The 37 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.

Don’t miss the Roof Garden Commission by  Alex Da Corte "As Long as the Sun Lasts," which balances Big Bird on one side and a modern mobile on the other, and  the retrospective of Alice Neel, "People Come First."

After three years of planning and construction—including a four-month closure this summer—the Museum of Modern Art has finally thrown open its doors to a shiny, reconfigured self, offering the public more MoMA to love (or at least to ponder) than ever. 

Learn about the relationship between architecture and the spaces of African diaspora communities with "Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America" and see "Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury," which features works by Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock, Alfredo Volpi and others.

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.

Get a glimpse of abstract works by avant-garde painters and "Off the Record," which questions and challenges dominant narratives in mainstream documentation.

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.

Catch 70 artworks by Ethiopian artist Julie Mehretu.

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

See striking photographs by John Edmonds as well as the first major survey of KAWS's gigantic works.

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.

"Scenes from the Collection" are selected works in thematic scenes that weave together centuries of art and Judaica. And you can't miss "Modern Look: Photography and the American Magazine."

The Fotografiska gallery in Stockholm, Sweden has opened a New York Branch in the heart of the Flatiron District that features three floors of exhibition space as well as Verōnika, a dining room and bar operated by award-winning Philadelphia restaurateur, Stephen Starr. Named for the patron saint of photographers, Verōnika is being helmed by executive chef Robert Aikens and will offer a menu inspired by cuisines from Northern France, Austria and Eastern Europe, all served up with a side order of seasonality and sustainability. The gallery itself mounts temporary exhibits featuring photos from “grand masters and emerging talent” that range from “easily accessible to hardcore conceptual.” 

Don't miss the solo exhibitions for Hassan Hajjaj, Pixy Liao, Miles Aldridge, Adrienne Raquel and Tom of Finland Foundation.

New York City’s only preserved 19th-century family home is an elegant, late Federal-Greek Revival house stocked with the same furnishings and decorations that filled its rooms when it was inhabited by hardware tycoon Seabury Treadwell and his descendants from 1835 to 1933.

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.

Check out "Grief and Grievance," which explores the history of racist violence all throughout the United States.

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 Frick is currently open on Madison Avenue at Frick Madison—the former Whitney and Met Breuer building.

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.

A new exhibition centers on the work of David Hockney with a special focus on his drawings and portraits on paper.

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.

The Neue Galerie is currently closed but is offering digital programs through its website.

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.

Works by Kenneth Tam reimagine spaces and social customs for male bodies in order to reveal vulnerable moments that can exist among men and Sydney Shen creates sculptures and environments that commingle historical and contemporary symbols in "Strange But True."

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.

Learn about the nature of color, take a deep dive into everything we know about the T. Rex and take in the "Worlds Beyond Earth,” the new space show at the Hayden Planetarium. 

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.”

Check out Niki de Saint Phalle's "Nanas" and other amazing works.

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.

Find your perfect New York City attraction.

Don't miss the Jim Henson or "Envisioning 2001:Stanley Kubrick's Space Odyssey" exhibits.

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

Navigate "Born in Flames: Feminist Futures" a collection of imagined world-scapes projected by fourteen contemporary artists.

You know the saying: “A picture is worth a thousand words,” and at the International Center of Photography Museum is where you should go to immerse yourself in the world visual storytelling. The institution caters to a wide audience—not merely shutterbugs and Instagram-addicts. The center does offer stellar academic programming as well as a library containing back issues of photography magazines and thousands of biographical files. As of 2020, ICP is in a new space in Lower East Side's Essex Crossing. The 40,000 square foot grounds is home to educational programs for people of all ages, and media labs and shooting studios.

"But Still, It Turns" features recent photography from around the world.

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.

See Beth Lipman’s transformations of glass, metal and clay.

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.

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.

On now, "Face Values: Exploring Artificial Intelligence" is an immersive installation that explores the pervasive but often hidden role of facial-detection technology in contemporary society. 

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.

A large-scale national survey of Latinx contemporary art,  "Estamos Bien – La Trienal 20/21," is on now. 

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.

See a new survey covering six decades of collecting self-taught art and the fun "American Weathervanes: The Art of the Winds" exhibit starting June 23.

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.

