New York Museums

A Virtual Tour of Museums in New York

Metropolitan Museum of Art – MET
Museum of Modern Art, NYC
Intrepid, Sea, Air & Space Museum
Neue Galerie New York
The Cloisters
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
American Museum of Natural History
Museum of the City of New York
New-York Historical Society
Frick Collection
Met Breuer
Rubin Museum of Art
Jewish Museum
Whitney Museum of American Art
National Museum of the American Indian
Brooklyn Museum
New York Transit Museum
Brooklyn Historical Society

A Virtual Tour of Public Art in New York

“The Knotted Gun” by Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd
“LOVE” by Robert Indiana
“Sphere Within Sphere” by Arnaldo Pomodoro
“Alma Mater” by Daniel Chester French

Highlights of New York’s Museums

Metropolitan Museum of Art – MET

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, often called “the MET,” is in New York City and is one of the largest art museums in the United States. It is in the top five most visited art museums in the world.

Its collection has over two million works of art from antiquity to modern times, consisting of paintings, sculptures, musical instruments, costumes, and accessories, and antique weapons and armor from around the world.

Highlights include large gallery installations, ranging from first-century Rome through modern American design.

Museum of Modern Art, NYC

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)’s collection offers an overview of modern art, which includes works of painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, design, photography, prints, illustrated books, artist’s books, film, and electronic media.

The Museum of Modern Art, NYC – MOMA is in New York City and was established: 1929 (87 years ago).

Intrepid, Sea, Air & Space Museum

The Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum is a military and maritime history museum at Pier 86 on the West Side of Manhattan.

The museum opened in 1982 after the USS Intrepid was saved from scrapping. Later, the Intrepid became a National Historic Landmark in 1986.

In 1988, the museum was awarded USS Growler, a Grayback-class submarine, which carried nuclear missiles by the United States Congress from the United States Navy and is now on display and available for tours.

In 2011, ownership of the Space Shuttle Enterprise was transferred to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum.

Neue Galerie New York

The Neue Galerie New York which is German for “New Gallery” is a museum dedicated to early twentieth-century German and Austrian art and design.

Highlights of the Neue Galerie New York include: Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, “Berlin Street Scene” by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and “The House of Guardaboschi” by Gustav Klimt

The Cloisters

The Met Cloisters is a separate museum in Fort Tryon Park in Washington Heights, Upper Manhattan, New York City.

The Cloisters specializes in European medieval architecture, sculpture, and arts, with a focus on the Romanesque and Gothic art and architecture. It has an extensive collection of medieval art-works shown in architectural settings sourced from French monasteries and abbeys.

Its buildings are centered around four cloisters, which were dismantled in Europe between 1934 and 1939 and relocated to New York.

They became part of the Metropolitan Museum’s Cloisters collection and were reconstructed into the design of this museum built into a hill, comprises of upper and lower levels.

The plan, layout, and ambiance of the building are intended to evoke a sense of the religious and monastic life of medieval Europeans.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum often called The Guggenheim, has an impressive collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern and contemporary art.

The Guggenheim building is a landmark work of 20th-century architecture, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, it was conceived as a “temple of the spirit”.

The museum’s collection is shared with the museum’s sister museums in Bilbao, Spain, and elsewhere.

American Museum of Natural History

The American Museum of Natural History is one of the largest museums in the world comprises 28 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library.

The museum collections contain over 33 million objects, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time.

The mission of the American Museum of Natural History is: “To discover, interpret, and disseminate—through scientific research and education—knowledge about human cultures, the natural world, and the universe.”

Museum of the City of New York

The Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) is a history and art museum which presents the history of New York City and its people.

Highlights of the Museum of the City of New York include: “Portrait of Mrs. Alexander Hamilton” by Ralph Earl, “Olivia Peyton Murray Cutting” by Alexandre Cabanel, and “Unveiling The Statue of Liberty” by Edward Moran.

New-York Historical Society

The New-York Historical Society presents exhibitions, public programs, and research that explore the rich history of New York and the nation.

The New-York Historical Society Museum & Library has been at its present site since 1908.

Highlights of the New-York Historical Society, imclude: “Tontine Coffee House, N.Y.C.” by Francis Guy, Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle, 1933, Pewterers’ Banner 1788 and Benjamin Franklin Bust.

Frick Collection

The Frick Collection is a small art museum with a collection of old master paintings and beautiful furniture housed in six galleries within a former New York mansion.

