The Museum Hours

The autumn’s marquee show follows Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock in parallel across the full arc of both careers — artistic peers and life partners, each with a distinct practice, shown side by side rather than one as the other’s footnote. It opens October 4; book a timed ticket for the first weeks. Until then, the season’s great draw is the Costume Institute.

The other colossus, directly across the park from the Met — forty-five halls of dinosaurs, dioramas, and the Hayden Planetarium, joined in 2023 by the soaring Gilder Center with its insectarium and butterfly vivarium, and watched over by Apex, the most complete stegosaurus ever found. This autumn the Halls of Gems and Minerals hold something no other museum can show you: the Larry O’Brien Trophy the Knicks brought home this year, their first championship in fifty-three years, on view through January 3 inside For the Win — some seventy trophies, rings, and medals across a dozen sports, from a Jesse Owens gold of 1936 onward. The giant-screen LeFrak Theater is closed until spring 2027.

MoMA’s autumn arrives in stages. The Surrealist Book opens October 4, followed on October 25 by Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio (through February 27) — the studio, not only the sculpture, is the subject. Already on the walls: Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa (through January 2) and Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives (through May 2, 2027).

A re-evaluation on a grand scale — some 130 works across the whole career, taking in film and sculpture as well as the paintings, with a complete recreation of the 1962 exhibition that made his name and of the 96-foot Greene Street Mural of 1983. The draw, still, is the hand-painted precision of pictures like Drowning Girl, machine-made imagery remade by hand.

For the first time, the Guggenheim has given its entire rotunda to a single new body of work: never-before-seen photographs, text, video, and sculpture by the New York artist Taryn Simon, gathered into one installation that spirals the length of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ramp. Walk it top to bottom or bottom to top; it is built to be read either way up the spiral.

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 reason it earns a place among the headliners: after two years dark, the New Museum reopened on March 21 with a 60,000-square-foot expansion by Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu of OMA, doubling its gallery space and giving the SANAA tower an arrow-shaped glass-and-mesh companion next door. It reopened with a show worthy of the building — more than two hundred artists, writers, scientists, and filmmakers asking how each new technology redraws the definition of the human, with Dalí, Duchamp, and Giacometti set in conversation against fresh commissions. Massimiliano Gioni curated; it fills the entire museum.

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.

Why does democracy matter, and what does it look like in action? For the nation’s 250th, the Historical answers from its own collections — art, artifacts, and documents tracing how the promise of liberty and equality has stretched, contracted, and been fought over, from Johannes Oertel’s painting of New Yorkers pulling down the statue of George III onward. Five hands-on stations for families take up protest, speech, symbols, and petitioning. First floor, Klingenstein Family Gallery.

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). These are its final days.

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. In this twenty-fifth anniversary year, Responding in Ink gathers some fifty covers, pages, and original drawings: the towers as a supervillain’s favorite target long before 2001, John Romita Jr.’s inked pages for the Spider-Man issue rushed out that December to honor the responders, and memoirs by artists who were children in the city that day.

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 first exhibition to make the case for Siena as a Renaissance capital of bronze: nearly forty statues, reliefs, candelabra, and medals — many never before shown outside Tuscany — by Donatello, Vecchietta, and Francesco di Giorgio, in the Lauder Exhibition Galleries. The Frick reopened in spring 2025 after a five-year renovation that opened the second-floor family rooms to the public for the first time; the Bellini, the Vermeers, the Holbein, and the Fragonards are reason enough on any day. Admission is free on the first Friday of every month through May 2027, January excepted.

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 Wiener Werkstätte is remembered as the work of three men; this exhibition, organized with the MAK in Vienna, restores the roughly two hundred women who designed for it and bought from it — nearly a quarter of them Jewish. More than two hundred objects across fashion, ceramics, textiles, graphic design, and furniture, with Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer present in a drawing from the museum’s own collection. Pair it with the Neue Galerie six blocks south, whose galleries reopen November 12.

El Museo’s autumn is about collaboration and chosen community. Octopus & Others draws on the collection — Papo Colo’s Photopoems among it — to look at artists working together across generations, and later this season the touring Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art arrives. Open Wednesday through Sunday.

The first Chinese American film star, seen whole — 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. The summer’s Goya exhibition has closed; this autumn’s show is Esperanza Cortés’s Embroidered Allegories.

The Studio Museum reopened in November 2025 in its first purpose-built home, and its autumn is devoted to the collection. Dreams of This Future draws on the bequest of the legendary patron and civil rights activist Peggy Cooper Cafritz — Nina Chanel Abney, Nick Cave, Kerry James Marshall, Simone Leigh, Deana Lawson, Toyin Ojih Odutola. Open Wednesday through Sunday.

For the bicentennial of Frederic Church’s birth, Cooper Hewitt opens the largest Church collection anywhere — more than two thousand oil and graphite sketches — to show the rarely seen studies he made traveling through Jamaica in 1865: palms, ferns, and mountain valleys observed with a botanist’s patience and a painter’s eye.

MAD’s autumn headline, at Columbus Circle, turns to the design of athletic motion — on view from September 12. The museum remains the city’s best argument for craft taken as seriously as art.

Spectacular needlework and ornamental arts made by American girls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — samplers and pictures that were lessons, portraits of home, and declarations of who their makers were — in one of the most significant presentations of the genre in years. Admission is always free; a good stop before or after a Lincoln Center evening.

The museum Isamu Noguchi built as his own gift to the city, with its outdoor sculpture garden, in the seventy-fifth anniversary year of his Akari light sculptures. Light and Stone marks forty years since he became the first solo artist to represent the United States at Venice — one gallery, with a model of his marble spiral slide and the Akari he insisted on showing. Akari at 75 follows November 4. Free on first Fridays.

Twenty-eight photographers across three generations — Ishiuchi Miyako, Kawauchi Rinko, Hiromix, Ninagawa Mika, Yanagi Miwa among them — rewrite a history of Japanese photography long told through men. Photographs, installation, photobooks, and printed matter, from blunt and tender observations of everyday life to sharp looks at the roles Japanese women have inhabited and remade. Organized with Aperture; it opens October 15 on Ludlow Street.

MoMA’s contemporary outpost in a converted Romanesque public schoolhouse across the river, and a pilgrimage worth the trek to Queens. The first large-scale American museum show of Teresa Margolles, the Mexican artist trained as a forensic pathologist, whose room-sized installations trace disappearance and violence along the border. Its centerpiece, La promesa, is a wall built from fourteen tons of rubble from an abandoned home in Ciudad Juárez, activated daily at 3 p.m. A companion show opens at MoMA itself. Admission is free for everyone.

The museum is the exhibit: a real subway station, opened in 1936 and closed to passengers ten years later, that became a Bicentennial pop-up in July 1976 and was never allowed to close. You enter down the same stairs and through the same turnstiles as any commuter; below, on a working platform a full city block long, some twenty vintage subway and elevated cars dating back to 1907 wait with their doors open — cane seats, ceiling fans, period advertisements — beside a live 1930s signal tower still used to move them.

The Neue Galerie at 1048 Fifth Avenue (86th Street) reopens October 1, with Café Sabarsky and the shops back at their regular hours; the galleries follow on November 12 with the 25th Anniversary Exhibition — Klimt and Schiele back on the walls, Adele Bloch-Bauer I among them. It is also the last season of the Neue Galerie on its own: the museum will become part of the Met, a merger that takes effect in 2028. The Rubin Museum closed its 17th Street home in 2024 and now operates as an online-only institution.