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.
Installation view of Man Ray: When Objects Dream, on view September 14, 2025–February 1, 2026 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Anna-Marie Kellen/Courtesy of The Met
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Man Ray (American, 1890–1976) Rayograph 1925. Gelatin silver print.
Musée d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève, photo by André Longchamp
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.
