Extending from Chinatown to Houston Street, the art scene centres around Manhattan's only museum devoted to contemporary art: the New Museum on the Bowery.

More traditional contemporary art galleries-such as Sperone Westwater and Lehmann Maupin-also have strong presences in the neighbourhood.

These include Bodega, Chapter NY, CANADA, JTT, 47 Canal, Invisible Exports, Zach Feuer Gallery, 33 Orchard, Foxy Productions, and Sargent's Daughters. The Lower East Side is often cited as home to the more avantgarde or experimental spaces. DIA Chelsea-the New York branch of the DIA Foundation-is one of the notable non-profit spaces in the area. While these spaces are spread out across the city's five boroughs, many of them can be found in the following six neighbourhoods: Chelsea, the Lower East Side, Soho, 57th Street, Williamsburg/Bushwick/Greenpoint, and Dumbo.Ĭhelsea-a former industrial neighbourhood ripe with wide-open warehouse spaces along the far west side of Manhattan between 14th and 34th Streets-is home to mega-galleries Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, Gagosian, Pace, Anton Kern, Gladstone, Marianne Boesky, and Lehmann Maupin, among many, many others. These galleries range from blue chip institutions to non-profit art spaces and artist-run initiatives. In total, the city is estimated to contain close to 1,500 galleries. The concentration of galleries in New York is perhaps most important to its status in the art world. MoMA PS1-an offshoot of the stalwart Museum of Modern Art-has been one of the largest American non-profit art institutions since its establishment in 1971, while The Met Breuer-the recently opened annex to The Metropolitan Museum of Art-provides ample opportunity to encounter 20th- and 21st-century masterpieces on Madison Avenue. Other notable institutions dedicated to modern and contemporary art include the famed Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, designed by the legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, founded in 1930 by sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Devoted to the evolving story of contemporary art around the world, The Museum of Modern Art holds 200,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, media and performance art works, architectural models and drawings, designed objects, and films. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, founded in 1870, houses a behemoth collection that encompasses over two million works of art made over a period of 5,000 years. One reason for New York's significance is the city's many well-endowed cultural institutions. You can find gallery spaces in just about every neighbourhood from Greenpoint, and Bushwick, to Red Hook, and beyond. Not to be outdone, the Lower East Side is also a go-to destination for gallery-goers, with edgy spaces, like that of Karma's, found within former storefronts and upstairs lofts.īrooklyn is famous for being home to many of New York's artists, and while rising rents have pushed many artists out of the suburb it still retains its arty edge, offering up a plethora of exceptional galleries to visit. Many of the art galleries are situated in late-19th and early 20th-century townhouses, like LGDR situated on Madison Avenue. The Uptown art galleries dotted along Manhattan's Upper East Side, not far from the Guggenheim and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, also offer up exceptional viewing, albeit the spaces are different from those found in Chelsea's art gallery district. Offering up a myriad of art galleries to explore, contemporary art can be found all across the city, from the Upper East Side, and Lower East Side, to Midtown, Soho, and Chelsea and over to Brooklyn and beyond.Ĭhelsea offers art collectors and other art lovers, one on the most accessible and largest art clusters, with rows and rows of gallery lined streets, and it is here you can find the flagship outposts of global mega galleries Gagosian, David Zwirner, White Cube and more.

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