The 5 Best New York City Museums

The 5 Best New York City Museums

Why wait a rainy day for visiting a New York museum? In this city, there is a museum for every aesthetic and intellectual curiosity, with specialties ranging from modern art to outer space or from design to photography.

– The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the largest art museum in the United States and one of the ten largest in the world. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided among seventeen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park, is by area one of the world’s largest art galleries. There is also a much smaller second location at “The Cloisters” in Upper Manhattan that features medieval art. Represented in the permanent collection are works of art from classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanic, Byzantine, and Islamic art. The museum is also home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes and accessories, and antique weapons and armor from around the world. Several notable interiors, ranging from 1st-century Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in the Met’s galleries.

– Museum of Modern Art (MoMa)

The MoMA is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world. The museum’s collection offers an overview of modern and contemporary art, including works of architecture and design, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated books and artist’s books, film and electronic media.

– American Museum of Natural History

The American Museum of Natural History, located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world. Located in park-like grounds across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 27 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library. The museum collections contain over 32 million specimens of plants, humans, animals, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, and human cultural artifacts, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time.

– Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The Guggenheim Museum is an art museum located in the Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan. It is the permanent home of a renowned and continuously expanding collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions throughout the year.

– Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located, the New York City’s second largest in physical size and holds an art collection with roughly 1.5 million works.

Founded in 1895, the Beaux-Arts building, designed by McKim, was planned to be the largest art museum in the world. Significant areas of the collection include antiquities, specifically their collection of Egyptian antiquities spanning over 3,000 years. African, Oceanic, and Japanese art make for notable antiquities collections as well. American art is heavily represented, starting at 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 throughout New York City.