Top 5 Art Museums to visit in NYC

Ekka
Apr 11, 2019
4 min read

Updated: Aug 14, 2019

New York City comprises some of the most excellent art museums in the country. I haven't explored all of the art museums in the city, but here are my top five museums that I have enjoyed exploring.

5) Moma PS1

This is the Moma's second location in Queens, NYC. Moma PS1 will be honoring all of the events that Moma in Midtown used to run. One of those events includes

Free Admission on Friday Nights. There are different kinds of displays that this location features such as Julie Becker: I must create a Master Piece to pay the Rent, Zheng Guogu: Visionary Transformation, Simone Fattal: Works and Days, Gina Beavers: The Life | Deserve, and Nancy Spero: Paper Mirror. In this museum, the art that was featured was mostly modern and contemporary art.

The interior of the museum is different from the Moma in Midtown. It reminded me of being inside a school building.

4) Whitney Museum

The Whitney Museum is located minutes from the meatpacking district. This museum is dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting, and exhibiting American art, and its collection is the Museum's key resource. (https://whitney.org/) In February and March, I went to the Whitney Museum and saw the art exhibit From A to B and Back Again, which featured the art of Andy Warhol. Warhol understood the growing power of images in contemporary life and helped to expand the role of the artist in society. He experimented with different images and created various types of artwork such as Hand-Painted Pop, Mechanical Reproduction, Silver Screens, Flowers, Filmmaking, Time Capsules, Abstraction, Still Lifes and Shadows, Collaborations, and Portraits. Throughout his art, I got to learn more about Warhol's life. Some of my favorite pieces from Warhol are Campbell Soup Cans and the Flowers.

Another exhibit that I enjoyed was Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018. It gave the viewer an outlook of how technology can be examined through the program as instructions, rules, and algorithms with a focus on conceptual art. The exhibit also featured how computational art has evolved in contemporary artistic practices. I found this exhibit to be insightful as to how much technology evolved in art.

Another exhibit that was cool to view at was the DO HO SUH: 95 Horatio Street. The artist Do Ho Suh is interested in the intersections of architecture, memory, and identity. The emotional significance of an architectural space, its relation to personal memory and the collapse of time, and its many-layered meaning are central themes Suh explores across media. His large-scale installations of fabric recreations of former homes, meticulous rubbings of the interior of his apartment in New York, and drawings of moveable and anthropomorphic architectural structures are evocative meditations on the definition of home, its public and personal significance, and how it is affected by displacement and context. (https://whitney.org/Exhibitions/DoHoSuh) This artwork of Suh, digitally rendered image evokes the history of the site but also connects to the current repurposed use of the High Line, which affords a unique view of his project at the southern terminus.

3) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (Guggenheim Museum)

The Guggenheim Museum has an exquisite architectural design. It was designed by Frank Lloyd

Wright. The museum is in its 60th anniversary, so to commemorate the anniversary, six artists

decided to do for the first time, an artist-curated exhibition mounted at the Guggenheim

celebrates the museum's extensive collection of modern and contemporary art. Artistic License

brings together both well-known and rarely seen works from the turn of the century to 1980.

Several other collections that the museum highlights include the Thannhauser Collection, Guggenheim Collection: Brancusi, Basquiat's “Defacement": and The Untold Story, Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat. There are many art pieces in this museum that are fascinating to admire.

2) Moma (Museum of Modern Art)

The Moma creates a space that fuels creativity, ignites minds, and provides inspiration. It has extraordinary exhibitions and collection of modern and contemporary art. This museum creates a conversation between past and present, the established and the experimental. (https://www.moma.org/) Some of these pieces of art are Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, 26A Black and White by Jackson Pollock, Campbell Soup cans by Andy Warhol, Still Life with Fruit and Glass and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso, House by the Railroad by Edward Hopper, and Water Lilies by Claude Monet.

Moma also offers free admission on Friday nights from 4:00 pm to 8:00 pm because of Uniqlo Free Friday Nights. The Moma is currently under renovation, until October 20th. However, you can take a trip to Moma'a other location in Queens. It is called Moma PS1.

1.) Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET)

This museum is a given, but it is one of my all-time favorite museums. There is a variety of forms of arts from different parts of the world. There are pieces of art from the Renaissance Period, Egyptian Art, Asian Art, Modern/Contemporary Art, European Art, and Medieval art that showcases; paintings, photographs, artifacts, and sculptures. There are 5,000 years of art at the Met to discover and observe.

There are special exhibits that the MET features to the public, for a limit time. Some of those special exhibits that I got to see were CAMP (the fashion at the Met Gala), Alexander McQueen exhibit, The Tale of Genji: A Japanese Classic Illuminated, Splendors of Korean Art, and Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit.