All throughout New York, there are many museums and cultural places of interest. These museums span entire neighborhoods from the Upper East Side of New York to the Lower East Side, and similarly, some neighborhoods, such as Chelsea, are dedicated wholly to the proliferation of smaller galleries.
As a diverse melting pot of culture and people, museums across New York have all sorts of specialties represented, from Chinese, Jewish, and Hispanic art, photography, natural history, and contemporary works; there is something of interest for almost everyone.
In this list of the top 20 museums in New York, there is no doubt that you, too, will find a specialty museum that draws your interest.
1) MoMA PS1
While it may be a relative of the famous Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Museumhttps://www.moma.org/ps1, that doesn’t mean it is just a simple or ordinary art museum. This museum is housed within an impressive Renaissance Revival public school building in Queens, Long Island City.
The museum’s setting and location are just as interesting as its fascinating collection of pieces within its art collection.
Within this collection of over 200,000 pieces of art, there is all manner of contemporary creativity displayed by artists such as James Turrell and Ai Weiwei.
Watching the eccentric types from around the city who have come to find inspiration can sometimes be just as good as looking at art.
2) The Noguchi Museum
Another museum is positioned in Long Island City; this museum was conceived by the artist Isamu Noguchi himself to be an intimate, meditative place for those who come.
Within this museum, the artist displays his abstract sculptures of geometric or globular lamps made of paper and bamboo alongside copied paper lamps across the museum’s exhibition space and through a quiet, peaceful garden outside.
Even if you are a person who is not familiar with the work of Isamu Noguchi, you have likely seen one of the artist’s light sculptures before, and this museum would capture your mind regardless of this fact.
3) The Cloisters
As a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), the Cloisters Is located on four acres of land at Fort Tryon Park in the north of Manhattan. It is the only museum in the United States of America that is dedicated exclusively to the incredible art and architectural designs that arose in the Middle Ages. The museum overlooks the Hudson River and has chosen to incorporate a total of five medieval-inspired cloisters, which are covered walkways, typically found in convents, monasteries, and colleges within its design. As a museum for the art of the Middle Ages, providing a medieval-type architecture for the museum allows you to view art amongst such a historical backdrop.
4) New Museum
The New Museum was founded in 1977, which doesn’t make it particularly new. However, it gained new attention in 2007 when it opened a new location at Bowery, its seven-story building designed to appear as if blocks were piled on top of one another, drawing many’s interests.
This museum contains many contemporary and modern things in various mediums and tends to champion newer and lesser-known artists. Several recent shows have included the Australian painter Helen Johnson, L.A.-based filmmaker Kahlil Joseph and Philadelphia installation artist Alex Da Corte.
Due to this, the reception of exhibits can vary, and their enjoyment is widely subjective.
Perhaps this focus on lesser-known artists makes it new and causes it to be such an exciting place.
5) The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met)
Perhaps one of the most well-known museums worldwide, the Met has retained its title as the cultural center of New York City for nearly a century and a half of its life.
The museum has an extensive collection of works and exhibits in its permanent collection, and the building itself, with its Gothic style, tiered steps, and location at Central Park, is quite the sight to behold.
Once inside the Great Hall and you manage to wade through the ceaseless number of museum enthusiasts taking in all the sights, incredible discoveries are to be found – such as a 2000-year-old Egyptian Temple of Dendur.
6) Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
On the Upper East Side of New York, the Smithsonian Design Museum is located within a Georgian mansion from 1902, one of the most amazing Gilded Age residences that still exist today.
A visit to this museum is worth it for the building, let alone for the collection itself, which spans centuries of work related to all things design.
This museum houses more than 200,000 pieces of work, from furniture, metalwork, sculptures, musical instruments, and pottery.
If you are not a fan of crowds, this museum is less popular than the likes of the Guggenheim and the Met, but that doesn’t make it any less worth it.
7) Rubin Museum of Art
Rubin Museum of Art, located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, is one of the museums renowned for its international art collection. Its specialty stems entirely from the Indian subcontinent; the art collection it keeps from the Himalayas and India spans as many as 1500 years and 38,000 pieces of work.