Check out a new exhibition on Bob Hope and World War II and get a close-up look at the Waldorf-Astoria's massive lobby clock.

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.

Studio Museum is temporarily closed but their initiative in Harlem is presenting works at sites throughout the neighborhood.

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.

Get an intro course on Himalayan Art this spring with "Gateway to Himalayan Art," and "Awaken"  37 artworks from the 7th to the 21st century that spur on an awareness that everything is interconnected.

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.

National Museum of the American Indian is temporarily closed but you can tour its online exhibitions.

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.

The Asia Society Triennial is currently on view through June 17 at the museum.

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.

Dissolution explores the role of queerness at the intersection of wider social relations and "Show and Tell" is the first comprehensive retrospective of photographer Laura Aguilar. 

MOCA occupies an airy former machine shop designed by prominent Chinese-American architect Maya Lin. In an interior loosely inspired by a traditional Chinese house, with rooms radiating off a central courtyard and areas defined by screens, MOCA’s core exhibit traces the development of Chinese communities on these shores from the 17th century to the present through objects, images and video. Mixed-media displays cover the development of industries such as laundries and restaurants in New York, Chinese stereotypes in pop culture, and the suspicion and humiliation Chinese-Americans endured during World War II and the McCarthy era. A mocked-up Chinese general store evokes the multipurpose spaces that served as vital community lifelines for men severed from their families under the 1882 Exclusion Act, which restricted immigration. A gallery is devoted to temporary exhibitions, such as the work of contemporary Chinese-American artists.

MOCA remains temporarily closed but is continuing to offer virtual programs.

As it names suggests, The Drawing Center is devoted to exhibiting and promoting works on paper, both historical and contemporary. A Soho stalwart since its founding in 1977, The Drawing Center is as much a museum as it is a gallery (there’s a five dollar admission), but its wooden floors and cast-iron columns are reminiscent of Soho’s glory days as a gallery district.

David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968–1979 brings together fascinating works where the artist used his body as a drawing tool and printing plate. It is open by appointment.

When sculptor (and landscape architect, and theatrical-set and furniture designer) Isamu Noguchi opened his Queens museum in 1985, he was the first living artist in the U.S. to establish such an institution. It occupies a former photo-engraving plant across the street from the studio he had occupied since the 1960s to be closer to stone and metal suppliers along Vernon Boulevard. The entire building was designed by Noguchi to be a meditative oasis amid its gritty, industrial setting. Twelve galleries and a garden are populated with Noguchi’s sculptures; also on display are drawn, painted and collaged studies, architectural models, and stage and furniture designs.

"Koho Yamamoto: Under a Dark Moon" is a one-gallery installation of ten untitled dark abstract paintings on paper.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a tourist, commuter or longtime NYC resident: No visit to lower Manhattan is complete without paying your respects at the September 11 Memorial & Museum. Both the outdoor memorial and accompanying museum are solemn, moving tributes to the nearly 3,000 victims who lost their lives during the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and February 26, 1993. Designed by Israeli architect Michael Arad, two of North America’s largest man-made waterfalls mark the footprint of each tower, framing the perimeter and cascading into reflecting pools almost an acre wide. 

You can visit the main memorial exhibition in person at the museum. Other smaller exhibitions, including one delving into the hunt for Bin Laden, can be viewed online.

Set in a lovely park overlooking the Hudson River, the Cloisters houses the Met’s medieval art and architecture collections. A path winds through the peaceful grounds to a castle that seems to have survived from the Middle Ages. (It was built less than 100 years ago, using material from five medieval French cloisters.) Be sure to check out the famous Unicorn Tapestries, the 12th-century Fuentidueña Chapel and the Annunciation Triptych by Robert Campin.

The Cloisters are currently open with timed tickets and limited hours.

The Fashion Institute of Technology owns one of the largest and most impressive collections of clothing, textiles and accessories in the world, including some 50,000 costumes and fabrics dating from the 5th century to the present. Overseen by fashion historian Valerie Steele, the museum showcases a selection from the permanent collection, as well as temporary exhibitions focusing on individual designers or the role fashion plays in society.

The Museum at FIT is currently operating remotely with online exhibitions, like the "Roaring 20s and Swinging 60s" showing.

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