Our Summertime Guide to Upper East Side Museums

 
We always enjoy welcoming so many of you who drop by our exhibitions on weekend afternoons. As we prepare to shift to our temporary summer schedule—with exhibitions on Fridays, Mondays and Tuesdays during July and August—we know many of our regular weekend visitors will be looking for new cultural destinations to explore.

Just beyond Doyle's doors, the museums of the Upper East Side are offering one of their strongest summer seasons in recent memory. Ancient Egypt meets modern sculpture, Revolutionary New York meets Wonderland, and the artistic worlds of Paris, Vienna and East Harlem all converge along Museum Mile. Here is our curated guide to the season's must-see shows.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Giacometti Meets Ancient Egypt

The Met’s defining exhibition of the summer is Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur, a remarkable installation placing seventeen sculptures by Alberto Giacometti within one of the museum’s most iconic spaces. The exhibition explores the Swiss sculptor’s lifelong fascination with ancient Egyptian art. Walking figures, standing women, and attenuated forms move through the temple precinct, creating an evocative dialogue between modern sculpture and a monument completed in 10 BCE. The presentation includes the largest showing of Giacometti’s plaster sculptures ever mounted in the United States. On view through September 8.

Also Noteworthy
  • Musical Bodies — exploring the relationship between musical instruments and the body across 4,000 years of art and objects. 
  • Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy — examining how globalism and colonialism shaped 19th century European visions of “the East.”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street. MetMuseum.org

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Carol Bove Takes Over the Rotunda

The Guggenheim's summer belongs to New York artist Carol Bove, whose first museum survey transforms Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral rotunda into a sculptural environment spanning more than 25 years of work. Towering steel forms, intimate collages, artist-designed seating areas, tactile libraries, and chess tables make this one of the most engaging exhibitions in New York this season. On view through August 2.

Also Noteworthy
  • Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now — exploring the enduring legacy of Pop Art from its emergence in the 1960s to contemporary practise.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street. Guggenheim.org

The Frick Collection

Fifth Avenue's Most Elegant Revival

Fresh from its celebrated reopening with newly accessible second floor galleries, the Frick Collection offers one of the most refined museum experiences in New York. And treat yourself to lunch at the Museum Café, a bijou setting that feels a world away from the city outside. 

This summer’s featured exhibition, Ruffles & Ribbons: Fashion Plates from the Time of Marie Antoinette, draws on the Frick Art Research Library’s holdings of rare hand-colored engravings from 18th century France. Many are shown publicly for the first time, revealing the visual culture and social language of fashion in the decades before the French Revolution. On view through August 3.

The Frick Collection. 1 East 70th Street at Fifth Avenue. Frick.org

Museum of the City of New York

New York Through Fantasy & Revolution

The Museum of the City of New York tells the city's story with unusual imagination and historical depth, and pairs perfectly with a visit to El Museo del Barrio next door.

Another Wonderland
Abram Champanier's restored New Deal-era mural cycle transforms Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland into a distinctly New York story, placing familiar characters amid the streets and culture of 1930s Manhattan. On view through September 27.

The Occupied City
Celebrating our nation's Semiquincentennial, this immersive exhibition examines New York during the Revolutionary era, exploring daily life under British occupation and the city's role in the founding of the republic.

Museum of the City of New York. 1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street. MCNY.org

El Museo del Barrio

Nuyorican Vision & Latinx Art

El Museo del Barrio presents wide-ranging exhibitions rooted in its longstanding commitment to Latinx, Caribbean and Latin American artistic production in New York and across the Americas. A combined visit with the Museum of the City of New York next door makes for one of the most rewarding cultural pairings on Fifth Avenue.

This summer’s landmark retrospective, Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures, is the first major museum survey of the pioneering Puerto Rican photographer. Moving between portraiture, conceptual photography, and experimental self-representation, the exhibition revisits Rivera’s role in shaping Nuyorican visual culture while expanding her place within contemporary photography and identity-based art. On view through August 2.

El Museo del Barrio. 1230 Fifth Avenue at 104th Street. ElMuseo.org

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

The Art of Making: Design, Industry & Process

Set within the former Andrew Carnegie Mansion, the Cooper Hewitt offers an intimate view of design as a way of understanding how objects, systems, and environments are made and experienced. Its galleries move between historic decorative arts and contemporary design, while the interactive “Pen” invites visitors to collect and engage with objects across centuries.

Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne
More than 70 large-format photographs trace Christopher Payne’s decade-long study of American manufacturing, from pencils and pianos to semiconductors and rockets. The series reveals the precision and labor behind industrial production, offering a portrait of making as a defining feature of American life. On view through September 27.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. 2 East 91st Street at Fifth Avenue. CooperHewitt.org

The Jewish Museum

Klee, Vienna & the Making of Modernity

The Jewish Museum brings together modernism, exile and design history in one of the Upper East Side’s most compelling summer programs.

Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds
The first American museum exhibition devoted to Klee’s final decade brings together approximately one hundred paintings and drawings created amid exile, illness and political upheaval. Rarely seen works—including the enigmatic Angelus Novus—anchor this revelatory presentation. On view through July 26.

Modernity and Opulence: Women of the Wiener Werkstätte
Opening mid-summer, this exhibition restores overlooked women artists, designers, patrons and innovators to the story of Vienna’s influential Wiener Werkstätte movement and early modern design. Opens July 17.

Also Noteworthy
  • Circa 1776: Jews in Colonial America. On view through August 9.

The Jewish Museum. 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street. TheJewishMuseum.org

Explore the Museums of the Upper East Side this Summer!

Few neighborhoods in the world can rival the concentration of artistic and cultural institutions found on the Upper East Side. We are fortunate to count these remarkable museums among our neighbors and hope this guide inspires summer weekends of discovery just beyond Doyle’s doors.