The collection features some of the best-known paintings by major European artists, as well as works of sculpture and porcelain.

In addition to the permanent collection, the Frick organizes popular temporary exhibitions. The Frick Collection is housed in the Henry Clay Frick House on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, New York City.

It houses the collection of industrialist Henry Clay Frick. The collection is exhibited in nineteen galleries of varying sizes within the former residence.

The collection features paintings by major European artists as well as numerous works of sculpture, porcelain, and Oriental rugs.

After Frick’s death, the collection was expanded half of the collection being acquired since 1919. The museum cannot lend the works of art that belonged to Frick, as stipulated in his will; however, artworks and objects acquired since his Frick’s death are loaned to other art museums.

Met Breuer

The Met Breuer is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art but located separately at 945 Madison Avenue and East 75th Street in the Upper East Side of New York City.

It is focused on modern and contemporary art and opened in 2016 in the building formerly occupied by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

After the idea behind the Met Breuer was initiated in 2008, an agreement between the Met and the Whitney was signed in 2011.

The location opened in 2016, and the Met operates the museum as part of an integrated expansion of the main museum’s outreach, with a focus on modern art and accessibility.

Rubin Museum of Art

The Rubin Museum of Art is dedicated to the collection, display, and preservation of the art and cultures of the Himalayas, India and neighboring regions, with a permanent collection focused particularly on Tibetan art.

The museum originated from a private collection of Himalayan art and opened in 2004 with the capacity to exhibit over 1,000 objects including paintings, sculptures, and textiles, as well as ritual objects from the 2nd to the 20th centuries.

Besides exhibitions based on the museum’s permanent collection, it also serves as a venue for national and international exhibitions.

Jewish Museum

The Jewish Museum is an art and cultural museum housed in the former Felix M. Warburg House, along the Museum Mile in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City.

The museum is the first Jewish museum in the United States, as well as the oldest existing Jewish museum in the world. The collection was established in 1904, but the museum did not open to the public until 1947.

The museum has nearly 30,000 objects, including paintings, sculptures, archaeological artifacts, Jewish ceremonial art, and many other artifacts relevant to Jewish history and culture.

Artists included in the museum’s collection include James Tissot, Marc Chagall, George Segal, Eleanor Antin, and Deborah Kass. The museum’s collection includes objects from ancient to modern eras, in all media, and originated in every area of the world where Jews have had a presence.

Whitney Museum of American Art

The Whitney Museum of American Art is an art museum in Manhattan that focuses on 20th- and 21st-century American art.

Its permanent collection comprises more than 23,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, films, videos, and artifacts of new media by more than 3,400 artists.

It places particular emphasis on exhibiting the work of living artists as well as maintaining an extensive permanent collection of important pieces from the first half of the last century.

From 1966 to 2014, the Whitney was at 945 Madison Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The museum closed in 2014 to relocate to a new building in the West Village, Meatpacking District neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan; it reopened at the new location in 2015.

It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), a wealthy American art patron after whom it is named.

National Museum of the American Indian

The National Museum of the American Indian is a museum focused on the culture of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

The museum has three facilities:

The National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
The George Gustav Heye Center is located at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House in New York City.
The Cultural Resources Center, a research and collections facility, is located in Suitland, Maryland.

The foundations for the collections were first assembled in the former Museum of the American Indian in New York City, which was established in 1916. It became part of the Smithsonian in 1989.

Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum that is New York City’s third-largest in physical size and holds an art collection of about 1.5 million works.

Significant areas of the collection include antiquities, especially their collection of Egyptian antiquities spanning over 3,000 years. European, African, Oceanic, and Japanese art.

American art is well represented, starting with the Colonial period. Artists represented in the collection include Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper, Norman Rockwell, Winslow Homer, Edgar Degas, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Max Weber.

The Museum also has a “Memorial Sculpture Garden,” which features salvaged architectural elements from New York City.

New York City has more than 2,000 arts and cultural organizations and more than 500 art galleries of all sizes.

The city government funds the arts with a larger annual budget, and besides, wealthy business magnates have built a network of important cultural institutions that have become internationally famous.

Museum Mile

New York City is home to hundreds of cultural institutions and historic sites, and one of the densest displays of culture is the Museum Mile, which is the name for a section of Fifth Avenue. Museums on the Museum Mile include: