No place in New York City better melds the prospect of temporary shelter from winter (if winter ever arrives properly) with cultured activity than the museums, where an ever-rotating slate of art, science, and history exhibits ensure that there's always something to see even if the permanent collection is already familiar territory. The welcome through-line this month is a bit of buoyancy with regard subject matter. Ducking into the Guggenheim, you might find yourself warmed by the vibrant, optimistic Parisian abstraction of the current Orphism showcase Harmony and Dissonance. Across the East River, Astoria's Museum of the Moving Image has Recording the Ride: The Rise of Street-Style Skate Videos for your visual delight. Read on for some of the best NYC exhibits.
Read our complete New York City travel guide here. This article has been updated with new information since its original publish date.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
South Korean artist Lee Bul's facade commission Long Tail Halo is on the Met's storied steps for all to enjoy—it's worth walking by even if you don't plan on going in just to see how she's played with the space. If you do want to cross the threshold, Mexican Prints at the Vanguard has over 130 woodcuts, lithographs, and screen prints exploring the strong printmaking tradition across the country. Mandalas: Mapping the Buddhist Art of Tibet opened a week later with an impressive assortment of Himalayan Buddhist painting, sculpture, and more. Architecture lovers will rejoice over Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph that presents a smattering of artifacts from the second-generation Modernist's life and work.
Long Tail Halo on view through May 27, 2025.
Neue Galerie
The Austrian painter Egon Schiele is perhaps most famous for his works that depict human subjects. These oil paintings, many of them self-portraits, represent people as tendinous and squirrelly. The figures often appear emaciated. But Neue has none of this in Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes, which features exactly what it sounds like: natural environments in green and brown, townscapes with greater color. Although people are not the focus, Schiele's energetic style imbues hues of personality nevertheless.
On view through January 13, 2025
The Jewish Museum
Ilit Azoulay: Mere Things, the first stateside solo exhibition of the Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist's large scale photomontages, is the next coming of Azoulay's solo exhibition at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. Originally trained as a photographer, Azoulay has focused on that medium's ability to preserve knowledge. December 5 marks the arrival of the Tel Dan Steele, a fragment of stone monument dated to the 9th century that contains the earliest mention on record of the Royal House of David—thereby supplying evidence for the existence of the Biblical King David.
Both exhibitions on view through January 5, 2025
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Color is alive and well at the Guggenheim, which unveiled its Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930 exhibition in early November. In a welcome departure from the stark minimalism of the previous Jenny Holzer exhibit, painting after painting hangs on the walls that crawl up that famous Frank Lloyd Wright spiral almost all the way to the top. These compositions are dancing and cinematic, existing somewhere between expressionism and cubism with ambiguous shapes and contrasting colors. Artists on view range from Marcel Duchamp to Sonia Delaunay. In one of the annexed galleries, break off to take a second with Collection in Focus: Piet Mondrian, Ever further for Guggenheim Director and CEO Mariët Westermann's first foray into curation since joining the museum. In addition to Mondrian's distinctive abstracts utilizing primary color blocking, the exhibition aims to chart the artist's life course with his rare sketchbooks on display.
Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930 on view through March 9, 2025
MoMA
As of September 15, there are two exhibitions of witnesser of American strife, Robert Frank's art: Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue and Robert Frank's Scrapbook Footage with over 200 works by Frank including footage that was only uncovered after his death in 2019.
Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue on view through January 11, 2025
New York Historical Society
Do you ever find yourself lamenting disappointedly that “we just don't do things like we used to." The complaint can be levied against almost anything, but as the holidays are nigh let's apply it to the festive spirit of Christmas. Just in time for the holiday season, Holiday Express: Toys and Trains from the Jerni Collection has pulled into the station to show us the playthings of our forerunners. Delicate and hand-painted, these pieces date between 1850 and 1940.
With Real Clothes, Real Lives, meanwhile, New Yorkers and visitors are treated to the most extensive repertoire of women’s clothing to be housed under one roof—two centuries’ worth, in fact. Originally the title of a book by artist Kiki Smith—who helped curate this exhibition—it is aimed at celebrating the kind of everyday clothing that rarely finds museum attention: the hardworking house dresses, Girls Scout uniforms, and the tailored suits of urban office-goers. But it isn’t just a celebration of form and function. It is a sociological scrutiny of how women’s role have shifted in society, and how race and class have played a role in these changes. Each piece holds colorful stories about the woman who wore it, as well as those who made it, and their context in place and time. Another look at the lives on New Yorkers is Pets and the City, which traces the (post-pandemic, soaring) population of animals and animal owners in the Big Apple via art, documentation, and clips from film and television.
