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: Ytu Barrada: Part-Time Abstractionist. What is abstract photography? Only one way to find out.
