, The Birds of America.

Once the private library of J. Pierpont Morgan, the Morgan Museum was gifted to the city by the Gilded-Age financier along with his collection of artworks and rare books—holdings that include drawings by Michelangelo and three Gutenberg Bibles. There’s also a first edition of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that’s put on display every Chirstmas.

Some of the most exciting today art is being created by young African-Americans and the Studio Museum is the place where many of them received their initial exposure. Opened in 1968 as the first black fine-arts museum in the country, the Studio Museum is undergoing a major expansion with plans to move into a new David Adjaye-designed building by 2021.

Devoted entirely to late-19th- and early-20th-century German and Austrian fine and decorative arts, this elegant addition to the city’s museum scene has the largest concentration of works by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele outside Vienna, including Klimt’s masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I.

Opened in 2004, this six-story museum in Chelsea houses Donald and Shelley Rubin’s impressive collection of Himalayan art and artifacts. It also mounts large-scale temporary exhibitions that have included offerings by contemporary artists.

The other branch of the Smithsonian Institution in NYC along with the Cooper Hewitt, the NMAI displays its collection around the grand rotunda of the 1907 Custom House at 1 Bowling Green. In total, the museum contains some 825,000 items from 1,200 indigenous cultures covering 12,000 years of Native American history.

The place to explore the NYC’s past, present and future, the Museum of the City of New York on Fifth Avenue at 104^th Street takes visitors on a tour of the city’s 400-year history through rotating exhibitions and its extensive collection of vintage photographs, costumes, textiles, theater memorabilia, furniture, decorative arts and more.

The galleries at the Asia Society host major exhibitions showcasing art—both historical and contemporary—from Asia, the Philippines and the Indian subcontinent.

Opened as a foundation to promote LGBT artists by Charles Leslie and his late partner, Fritz Lohman, this Soho institution was granted museum status by New York State in 2011. Its program includes solo shows, as well as group shows organized around important LGBT themes such as identity, gender and AIDS.

Looking for which of NYC's best museums are open late? We’ve got all the information here.

From uptown to downtown and Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens, we’ve got all the free museum days in New York City

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Thanks to all the free museums in NYC, we’re convinced you can spend a day in New York without spending any money