This Summer’s Must-See Exhibitions in NYC

No trip to New York City is complete without a visit to a favorite museum… or several of them! Whether you want to get lost in the art of millennia at The Met, hone in on something very specific at The Frick, or explore emerging artists at The New Museum, there are always endless opportunities to immerse yourself in art.

Photo of Mycah Bueché

This is especially true with the annual roster of headlining summer exhibitions. Here at The Knickerbocker, we’re celebrating being an official hotel partner of NYC Pride (link to Pride blog when it’s posted) with some art of our own. We collaborated with multi-hyphenate, Latina lesbian artist Mycah Bueché, who created limited edition coffee sleeves for Jake’s honoring NYC LGBTQIA+ landmarks. They make the perfect accessory to take your coffee “to-go” to some of this summer’s most exciting NYC exhibitions. 

Young Picasso in Paris

The Guggenheim’s Young Picasso in Paris (through August 6th ) is one of six major exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. commemorating the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death. The show is comprised of 10 paintings, all created in the year after Picasso arrived in Paris in the fall of 1900. The centerpiece of the exhibition is Le Moulin de la Galette, which invites comparison to dance hall scenes by other artists of the era, including Vincent van Gogh, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Ramon Casas.

Photo collage courtesy of Brooklyn Museum: Left: Pablo Picasso, 1920 © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artist Rights Society (ARS) New York. Right: Hannah Gadsby, 2018 (Photo: Alan Moyle)

 It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby

For a different take on Picasso, this exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum (through Sept. 24th) looks at the artist through the critical, feminist lens of Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby and her co-curators, Lisa Small and Catherine Morris. It includes works by Picasso as well as by 20th– and 21st-century women artists.

Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Van Gogh’s Cypresses

This exhibition, devoted exclusively to the cypresses with which Vincent van Gogh became preoccupied toward the end of his life, may well go down in history as one of the seminal VvG retrospectives. From the hauntingly beautiful, yet strangely desolate, trees that are its subject, to the lodestar inclusion of The Starry Night (whose cypresses are the definition of hiding in plain sight!), to the recent discovery of gravel mixed in with some of the paint, the show and its curation contributes volumes of texture to van Gogh’s tortured artist mystique. (Through August 27th)

 Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time

MoMA’s major O’Keeffe retrospective (through August 12th) includes work from 1915-1964 and traces the evolution of the artist’s perspective and technique during those era-defining decades.

This is New York

This year, the Museum of the City of New York is celebrating its centennial anniversary by fitting New York’s entire pop culture history into a city block. Their immersive, family-friendly exhibition (through July 2024) devotes an entire floor of the museum to love letters to NYC in music, art, books, film, fashion, television and even memes (Pizza Rat is ready for his close-up, Mr. DeMille). Music-lovers of all ages will jump at the chance to step on a floor map featuring each of the five boroughs and hear a song by an artist from that borough.

Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s flagship show this summer (through July 16th) is dedicated to the 65-year career of Karl Lagerfeld, a.k.a Kaiser Karl, a.k.a. cat father and $1.5 million benefactor to Choupette, a.k.a. the man with the can (of Diet Coke). This exhibition carefully sidesteps the more problematic aspects of Karl, the person, to celebrate Karl, the designer, with more than 200 pieces that represent his 26 years at Chanel, 54 years at Fendi, 25 at Chloé, and 35 at his eponymous brand — and the incredible impact those years had on the world of fashion. 

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