The Museum of Modern Art — Attraction in New York

MoMA is an amazing museum with a remarkable collection, stretching all the way up to the roof! The artworks here are thought-provoking, and as Ed Ruscha once said, 'Art has to be something that makes you scratch your head.' I couldn't agree more. It's like an art heaven that has so much to offer!

While not the largest museum, it's precisely the right size. You don't need days to explore it, and there's no fear of missing out. You'll find iconic pieces from artists like Dali, Picasso, Klimt, Matisse, Rothko, Warhol, Pollock, and many more. What sets MoMA apart is the arrangement of art. Instead of rooms filled with a single artist's work, you get collections of pieces with similar styles and techniques. Each item is named and explained, but I recommend bringing headphones and using the audio app for more in-depth information. The lighting inside is excellent, the rooms are spacious, and there are seats for you to sit, relax, and admire the art. The museum stores offer unique, high-quality items that caught my interest.

I personally loved the AI exhibition from American-Turkish artist Refik Anadol. You might have come across his digital artwork on social media. Titled 'Unsupervised,' it's an absolute masterpiece that interprets and transforms over 200 years of art at MoMA. Watching artificial intelligence create new shapes and colors of art is nothing short of brilliant, fascinating, and utterly mesmerizing. I've never seen anything quite like it, and I could gaze at that screen for hours. I'm thrilled that MoMA has decided to make this a permanent exhibition.

However, MoMA has its downsides. It's clear that their primary goal is to make money, with customer satisfaction coming second. The limited opening hours (only 7 hours a day) make it tough for working people to visit during the week. Weekends are often packed, especially on bad weather days. I had to wait 15+ minutes in the queue outside forming around the block, luckily it went fast. The museum lacks effective organization as the maps offered little guidance, failing to indicate where to find specific pieces or the art style in each room. Instead, the rooms are named after donors, which, as a visitor, felt irrelevant and inconsequential.

The museum doesn't limit the number of visitors, which can lead to overcrowding, especially around popular pieces like van Gogh. The lack of a cloakroom is inconvenient, forcing visitors to carry all their belongings. The bathroom situation, especially on the ground floor, doesn't match the number of visitors and gets very busy.

All these issues named above, even though they are subjective, could be resolved with visitor limits, but that would certainly affect the museum's revenue. Regardless of the downsides, MoMA is worth a visit for its extraordinary art collection and the 25 USD entrance is more than fair. You will go through a fascinating journey of modern art, that's for sure! Visited on a Saturday,...

I knew this would be my favorite stop on our NYC vacation, and I was 100% correct! There was so much to see! Starry Night on display, along with several Georgia O'Keeffe paintings and a handful of Monet's works...just incredible. I kept tearing up while walking around, because it's just so incredible to see such famous pieces of art and realize that these pieces have long outlived the artists themselves. Did they have any idea their art would be so inspiring to so many? Did they even intend to show off their work, or was it just something they did for enjoyment? Such an amazing thing art is! I'm a fine arts painter, though I'll never be featured in this type of masterfully curated locale, and just seeing so many paintings I recognized was incredible to me emotionally.

Compared to the Met, MoMA is rather small, and of course none of the exhibits are ancient. Rather than needing several days to see it all like at the Met and constantly feeling like the building couldn't possibly be so large, MoMA felt mostly manageable in one afternoon trip. We left feeling content with the amount and variety we had seen from various mediums and artists, both known and unknown to us prior to our visit.

Compared to the Guggenheim, MoMA is large, spread-out, and diverse. The Guggenheim really only has one pathway through the museum, but MoMA is a bit more of a maze. Guggenheim was small enough we could reasonably see everything in a few hours, but we also felt it was a little one-note, with most of the current exhibits being from only a handful of lesser-known artists. MoMA had more variety, and also just more in general.

Compared to the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA is filled with more works by better-known artists and felt a bit elevated in the art world. The Whitney felt a bit smaller than MoMA, but still larger and a little more diverse than the Guggenheim. The Whitney felt more like a local art gallery, while MoMA rightly felt like something people travel the world to see.

Over all, MoMA was wonderful. We thoroughly enjoyed our visit, and would love to return again someday if we are ever back in NYC. It's absolutely a "do not miss" for any itinerary, and the manageable size coupled with the quality of famous works makes it, in my opinion, the best of the main NYC art museums to add to a very short trip. If you're in NYC, you really just...

Currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Jack Whitten: The Messenger is a profound retrospective that encapsulates the late artist’s dynamic career, bridging abstraction, memory, Black identity, and political witnessing. The exhibition unfolds across multiple galleries with a thoughtful chronology, offering a journey through Whitten’s evolving techniques—from gestural abstraction to his signature “mosaic” canvases and sculptural assemblages.

Visitors are welcomed by a bold blue wall emblazoned with the exhibition title, surrounded by photographs of Whitten’s studio and life. This grounding context sets the tone for a show deeply rooted in material exploration and intellectual rigor. The artworks themselves defy categorization. One moves from painterly explosions of color to serene, methodical grids made from tessellated acrylic chips. Each work pulses with layered meaning—tributes to historical figures, meditations on space and time, and coded narratives of Black experience.

A standout moment includes Whitten’s mosaic portraits, where pigment is treated sculpturally. The silhouette-based portrait on a glowing aqua field is both ghostly and reverent, embodying Whitten’s view of the artist as a spiritual “messenger.” Another highlight is the towering totemic sculpture encrusted with circuit boards and electronic debris, merging ancestral craft with contemporary detritus—science fiction meets African cosmology.

The exhibition benefits from its spacious layout. Visitors are given room to absorb the large-scale works, and many linger—whether snapping photos of the textured surfaces or following along with the guided tours, which add interpretive depth.

In sum, Jack Whitten: The Messenger is both visually commanding and intellectually invigorating. MoMA has done justice to an artist who persistently challenged formal conventions and insisted on art’s role in bearing witness. It’s an essential stop for those interested in the intersections of modernism, identity, and innovation in...