Ten Summer Exhibitions to See in 2024

Looking for somewhere to beat the heat? Cool down and check out one of the city’s exciting many summer exhibitions. And don’t forget to get your Culture Pass for free admission to many of these (and more!)

The Met Fifth Avenue

• The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism (until July 28, 2024) This groundbreaking exhibition explores the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life. With over 150 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, and ephemera, you can explore the new Black cities that took shape in the 1920s–40s in the early decades of the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South.
• Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion (until September 2, 2024) The Costume Institute’s spring 2024 exhibition reactivates the sensory capacities of masterworks in the Museum’s collection. The exhibition features over 200 garments and accessories spanning four centuries, all visually connected through themes of nature, which also serves as a metaphor for the transience of fashion.
• Petrit Halilaj: Abetare (until October 27, 2024) For the artist’s first major project in the United States, Halilaj has transformed The Met roof with a sprawling sculptural installation. Halilaj’s work is deeply connected to the recent history of his native country, Kosovo, and the consequences of cultural and political tensions in the region.

Fotografiska

• Vivian Maier: Unseen Work (until September 29, 2024) explores Maier’s complete oeuvre from the early 1950s to the mid-1980s through more than 200 works. Vintage and modern prints, color, black and white, and Super 8 films and soundtracks offer a complete vision of the dense, rich, and complex architecture of this archive, which provides a fascinating testimony to post-war America and the idea of the American dream.

Museum of Modern Art

• Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning (until July 6, 2024) presents drawings, photographs, notebooks, oral histories, film screenings, performances, and a selection of the artist’s installations. These trace the full breadth of her career with works that explore the encounters between performance and technology to recent installations about ecology and the landscape.
• Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time (until August 12, 2024) Best known for her flower paintings, O’Keeffe also made extraordinary series of works in charcoal, pencil, watercolor, and pastel. Reuniting works on paper that are often seen individually, along with key paintings, this exhibition offers a rare glimpse of the artist’s working methods and invites us to take time to look.

Brooklyn Museum

• Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm (until August 18, 2024) As The Beatles captured the hearts of millions, Paul McCartney captured it all on his Pentax camera. This exhibit takes us inside the frenzy of Beatlemania in 1963–64, when the band’s first U.S. tour skyrocketed them to superstardom. More than 250 of McCartney’s photos, recently rediscovered in his archives, reveal his singular vantage point at the center of this whirlwind of attention and adoration. Many of the prints buzz with the electricity of 1960s New York City, which has had a love affair with The Beatles ever since.
• Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys (until July 7, 2024) The first major exhibition of the Dean Collection, Giants showcases a focused selection from the couple’s world-class holdings. Expansive in their collecting habits, the Deans champion a philosophy of “artists supporting artists” and encourage “giant conversations” inspired by the works on view—critiquing society and celebrating Blackness.

The Whitney

• Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than The Real Thing (until August 11, 2024) The 81st edition of the Biennial—the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States—features 71 artists and collectives grappling with many of today’s most pressing issues. This gathering of artists explores the permeability of the relationships between mind and body, the fluidity of identity, and the growing precariousness of the natural and constructed worlds around us. Whether through subversive humor, expressive abstraction, or non-Western forms of cosmological thinking, these artists demonstrate that there are pathways to be found, strategies of coping and healing to be discovered, and ways to come together even in a fractured time.

The Guggenheim

• Jenny Holzer: Light Line (until September 29, 2024) This exhibition presents a reimagination of her landmark 1989 installation at the Guggenheim. Climbing all six ramps of the rotunda to the building’s apex, the site-specific installation transforms the building with a display of scrolling texts featuring selections from her iconic series, such as “Truisms” and “Inflammatory Essays”.

Fancy something off the beaten track? Check out this exhibit that explores the fascinating history of downtown artist lofts, Art in Dumbo’s First Thursday Gallery Walk, or grab a friend and experience LES Gallery Nights. Want to keep up to date on what’s on in the smaller galleries? Thirsty Gallerina has an awesome guide to openings around the city.