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.

Knights in armor and sublime views of the everyday by an underrated painter Vija Celmins highlight The Met’s line-up of shows.

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. 

At the new MoMA, everything’s changed, especially its roster of exhibitions.

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.

Don't-miss works by art-world icons Jean-Michel Basquiat and Robert Mapplethorpe are two of the current offerings at the Guggenheim.

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.

Among other shows, the Whitney Museum stirs things up with piquant observations on male privilege by artist Rachel Harrison.

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.

Mod fashion pioneer Pierre Cardin and global street art sensation JR headline the Brooklyn Museum’s current slate of exhibits.

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

The Jewish Museum’s latest exhibitions includes a look at Edith Halpert, a key champion of 20th-century American art.

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.

Conceptualist pioneer Hans Haacke explores the institutional machinations behind the art world in this revealing retrospective.

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 hosting a rare East Coast appearance of Manet masterpieces from L.A.’s Norton Simon Museum.

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.

Check out these exquisite portrait studies by Gilded-Age New York’s go-to artist, John Singer Sargent

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.

Revisit the tumultuous Weimar era in this look back at German Expressionist painter Ludwig Kirchner.

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.

See Rube Goldberg’s original drawings for his famed cartoon machines, which poked fun at life in Industrial-Age America. 

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

RECOMMENDED: 50 best New York attractions Other archives may offer broader perspectives on city history, but we love the Transit Museum because it goes deep into one essential element of New York life: the public transit system. Opened in 1976 in a former IND subway station, the museum displays historic artifacts—including a collection of vintage train cars spanning the 20th century—as well as more timely pieces, such as works from the MTA’s Arts for Transit program. We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention Sadie, the fluffy gray cat who controls the space’s rodent population; look for her on the lower-level subway platform, where she’s often found snoozing in an old-timey car.

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.

Everything you need to know about visiting the National September 11 Memorial & Museum (911 Greenwich St, NY 10006). 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. The trees surrounding the area add to the mood of somber, tranquil reflection: Each one was selected from a 500-mile radius of the World Trade Center site, with others brought in from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Washington, D.C., the other places directly affected on 9/11. While the memorial is impressive on its own, the museum provides a complete picture of the courage and compassion demonstrated locally, nationally and internationally after the attacks, and it’s interspersed with pieces of the towers and other debris recovered by those who risked their own lives to save others. While you should spend an hour or two taking it all in, here are three especially memorable highlights. See an emotional monumentLocated between the footprints of the two former towers, the most striking thing about Mem

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 Hispanic Society boasts the largest assemblage of Spanish art and manuscripts outside Spain. Goya’s masterful Duchess of Alba greets you as you enter, while several haunting El Greco portraits can be found on the second floor. The collection is dominated by religious artifacts, including 16th-century tombs from the monastery of San Francisco in Cuéllar, Spain. Also on display are decorative art objects and thousands of black-and-white photographs that document life in Spain and Latin America from the mid 19th century to the present. In May 2010, one of the highlights of the collection—Valencian painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida’s Vision of Spain, comprising 14 monumetal oils commissioned by the Society in 1911—returned to a renovated gallery after a three-year tour of Spain.

There’s no shortage of tall, impressive skyscrapers in Gotham: the Flatiron Building, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Woolworth Building, Rockefeller Center and One World Observatory are just a few of the massive structures recognizable the world over. At this Battery Park museum exhibit, explore the design, technology, real investments and construction techniques that make these towering beauties possible in our vertical metropolis.

The American Museum of Natural History's Rose Center was founded in 2000. It is home to the Hayden Planetarium, daily Space Shows and an IMAX auditorium.

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.

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

Checking out the best museum exhibitions NYC has to offer is one of the best things to do on a rainy day

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