The Museum Hours

The first comprehensive Raphael retrospective ever mounted in the United States, and almost certainly the last for a generation — more than 170 works assembled over seven years from the Louvre, the Vatican, the Uffizi, the Prado, and dozens of other lenders. The Alba Madonna, the Portrait of Baldassarre Castiglione, and La Fornarina all travel to New York; book a timed ticket and expect crowds through the final weeks.

The first major Duchamp retrospective in the United States since 1973 — some 300 works tracing six decades of the artist who taught the twentieth century to ask "why is this art?", from Nude Descending a Staircase through the readymades and the Boîte-en-valise. The reception has been mixed in tone, but the breadth of works gathered is genuinely once-in-a-generation; after MoMA the show travels to Philadelphia in October.

The 82nd edition of the longest-running survey of American art, organized by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer with 56 artists, duos, and collectives. Less a thesis than an invitation — the curators describe it as tuning in to the moods that bind contemporary life — and a reliable bellwether of where American art is pointing, whether or not you love every piece.

The Rotunda exhibition for the season, and the first comprehensive museum survey of Carol Bove's twenty-five-year career — early drawings and collages, assemblages of found objects, and the monumental painted-steel "collage sculptures" of the past decade. Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral does what it always does, pulling the eye upward and turning the survey into a single ascending experience.

The North American debut of the major touring retrospective of the Dutch couturier whose work sits at the intersection of fashion, sculpture, and science — more than 140 garments, including the 3D-printed pieces that broke open haute couture in 2010, alongside art, natural-history specimens, and a soundscape by Salvador Breed. If you would have queued for Heavenly Bodies or Manus x Machina at the Met, this is the season's must-see in the same spirit.

The largest exhibition MCNY has ever mounted recenters New York in the Revolutionary story — the strategic prize both sides knew would help decide the war, yet eclipsed in the usual telling because the British held it for seven years. Hamilton's desk, a dress from Washington's inaugural ball, the fire bucket from the Great Fire of 1776, and a wall reckoning with the thousands who died on the prison ships of Wallabout Bay.

More than sixty Dutch Golden Age paintings — many never before shown in New York, drawn substantially from the Leiden Collection — imagine the texture of life in the small settlement that became this city. An immersive 3D reimagining of the 1660 Castello Plan lets you walk through the streets and interiors of the earliest detailed map of New Amsterdam.

Inside Manhattan's oldest building — where Washington said farewell to his officers in 1783 — the second chapter of the museum's Revolutionary unfolding covers the war's pivot into New Jersey and the Trenton and Princeton campaigns that saved the cause. Treasures include Nathan Hale's last known letter and a piece of the iron fence pulled down with the King George III statue at Bowling Green.

The museum's newest apartment tour, years in the making, follows a young Black couple who built a home in a Lower Manhattan tenement just after the Civil War. Accessible only by guided tour, it traces their migration into a racially mixed block and the community Black New Yorkers built in a city transformed by the war.

The quietly fascinating story of how the most lucrative mile of real estate in America began as a Beaux-Arts engineering audacity at Grand Central, stacking towers above active train tracks. Physical models trace the street from the open-pit train yard of the 1890s through the Pan Am Building to the recent 270 Park Avenue (47th & 48th Streets).

The principal national institution for examining the events of September 11, 2001, set within the footprints of the original Twin Towers — more than 10,000 personal and monumental objects, told through intimate stories of loss and recovery. For the 25th anniversary, The World’s Game ties to the 2026 World Cup co-hosted by the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, exploring how the global soccer community responded in the days and years after the attacks.

The Morgan holds more than 5,700 of Peter Hujar's contact sheets, and this exhibition pulls more than a hundred into the light — the photographer's working notebook from 1955 until his death in 1987, many marked up with his own thoughts on cropping and printing. A connoisseur's recommendation if you have a serious interest in photography.

