6 art galleries
Free to walk into, mostly — contemporary galleries across the city. Most are free; a few keep gallerist hours, so check before a special trip.
Gagosian
Larry Gagosian moved his gallery here from SoHo in 1999 into a 25,000-square-foot industrial space designed by architect Richard Gluckman, built to hold Richard Serra-scale steel.
The Chelsea space is essentially one large open warehouse floor, so shows lean toward big installation and sculpture rather than intimate viewing.
MoMA PS1
The building dates to 1892 as Long Island City's first public school, closed in 1963, and reopened in 1976 as an Institute for Art and Urban Resources project, taking the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center name after its 1997 renovation and formally affiliating with MoMA in 2000.
Galleries are laid out room by room through old classrooms and stairwells, and the courtyard turns into a dance-music venue for the Warm Up series on summer Fridays.
New Museum
Marcia Tucker founded the New Museum in 1977 to show work by living artists; its Bowery building by SANAA's Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa opened in 2007, the first art museum built from the ground up in downtown Manhattan.
The SANAA building stacks offset rectangular boxes, so the galleries are separate floors rather than one continuous route; the expansion that reopened in March 2026 added an atrium stair and further elevators to link them.
Paula Cooper
Paula Cooper opened the first art gallery in what would later be called SoHo in October 1968, at 96 Prince Street; by 1975 the renamed neighbourhood held 83 more. The gallery moved to Chelsea in 1996, into a West 21st Street building she had bought the year before.
Chelsea’s gallery blocks are concentrated west of Tenth Avenue in the low 20s, so this sits within a few minutes’ walk of most of the others and is easy to fold into one afternoon.
Pace
Arne Glimcher founded Pace in Boston in 1960, aged 22, running it with his wife Milly and his mother Eva. The Chelsea flagship it opened in 2019, designed by Bonetti/Kozerski, runs eight storeys and 70,000 square feet.
Eight floors is a longer visit than a typical gallery, and roughly 10,000 square feet of the exhibition space is outdoors — easy to miss if you stop at the main interior levels.
Hauser & Wirth
Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser founded the gallery in Zurich in 1992. Its West 22nd Street home, designed by Selldorf Architects and opened in spring 2020, was the first space the gallery built for itself rather than converted.
Being purpose-built rather than a reclaimed warehouse, the rooms are unusually tall, and shows lean toward large-scale installation rather than intimate hangs.