The best galleries in New York? Artists choose their favorites

New York City’s art museums are among the most popular in the world — the Metropolitan Museum of Art (known as the Met) and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) attracted 5.4 million and 2.8 million visitors, respectively, in 2023, according to The Art Newspaper.

CNBC asked artists to name their top New York galleries, ranging from the well-known to the underground.

London-based screen-printing artist Diego Arellano likes Manhattan’s Chelsea galleries for their large rooms and high ceilings. “Places like C24, Hauser & Wirth and Dia feel like little contemporary museums — just without the tourist queues (and for free!),” 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, as well as paint, while Dia Chelsea will show an exhibition by filmmaker Steve McQueen from Sept. 20. Hauser & Wirth has two Chelsea galleries, and both 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 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 more than 60 of its staff at its 519 and 525 West 19th Street locations.

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

Artist and actor Edward Akrout is a fan of the area’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 is looking forward to the launch of “Saints,” a book by photographer Sasha Maslov that documents the war in Ukraine, which will launch at Mriya in the fall. “Saints” features “portraits of ordinary Ukrainians who have acted bravely and elevated themselves to sainthood,” according to Akrout, in an email to CNBC.

Arellano likes New York City for its well-known galleries’ proximity to each other. “You can essentially visit the Whitney, MoMA and Guggenheim all in the same day,” he said. The Whitney Museum of American Art is in 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’s 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 recommended the Whitney for its “unmissable” Biennial exhibits. Its current show, “Even better than the real thing,” features the work of 71 artists and collectives “grappling with many of today’s most pressing issues” — such as how AI affects what we understand to be real — according to the gallery’s website.

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

Xiong, who is from Inner Mongolia, said that “The Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual,” a Qing dynasty painting guide that is part 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 once formed the U.K.’s National Gallery archives — until Aug. 15.

Akrout likes a “secret” gallery underneath the Manhattan Bridge, located above the East Broadway Mall in Chinatown. “It’s a very important contemporary art underground gallery,” he said.

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

Also in the East Village, artist and costume designer Machine Dazzle (born Matthew Flower) recommended 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 away is OSMOS, a space run by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, a former Art Basel artistic director and “art world insider,” according to 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.”

If you don’t feel like heading to a gallery, there are plenty of creative endeavors to see on the streets of the city, Arellano said. “In New York, walking around for hours, listening to conversations and music, seeing millions of stickers, billboards, and posters, and what they write and paint on their walls, has given me more material and inspiration than any other place I have ever been,” he said.