The Frick reopened in spring 2025 after a five-year renovation that doubled its public space and, for the first time, opened the second-floor family rooms to the public. With the Gainsborough show closed and the next special exhibition not until October, this is the summer to see the Bellini, the Vermeers, the Holbein, and the Fragonards in their restored rooms without the queues a marquee show generates.

The 70th-anniversary exhibition — seventy of the finest examples of Asian art in the United States, drawn from the Rockefeller collection that founded the institution, spanning two millennia of bronzes, ceramics, and metalwork. The Garden Court Café upstairs is a quiet, plant-filled retreat worth knowing about for a refreshment between galleries.

The first U.S. museum exhibition devoted to Paul Klee's late work — the final decade from 1931 to his death in 1940, the years the Nazis dismissed him and branded his work "degenerate." Roughly a hundred paintings and drawings trace the rise of his political imagery and the harrowing late style; curator Mason Klein's final exhibition for the museum.

The first museum survey of the pioneering Nuyorican photographer Sophie Rivera — long overdue, and a homecoming, since the museum mounted her first solo show in the 1980s. The work confronts her identity as a feminist Puerto Rican artist in New York from the 1970s through the 1990s, with an accompanying Aperture monograph, the first published on her work.

A solo exhibition of the pioneering children's-book illustrator and Caldecott Medalist whose visual language has shaped American picture books for more than half a century. Part of MOCA's year-long Luminaries programming, honoring Chinese American historymakers; the Maya Lin–designed building itself is a quiet pleasure.

The least-visited great museum in New York and one of the most magnificent — free admission, a breathtaking Beaux-Arts hall, and Spanish and Latin American collections that rival European holdings. Two strong shows run in parallel: a Goya exhibition situating him in the revolutionary upheavals of his time, and Sandy Rodriguez's account of the land itself as an active force against colonial violence.

The Studio Museum reopened in November 2025 in its first purpose-built home, the Adjaye-designed building that is now a cultural anchor of 125th Street. Fade gathers seventeen early-career artists of African and Afro-Latinx descent; below it, Kapwani Kiwanga's site-specific BLEED draws on quilting traditions and their coded symbolism. Take the Grand Stair when you arrive.

Art of Noise surveys a century of how design has shaped the way we listen, with more than 300 objects from concert posters through Walkmans and modular synthesizers. On the ground floor, audio artist Devon Turnbull's handmade hi-fi "shrine to music" invites you to take your shoes off and sit on the floor — and on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays from 1 to 4, live guest operators take over. There is nothing else like it in the city right now.

Fifteen years of work from the Los Angeles twins whose practice refuses to settle inside any one category — eighty-five pieces of hybrid creatures in bronze, glass, fur, and resin against algorithmically generated landscapes. A useful pre-dinner stop on a Columbus Circle evening, with views of Central Park from the upper floors.

Self-Made takes ninety works by sixty self-taught artists — Henry Darger, Madge Gill, Horace Pippin — and uses self-portraits and alter egos to dismantle the cliché of the isolated outsider. Folk Nation asks how vernacular art has constructed an American sense of self. Admission is always free; a good stop before or after a Lincoln Center evening.

The fortieth-anniversary exhibition turns inward to ask what the city Isamu Noguchi spent sixty years trying to reshape made of him in return — more than fifty works, including models for unbuilt playgrounds Robert Moses laughed out of the room. The museum itself, Noguchi's own gift to the city with its outdoor sculpture garden, is the second reason to come.

The country's premier institution devoted to photography, with school and museum unified on Ludlow Street. The May 16–17 opening weekend of Photoville at Brooklyn Bridge Park is the free public photography festival of the year; back at Ludlow Street, the recent graduates show traces emerging talent from this year's certificate-program cohort.

The Neue Galerie at 1048 Fifth Avenue (86th Street) is closed for the summer beginning May 27, reopening in autumn for its 25th anniversary; Café Sabarsky is dark with it. The Rubin Museum closed its 17th Street home in 2024 and now operates as an online-only institution.