Many of its works, such as sculptures, paintings, installations, and reproductions of famous murals from the Tibetan Lukhang Temple provide the viewer an incredibly comprehensive image of the culture and artistic richness of the peoples from the Indian subcontinent.
For example, an exhibit that showcases mid-century India or Nepal’s ceremonies, festivals, and the environment by photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson has been displayed in the past.
8) National Museum of the American Indian New York
The National Museum of the American Indian can be found within a former customs house at the southern tip of Manhattan in New York.
This museum is wholly dedicated to the more than 1200 indigenous peoples of the Americas and ensures that their cultures and histories are preserved and shared with as many people as possible.
Their collection contains many beaded and feathered ceremonial items and amazing traditional art pieces made of carved wood and bone.
Alongside these things, they have many detailed types of clothes and a vast array of everyday items from baskets, pottery, and instruments to photographs and archival materials.
9) American Museum of Natural History
Often credited as one of the world’s greatest natural history museums, the American Museum of Natural History can be found across Central Park, its incredible size taking up four city blocks.
Represented within this museum are all aspects of the natural world, the animals, and the people who make it up.
This includes taxidermy animals, depictions of the life of Native American tribes, marine life, dinosaur fossils, and all kind of special and immersive exhibits and shows on subjects such as humanity or the ancient world mummies of the Egyptians and Peruvians.
From the incredible sights of a life-size blue whale to the full skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, the American Museum of Natural History is not to be missed.
10) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The circular concrete structure of the Guggenheim is quite a unique design and represents a departure from both the typical museum layout and the rectangular steel and glass buildings that flank it.
Inside the museum is a central ramp spiraling upwards and outwards from one floor of the structure to the next, taking the viewers throughout the exhibits in a way many other museums would never dare.
This design provides an open interior, easily lit by daylight through the glass dome on top.
As a home for Solomon R. Guggenheim’s modern art collection, including works by Picasso, Klee, Miro, Kandinsky, and many more, the Guggenheim is worth the time.
11) Whitney Museum of American Art
In 2015, the Whitney received a major upgrade following its relocation from the Upper East Side to its Meatpacking headquarters. The Whitney Museum of American Art contains a huge amount of space for indoor galleries, housing many works by artists such as Jean Michel Basquiat, Richard Avedon, and Alexander Calder, four outdoor exhibition spaces and a terrace, as well as space for a ground-floor restaurant and a top-floor bar. All the floors of the building are connected by slow-moving oft-crowded elevators designed by entire artists. Again, if crowds are an issue, stairs are always an option, where some of the upper floors and sculpture terraces have a series of staircases exterior to the building, with great views of the city skyline.
12) Tenement Museum
The Tenement Museum is a historical building, a tenement house or two on the Lower East Side.
When you have a tour of the tenements, many stories are shared of the personal histories of the people who lived there while they worked hard to build their new lives in the United States of America.
The museum can also be reached through a neighborhood walking tour, where tourists can learn how the Lower East Side of New York evolved and how the immigrant peoples who lived there caused it to be a densely populated area of the United States during the 1900s.
13) Museum of the City of New York
The Museum of the City of New York is a Colonial-era structure near the top of Central Park built entirely for the Museum of the City of New York in 1932. Today, the museum is relatively unknown, and many New Yorkers have no idea that the museum even exists.
The museum’s collection contains over 1.5 million pieces of work, incorporating all kinds and forms of pieces into its collection.
There are photographs, paintings, drawings, furniture, decoration, and manuscripts, all closely related to the history of New York City’s five boroughs.
Those who do visit do so with enthusiasm since it is a little more out of the way and specific than the interests of the average museum visitor.
14) The Morgan Library and Museum
The Morgan Library and Museum is quite a unique entry, having many different roles and purposes.
This museum is not only a museum and a library, as the name implies, but also a famous landmark, historical site, and musical venue. As you dive into the multimillionaire’s person library, which was expanded as a museum and cultural site, there are a variety of rare artifacts, paintings, and books, with some of them dating back to the earliest stages of civilization in 4000 B.C.
The museum contains one of the 23 copies of the original Declaration of Independence, Mozart’s handwritten score of the Haffner Symphony, the collected works of African American poet Phillis Wheatley, the only living manuscript of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Charles Dicken’s manuscript of A Christmas Carol. Even one of these priceless artifacts is worth far more than your house.
