New York City has a lot of great things going for it in autumn, including a wide array of art exhibits on display at many of its museums. This is the perfect time of year, what with the finally-cool-but-not-cold temperatures and last burst of vivid foliage, to walk from one to the next. Whether you're flitting between the conveniently adjacent institutions of the Upper East Side's Museum Mile or venturing downtown—or even out of Manhattan entirely—interesting exhibitions are to be found everywhere. Below, we've rounded up the best art exhibits NYC has to offer right now. From a showcase for German Expressionist Gabriele Münter at the Guggenheim to a Brooklyn Museum deep-dive on Monet's adventures in Venice, there's something for every kind of art lover.
Read our complete New York City travel guide here, including our roundup of the best museums in New York City. This article has been updated with new information since its original publish date.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Can you take a photograph without a camera? In 1921, the photographer and artist Man Ray stumbled upon a way to do so when he placed some glass objects atop light-sensitive paper. Once exposed, a ghostly image (now known as the rayograph) emerged. Over a century later, as the Met gives Ray a full-scale exhibit called Man Ray: When Objects Dream, the rayograph gets situated within the larger context of Ray's work. 60 rayographs are on display here alongside 100 paintings, prints, photographs (including his iconic Le violon d’Ingres), and other materials.
There's also Baseball Cards from the Collection of Jefferson R. Burdick, which is exactly what it sounds like, with 30,000 trading cards on display through January 20, 2026, and Casa Susanna featuring photography depicting and publications created by a community of cross-dressers that met in New York City as well as the Catskills. Allegory and Abstraction: Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints runs through December 9 with a new rotation of rare selects from the one million-strong collection.
New York Historical Society
Dedicated as it is to life in New York City past and present, the New York Historical Society currently has a couple exhibits underway on exploring how some things have changed while others stay the same. First, there's The Gay Harlem Renaissance, which tracks the contributions of queer Black artists and writers to that movement—people like Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, and Bessie Smith—with photographs, documents, music, and more. Chief historian George Chauncey told Gothamist, “I hope that people who come to the exhibit will come away with a sense that Harlem was indeed the most gay-friendly neighborhood in New York in the early 20th century, surpassing Greenwich Village.” There's also The New York Sari with an eye toward how South Asian women and their fashions have influenced culture in New York starting in the Gilded Age.
The Gay Harlem Renaissance on view through March 8, 2026. The New York Sari on view through April 26, 2026.
Brooklyn Museum
Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200 is just about what it sounds like, with a bonus. Running through February 22, 2026, this retrospective looks back not only on two centuries of its own history as an institution but also on the wider borough's artistic practices and legacies as established since the 17th century. This is a story of Brooklyn, its museum, and the Beaux-Arts building that has long housed it. There's also Monet and Venice with 19 of the painter's Venetian paintings set in dialogue with the likes of John Singer Sargent and Pierre-August Renoir.
Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200 on view through February 22, 2026.
Museum of Modern Art
There's a great deal on view at the MoMA, with several artists showcases either already on display or about to be. There's a Ruth Asawa retrospective two years after the Whitney's (which was the first solo exhibition of Asawa's work), with 300 of the artist's material-spanning work including bronze casts, wire sculpture, and paintings. Other November offerings include Wifredo Lam: When I Don't Sleep, I Dream with 130 paintings and large-scale works from the Cuban painter's Picasso-adjacent oeuvre, and Helen Frankenthaler: A Grand Sweep for the New York Abstract Expressionist's experimental techniques (opens November 18.)
Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective on view through February 7, 2026. Helen Frankenthaler on view through February 8, 2026. Wifredo Lam on view through April 11, 2026.
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Sotheby's
Sotheby's will mark its move into the Breuer building that once housed the Whitney with an opening exhibition of “modern and contemporary art” although further details are unclear. Going forward, the ample galleries in the space will showcase the works that Sotheby's is selling, and are open to the public for all to see. In addition to that exhibit, a handful of van Goghs are currently on view (and for sale).
Neue Galerie
Next up at the Neue? German Masterworks from the Neue Galerie, which will pull from the museum's vast stores of German art from the period 1890 to 1940. As Austria enjoyed the expressionist movement, Germany during this time saw major developments in color and form from the Brücke (Bridge) and Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) groups. Expect unexpected colors from Vasily Kandinsky, August Macke, and more. Nearly 40 works from the student years of the German expressionist painter Erich Heckel are also on display through January.
German Masterworks from the Neue Galerie on view through May 4, 2026.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Filling this wondrous museum's rotunda through January are 90 works by Rashid Johnson. A Poem for Deep Thinkers brings the contemporary artist's black-soap paintings, large-scale sculptures, film installations, and more to the Upper East Side, continuing the museum's 2025 trend toward vibrant and colorfully optimistic artwork. It's more than welcome. Also on display through March of next year is Collection in Focus: Modern European Currents with works from the collection in vivid color by the likes of Franz Marc and Natalia Goncharova.
For further color, Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World opens November 7 with 50 paintings (and 19 photographs from her extended stay in the United States between 1898 and 1900) hanging across three tower galleries from the under-sung German expressionist (lots of that in the city right now). Robert Rauschenberg: Life Can’t Be Stopped has over a dozen of the artist's enormous and energetic works in celebration of what would have been his 100th birthday, so poke your head in there as well.
Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers on view through January 18, 2026.
The Jewish Museum
Bright, bright color can be found at the Jewish Museum, where Anish Kapoor: Early Works presents 55 of the artist's sculptures and drawings from the beginning of his career. The highlight here are Kapoor's pigment sculptures, geometric models that look as though they've been placed on the floor and doused with powdered color.
On view through February 1, 2026.
The Studio Museum in Harlem
When it reopens November 15 after seven years of being shuttered and the construction of a $160 million new building, the Studio Museum in Harlem will be an exhibit of newfound vivacity in and of itself. But it's not just the impressive new modernist structure on West 125th Street and the permanent collection it houses that you'll want to see. There's also Tom Lloyd, an exploration of its titular artist's 20-year career that's also a full-circle moment for the museum—Lloyd's use of electric light as medium via programmed light sculptures was the subject of the Studio's first exhibition back in 1968.
On view through March 31, 2026.
International Center of Photography
Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide gets her first ever New York City retrospective through January with Serious Play at ICP, where the walls hang with over 200 images by Iturbide. Concerned for the most part in her home country and the vast diversity within it, Iturbide documented with her lens everything from communal life and indigenous communities to the Sonoran Desert and human interaction with natural environments.
On view through January 12, 2026.
Whitney Museum of American Art
Surrealism is the star of the moment at the Whitney, with Sixties Surreal aiming to track the artistic movement in America from its onset in 1958 through 1972. This is a period now most popularly associated with the pop art of the Manhattan scene, but this exhibition and its curators are interested in how surrealism bubbled under the radar and perhaps more adequately defines the decade in retrospect. Expect a wide range of works from the likes of Diane Arbus and Yayoi Kusama.
On view through January 19, 2026.
Museum of the Moving Image
There's still time to check out Mission: Impossible—Story and Spectacle, which puts a spotlight on the craft that's gone into the films in this series through the years—come for Tom Cruise, stay for costume pieces and intricate breakdowns of the stunt sequences. For something more avant-garde, Lu Yang: The Great Adventure of the Material World can be experienced two ways in the exhibition space: as a projected film for a passive viewer, or through interactive gameplay.
On view through December 14.
