America's Best Cities for Artists: New York

Where do you begin with a city that has so much to offer? An art enthusiast’s dream come true, New York City has so many artistic works spilling out over its hundreds of museums and galleries that they are too numerous to detail in this section. To give you a small taste of the New York art scene, we’ll start with a few of the cultural heavy hitters, and then introduce some of the lesser-known but intriguing spots around the city.

The first stop for anyone exploring New York’s art scene should be the “Museum Mile” bordering Central Park, where you will find several of the world’s greatest museums concentrated in one area. Here, you can visit the easily recognizable Guggenheim Museum, which is renowned for its continuous spiral design and its permanent collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Contemporary art. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the building itself is one of the most important architectural landmarks in the United States. Nearby, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or more simply, “The Met”, is the largest museum in the United States. Its vast collection of art, including paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, is rivaled perhaps only by the Louvre in Paris. With an astonishing two million works of art under one roof, there is more art to revere in one day than most can possibly take in. Other significant museums (all in this area) include the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Frick Collection.

If the smaller gallery scene is more your style, then the neighborhood of Chelsea, located on the West Side of Manhattan, is where you will be spending your time. Widely considered to be the center of the New York art world after hundreds of galleries and independent artist studios flocked to the area in the mid-1990s, Chelsea is perhaps the most exciting and transformative area of New York. Formerly an ordinary, industrialized community with old brick buildings, abandoned warehouses, and dusty streets, the neighborhood is now flourishing, with an estimated 350+ art galleries and studios occupying newly developed artist space (see the Chelsea Gallery Map).

Looking past the visual arts as the centerpiece of the art scene in New York, students, and art lovers will find an abundance of opportunity in the thriving entertainment and performance arts industry. Next to Los Angeles, New York City is the second-largest center for the film industry and the world’s largest producer of independent films. Naturally, more than a third of all professional actors in the U.S. work out of New York City. The city is also home to the largest concentration and most popular group of theaters in the country. Commonly known as “Broadway”, the city’s collection of 40 large theaters (which have a minimum of 500 seats) hosted performances that were attended by over 12 million people in 2011. Close by, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is a vast complex of buildings with 29 indoor and outdoor performance facilities. Highlighting this group are the Metropolitan Opera House, the New York City Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Ballet, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Vivan Beaumont Theatre.