The Best Art Exhibits to See in New York City This Summer

The best exhibits in New York City right now really run the gamut. Whether your interests lie in history, art, or science; whether your preferred artistic medium is photography or painting; whether you want to stick around Manhattan or venture to an outer-borough: the options are as abundant as they are inspiring and mentally nutritional. As a bonus, air conditioning's omnipresence in our myriad museums supplies a respite from the summer heat and humidity turning the streets of our great city (and your pants) into a swamp extravaganza. Read on for the best of the best.

Read our complete New York City travel guide here.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

As usual, the Met has an embarrassment of riches on display. The sartorially-inclined have until September 2 to rush to Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, the Costume Institute's 2024 exhibition exploring the natural world's depictions in fashion across the past four centuries. For calmer, more focused waters, make your way to The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, an exploration of art and its explosion in new Black cities between the ’20s and ’40s runs through July 28. There are 160 works of photography, painting, sculpture, and film, making this is the first survey of such subject matter in a New York City museum since 1987. There’s also Indian Skies: The Howard Hodgkin Collection of Indian Court Painting on view until June 9, with a very pretty selection of works ranging from the 16th to 19th centuries.

Neue Galerie

Starting June 6, this small-but-mighty museum across the street and a few blocks up from the Met launches PAULA MODERSOHN-BECKER: ICH BIN ICH / I AM ME with paintings and drawings from the significant German Expressionist going up on the mansion's third floor. Modersohn-Becker has never before been the subject of a museum retrospective stateside, and is often overlooked due to the brevity of her career (she died at 31.) Give her her due this summer.

International Center of Photography

Two exhibitions are on view at the Lower East Side's International Center of Photography this summer. The first is Shared Spaces—ICP having a photography school on the premises, this is the first exhibition displaying the work of recent graduates to run for a full cycle. More than 70 students from 25 countries feature, with the press release flagging participating residents of Argentina, Belarus, Yemen, and Thailand. Another ICP graduate, meanwhile, fronts an exhibition of her own: Yto Barrada: Part-Time Abstractionist. What is abstract photography? Only one way to find out.

The Jewish Museum

Things are getting colorful at The Jewish Museum with Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration, featuring works in painting, sculpture, and installation by seven up-and-coming artists. The concern here is the figure, and in particular its pliancy and ever-changing nature. No two bodies look alike, as these multiethnic and multiracial artists can attest. It's weird and quite fun.

New York Historical Society Museum & Library

This city changes relentlessly—Brooklyn is barely recognizable today as the playground for Girls just over a decade ago. To give us a glimpse of New York's churning eras, the New York Historical Society has Lost New York through September 29 highlighting various losses and gains the Big Apple has enjoyed since its establishment. There are historical artifacts and immersive sensory experiences, but the most important tool here is your imagination.

Intrepid Museum

Through September 2, this floating museum on the Hudson (and home of the space shuttle Enterprise!) hosts Apollo: When We Went to the Moon with its definitive history of the Apollo program. There's a people-forward bent that's quite interesting here, with a hard emphasis on the some 400,000 peoples who worked behind the scenes to put Armstrong's boots on the moon, as well as some key historical context outlining the space race with the Soviet Union. Once you've done your learning, there's an exhilarating reward in the three-screen presentation of the launch itself. Plus—you get to touch a chunk of lunar meteorite.

The Tenement Museum

The Tenement Museum has, until now, focused its exhibitions strictly on the former residents of the two Lower East Side structures it occupies. With A Union of Hope: 1869, that changes. Recreated here is the home of Joseph and Rachel Moore, a Black couple that lived in SoHo in the 1860s and ’70s. The cramped two rooms sit on the museum’s top floor, giving a glimpse into the lives of a migrant group heretofore unseen on its premises.

Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum is rife with exciting exhibitions, the starriest among them being Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm featuring over 250 of the Beatle's photographs documenting the skyrocketing fame of himself and bandmates John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr amidst fever-pitch Beatlemania. The collection arrives from its first home at London's National Portrait Gallery and will be on display through August 18. Worth seeing while you're there is Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo (feat. Takashi Murakami), a splendid and complete set of prints from the 16th-Century master depicting Tokyo from vantage point after delightful vantage point. Contemporary artist Takashi Murakami has recreated each of these as paintings, hiding in the largest-scale of them whimsical little characters for the viewer to seek out.

There's also Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, on through July 7. Beatz and Keys, the avid collectors that they are, have loaned the museum pieces by everyone from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Kehinde Wiley. It’s an impactful show, one where you really do feel towered over by the art, and that proves the unimpeachable taste of Beats and Keys. Through the same dates are In the Now: Gender and Nation in Europe, Selections from the Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl Photography Collection featuring photography by fifty European women artists, and Nona Faustine: White Shoes, with several self-portraits of the titular artist standing in some of the city's most recognizable locales (Prospect Park, Wall Street) that are “built upon legacies of enslavement.”

The Morgan Library & Museum

Wonder and whimsy are alive and well in New York thanks to The Morgan's Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature, where the museum's collection of her picture letters pairs nicely with artworks, books, and manuscripts gathered from leading institutions in the United Kingdom. Potter grew up ensconced in English nature, and from a young age sketched the flora and fauna that surrounded her and created fairy tales to match—the exhibitions take you from this inception point through her study of natural sciences and end in a recreation of her Lake District country home complete with a pair of her clogs.

American Museum of Natural History

As New York City continues celebrating 50 years of hip-hop's mainstream breakthrough, the American Museum of Natural History enters the conversation with an unexpected contribution. Ice Cold: An Exhibition of Hip-Hop Jewelry, located in the glorious new Allison and Roberto Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals, displays the metals and gems of everyone from Notorious B.I.G., Slick Rick, and Jay-Z to Nicki Minaj, Erykah Badu, and A$AP Rocky. There's even an accompanying playlist for listening while viewing.

Noguchi Museum

In 2022, the retrospective Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within began a tour marking 100 years since the artist's birth (she died in 2011.) As it lands in Queens through July 28, New Yorkers can explore Takaezu's 70-year career by moving around over 200 pieces of her work—ceramic sculptures, acrylic paintings, and even immersive soundscapes inserting the listener within one of her closed-form sculptures—what would that sound like?

Museum of the Moving Image

It's odd to consider that the internet has been around for long enough that one of its pioneer artists is now of age for a career retrospective. Auriea Harvey: My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard is a wonderfully nebulous, searching survey of the net-artist and sculptor's strange and prescient work. Installed here are interactive, “net-based” interactive pieces alongside video games and augmented-reality sculptures that challenge the viewer to ponder digital media's ability to bring people together while keeping them physically apart. Very far out, and on view through July.

Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler