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.