One of the best galleries in Recent York? Artists select their favorites

Recent York City’s art museums are amongst the most well-liked on the planet — the Metropolitan Museum of Art (often called the Met) and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) attracted 5.4 million and a couple of.8 million visitors, respectively, in 2023, in keeping with The Art Newspaper.

CNBC asked artists to call their top Recent York galleries, starting from the well-known to the underground.

London-based screen-printing artist Diego Arellano likes Manhattan’s Chelsea galleries for his or her large rooms and high ceilings. “Places like C24, Hauser & Wirth and Dia feel like little contemporary museums — just without the tourist queues (and free of charge!),” he told CNBC by email. These galleries sometimes have “more daring” exhibitions than larger organizations, Arellano said.

C24 Gallery features artists who work in sculpture, ceramics and photography, in addition to paint, while Dia Chelsea will show an exhibition by filmmaker Steve McQueen from Sept. 20. Hauser & Wirth has two Chelsea galleries, and each are currently showing work by Hungarian-born U.S. artist Rita Ackermann.

Brooklyn resident and artist Zhuo Xiong also favors Chelsea galleries. Gladstone Gallery — with two locations in Chelsea — is considered one of his favorites. “The artists they select and the exhibitions they curate are top-tier,” he told CNBC by email, and he likes the David Zwirner gallery’s current exhibit, showing works by greater than 60 of its staff at its 519 and 525 West nineteenth Street locations.

Xiong also picked Tribeca gallery P·P·O·W, founded greater than 40 years ago by dealers Wendy Olsoff and Penny Pilkington and currently showing “Airhead,” a gaggle show based on teaching as an idea.

Artist and actor Edward Akrout is a fan of the world’s Mriya gallery, which opened last September and claims to be the “first Ukrainian art gallery in NYC.”

Akrout runs the nonprofit Art Shield, which supports artists threatened by conflict or censorship, and said he’s looking forward to the launch of “Saints,” a book by photographer Sasha Maslov that documents the war in Ukraine, which is able to launch at Mriya in the autumn. “Saints” features “portraits of unusual Ukrainians who’ve acted bravely and elevated themselves to sainthood,” in keeping with Akrout, in an email to CNBC.

Arellano likes Recent York City for its well-known galleries’ proximity to one another. “You possibly can essentially visit the Whitney, MoMA and Guggenheim all in the identical day,” he said. The Whitney Museum of American Art is within the Meatpacking district of Manhattan, while MoMA is in Midtown, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is further north, on the Upper East Side.

MoMA is “special” to British artist Kate Lewis, who first visited the museum when she was 17. “That is where I ‘met’ Matisse, Hopper [and] Degas,” she told CNBC by email, referring to French artists Henri Matisse and Edgar Degas, and American realist painter Edward Hopper.

Lewis, who creates botanical-style collages from newspaper stories, also advisable the Whitney for its “unmissable” Biennial exhibits. Its current show, “Even higher than the true thing,” features the work of 71 artists and collectives “grappling with a lot of today’s most pressing issues” — comparable to how AI affects what we understand to be real — in keeping with the gallery’s website.

Xiong described the Met gallery as having the best influence on his painting profession. “The Met’s collection is incredibly diverse, featuring every part from Egyptian mummies to Chinese porcelain, ancient Chinese bronzes, Chinese calligraphy and paintings, and European medieval works,” he said.

Xiong, who’s from Inner Mongolia, said that “The Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual,” a Qing dynasty painting guide that is an element of the Met’s collection, has influenced his forthcoming London exhibition. “Gone With the Wind” is being exhibited at London gallery Maison Pan — housed in vaults that when formed the U.K.’s National Gallery archives — until Aug. 15.

Arellano described the experimental art museum Swiss Institute within the East Village as a hidden gem, and said he likes its lobby bookstore, Printed Matter, which also holds fairs and launches.

Also within the East Village, artist and costume designer Machine Dazzle (born Matthew Flower) advisable La MaMa Galleria, which is connected to the theater space La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. “It supports artists pushing the boundaries of their medium,” he told CNBC by email.

Not far-off is OSMOS, an area run by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, a former Art Basel artistic director and “art world insider,” in keeping with the gallery’s website. Dazzle described her as “a genius of the art world,” and said the gallery’s eponymous printed magazine is “top notch.”

In the event you do not feel like heading to a gallery, there are many creative endeavors to see on the streets of the town, Arellano said. “In Recent York, walking around for hours, listening to conversations and music, seeing tens of millions of stickers, billboards, and posters, and what they write and paint on their partitions, has given me more material and inspiration than some other place I even have ever been,” he said.