15) 9/11 Memorial and Museum
Both Americans and non-Americans alike should visit the 9/11 Memorial and Museum at least once.
The Museum takes you down to the bedrock level where the foundations of the former World Trade Centre used to be.
Naturally, you are bound to be overcome by the sober and meditative sense of recalling where you were on September 11th, 2001, and how things have changed not only in America but worldwide.
The Museum itself strikes a masterful balance of the right feelings. The enormity of the loss of that day can be felt, physically and spiritually, in no small part due to the scale, construction, and execution of the site.
16) El Museo del Barrio
Another specialty museum, El Museo del Barrio was founded in the 1960s by the artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz and a group of other Puerto Rican artists who were frustrated by the lack of representation they were given in traditional kinds of museums.
These artists produced a space that sought to celebrate the works of art and the Latino culture’s impact on the United States of America. From the collection of 6500 objects, there are historic Taino artifacts and contemporary paintings, sculptures, and photography, all of which provide an amazingly comprehensive dive into the works by those of Latin American and Caribbean heritage.
17) Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA)
A modern space designed by Maya Lin on Centre Street on the fringe of New York City’s Chinatown, the collection here at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) seeks to document the long history of Chinese Americans from 19th century America to the present day.
Containing 65,000 works from photographs, textiles, and clothing, it’s an incredibly thorough and comprehensive look at an important group of American people that often go unconsidered.
Talks at the museum happen every Saturday afternoon, giving an interesting, free overview of how the Chinese people have experienced the United States of America since their arrival in the 19th century. Similarly, there’s a fascinating Chinatown walking tour on Saturdays for a small price of $35 dollars.
18) Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Alongside the Met and the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art stands as one of the main museum attractions in New York City.
In the heart of midtown in Manhattan, the grandiose nature of the museum is often seen in the crowds that attend it. In 2019, the MoMA designed new galleries and performance spaces that provided the always-filled museum with some more space.
All the collection in their care was re-curated for a brand-new display to showcase its diversity and modernity, and a gift store is a huge place for those who like to spend money on keepsakes.
Ensure you spend some time with van Gogh’s The Starry Night and Monet’s Water Lillies in the fifth-floor collections when you go.
19) New York Transit Museum
The New York Transit Museum, as the name suggests, is in a former subway station, and to enter, you are required to descend from the sidewalk, as you might on your daily commute. You can find vintage subway trains and cars, a city bus, and a turnstile in the museum, covering more than a century of New York City’s mass transit history.
The place is perfect for kids and designed to draw in New Yorkers to a time when the subway was a much more loved aspect of the city than it is in our day and age.
As with any museum, there are many souvenirs to purchase and take home, from necklaces to mugs and caps, for yourself and your loved ones.
20) Merchant’s House Museum
A house built in 1832, the house is almost like a time capsule, capturing the lives of a family from the 19th century and how they lived.
The Merchant’s House Museum comes with all its original furniture and furnishings, clothing, books, and artwork. Back in the 1960s, this five-story Greek Revival building was the first in Manhattan to be designated as a landmark, and as you visit it today, you’ll almost feel as if you snuck into someone’s house while they’ve ducked elsewhere, stepped out of our time into an entirely different one.
Two generations of the Tredwell family, merchant-class people lived in the home for 100years and left more than 4000 possessions, from oil lamps, fine China, needlework, and dresses in place for us all to see today.
Conclusion
Throughout New York City, there are many incredible cultural centers.
While this list contains just twenty, there are undoubtedly hundreds more within the city’s bounds, all of them containing a vast and rich history to be seen.
There truly is something for everyone – from artworks to natural history, exploration of other cultures, indigenous peoples, and a glimpse into the often long-forgotten past of transit or life in the 19th century.
Indeed, museums are an important part of preserving and sharing the human history and the history of our world and are valuable places of inspiration and learning.
These top 20 museums in New York are on the must-see list, but don’t let that stop you from exploring many of the other wondrous places not on this list.
Also, check out our post An Exhilarating Pursuit Through New York’s Art World, You Can’t-Miss These 7 Art Spots