Holiday Express on view through February 2, 2025. Real Clothes, Real Lives on view through June 22, 2025
International Center of Photography
We Are Here: Scenes From the Streets has work from more than 30 photographers from around the world who spent time documenting urban environments and the people that populate them. Through the eyes of these artists, who span generations, races, genders, and locations, the viewer can get acquainted with all types of urbanites—those who live in far-flung places as well as right next door. Selections from ICP at 50, meanwhile, shows 70 works from the archives that condense—as much as is possible—the institution's legacy in celebration of its anniversary. On December 12, the Google-backed Alternative Images of AI—ICP x Google opens on the ground floor. Artists Farah Al Qasimi, Charlie Engman, and Max Pinckers photographed Abu Dhabi, Belgium, and Ghana respectively in an attempt to represent visually what artificial intelligence means to them. As the phasing out of humanity in arti s one of the chief concerns regarding artificial intelligence, this exhibit featuring art made by real people could be quite interesting—just be wary of bias, considering the sponsor.
All exhibitions on view through January 6, 2025
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.
On view through January 5, 2025
The Museum of Sex
The Museum of Sex makes the list for the first time with Looking at Andy Looking, presented in collaboration with Pittsburgh's The Andy Warhol Museum as well as MoMA—these two institutions together digitized the original film material presented in this exhibition. The theme here is desire, particularly homosexual desire, with the centerpiece being the 5-hour 21-minute Sleep (1963) depicting Warhol's then-lover John Giorno lost in the titular act. There are 16 films in total, half of which have never before been screened before, so it's worth popping in.
No close date announced
Brooklyn Museum
Liza Lou: Trailer is exactly what it sounds like. Filling the insides of a 1949 Spartan Royal Mansion mobile trailer, this vivid tableau and new addition to the Brooklyn Museum's collection aims to evoke the nebulous, glamorous pleasures of Hollywood noir. Everything on this set is rendered in glass beads, from the furniture, to the guitar, and shots of whiskey. On the same day, Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies (an amazing name) arrives to give the under-celebrated feminist sculptor and printmaker her due.
Elizabeth Catlett on view through January 19, 2025
New York Transit Museum
Whether they love it or hold it in contempt, the New York subway is an essential part of a New Yorker's daily life. If you're visiting the city, you should take it at least once to understand how the people that live here get around—it's what makes the city so accessible. And why not take that subway to Brooklyn's New York Transit Museum, located conveniently off the 4 and 5 trains at Borough Hall and A, C, and F trains at Jay Street-MetroTech, for The Subway Is… in celebration of our metro's 120th birthday. It does this with several artifacts, photographs, and multimedia installations that highlight the subway's long life since its opening October 27, 1904. In conjunction, there will be four Nostalgia Rides starting on October 27 wherein visitors to the museum can ride in a vintage 1917 Lo-V subway car from the decommissioned Old South Ferry up the 1/2/3 line to the Bronx, back down Lexington Avenue to the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall Station in downtown Manhattan.
No close date announced
Museum of the Moving Image
It's a bit of an interim period for MoMI with regard to exhibitions, with the ongoing Jim Henson Exhibition and Horrible Sites installation on makeup and production design for The Exorcist reason enough to pay a visit. But the highlight is Recording the Ride: The Rise of Street-Style Skate Videos with tons of VHS footage depicting skaters and their tricks in the ‘80s and ’90s. This is joyful, expressionist videography, and the exhibit does good work highlighting the real marriage between skating and video—that skaters were spurred to learn and nail tricks in large part so that it could be caught on camera.
Recording the Ride on view through January 26, 2025
Whitney Museum of American Art
The 2024 biennial is over and gone is its controversial AI painting, making it is safe to return to the Whitney. Happily, incoming is the first large-scale museum exhibition celebrating the life and work of choreographer Alvin Ailey, Edge of Ailey is on through February 9 with a fabulously bonkers immersive showcase of the ubiquitous artist's works across the 18,000-square-foot fifth floor galleries. Works from more than eighty artists—Basquiat, Romare Bearden, and more—who inspired and were inspired by Ailey in some combination are interspersed throughout archival material, including a looped cinematic montage of Ailey's life on an 18-channel video installation. To see Ailey's dances as they were performed, head to the third-floor theater that is playing video footage of performances by both his repertory companies—one of which will take up physical residence in that space for performances for a week out of every month of the exhibition.
On view through February 9, 2025
MoMA PS1
Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon has more than 60 pieces from Lemon's oeuvre. Lemon, who was born in 1952 and continues to live and work, makes Rant Redux (2020-24) his centerpiece. The four-channel video and sound installation created in collaboration with Kevin Beasley is based on a live performance piece of Lemon's called, simply, Rant. In addition to numerous multimedia pieces, there are traditional works of painting and sculpture on display as well. If you're keen to go in-depth on a true New York artist who emerged from the downtown scene in the ‘70s and ’80s, this should be your first stop.
On view through March 25, 2025.
