The 30 Best Art Museums in the US

A stately institution dating to the early 20th century—when Charm City was still a bustling port—the Baltimore Museum of Art boasts more than 1,200 works by Henri Matisse, enough to warrant its own Center for Matisse Studies. But the collection extends far beyond that strength, encompassing Picasso, Monet, and Degas, alongside an adventurous contemporary program that has included notable exhibitions of Native American artists. In 2023, the museum mounted the standout “The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century,” featuring more than 90 works that captured both the visual and sonic spirit of the genre. —Andy Battaglia

The Seattle Art Museum has no shortage of standout items in its collections and programming. These include a broad array of Native and Indigenous modern and contemporary art, dozens of works by Alexander Calder from the collection of Jon and Kim Shirley, as well as modern masterpieces by Rothko, Lee Krasner, Alberto Giacometti, and Joan Mitchell from the collection of Jane Lang Davis and Richard Lang. Its temporary exhibitions have included Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Yayoi Kusama, Jacob Lawrence, Amoako Boafo, and Lauren Halsey. Its Olympic Sculpture Park transformed the city’s waterfront with large sculptures by Richard Serra, Louise Nevelson, and Beverly Pepper facing the mountains. And its Asian Art Museum has a growing permanent collection of religious and contemporary art, showcased in a treasured historic Art Deco building that recently underwent a $56 million, three-year renovation. —Karen K. Ho

Established in 1900, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is one of the oldest encyclopedic institutions in the US and the oldest institution in Texas. In the century and a quarter since its founding, the museum has been in a seemingly continual state of expansion. Its campus now consists of three main buildings, the newest of which, the Kinder Building for modern and contemporary art, was completed in 2020. The original neoclassical Caroline Wiess Law Building, meanwhile, was completed in 1924 and boasts two extensions—the first in 1958 and the second in 1974—by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, representing his only museum buildings in the US. While the MFA’s collection spans centuries of creation, the museum is most notable for its deep holdings in Latin American and Latinx art, as well as that department’s affiliated research center, the International Center for the Arts of the Americas, which has also contributed significant scholarship to the field. —Maximilíano Durón

Founded by Albert Barnes in 1922, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia is home to more than 4,000 objects and over 900 paintings, primarily (though not limited to) ones by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masters. Among them are such wonderful works as Henri Matisse’s Le Bonheur de vivre (1905–06) and The Dance (1932–33), Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Le Déjeuner (1875), and Paul Cézanne’s The Bathers (1906). The collection is sizable, and the Barnes’s current building—to which the museum controversially relocated in 2012—is grand, too. But the museum still feels intimate, with the permanent collection meticulously arranged the way Barnes intended: paintings are hung on top of each other, often in pairings displayed side by side. Unusually for a US museum, the Barnes does not include wall text alongside those paintings, allowing viewers to have an unmediated experience with the art. —Francesca Aton

When Japanese architect Tadao Ando completed his new building for the Clark Art Institute in 2014, it came with one of the most charming additions to a museum in recent memory: an ice skating rink. When the reflecting pools built into the museum’s surrounding landscape freeze in the winter, out come the skaters. It’s the perfect touch for an institution in the heart of the Berkshires, which attracts visitors in summer and winter alike. Inside the museum, you’ll find a world-class collection of Impressionism, along with some concurrent artistic styles: William Bouguereau is far too saccharine for this writer’s taste, but if this strain of academicism is your cup of tea, you can do no better than his masterpiece, Nymphs and Satyr. The Clark—as it’s commonly called—began as the collection of Robert Sterling Clark, heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, but it has never stopped growing. The most recent development is the gift of 331 artworks from the Aso O. Tavitian Foundation, along with $45 million to build a new wing to house it. In a few years, when it’s built, there will be even more reasons to visit. —Sarah Douglas

Much like its neighbor down the street (the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, also on this list), this Texan institution offers a master class in how architecture can dramatically reframe much-loved masterpieces. The Kimbell Art Museum’s famed galleries, conceived by architect Louis Kahn, are deliberately spare, with vaulted ceilings meant to recall Italian religious sites. His architecture bestows majesty upon this museum, which opened in 1972 and is now one of the great destinations for Renaissance and Old Masters art in the US. Come for astonishing paintings by Caravaggio, El Greco, Duccio, Georges de la Tour, and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. Stay for less widely known gems such as Gustave Caillebotte’s On the Pont de l’Europe (1876–77), a painting of bowler-hatted men at a train station. Its greatness shines brightly when seen anywhere, but the painting looks especially dazzling under Kahn’s ceilings. —Alex Greenberger

America’s first university art museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, was founded in 1832, when artist John Trumbull gifted around 100 of his paintings to the college. Today, the museum’s holdings number over 300,000 works, and its galleries span three architecturally distinct buildings: the neo-Gothic Street Hall, the 1920s-era Old Yale Art Gallery, and a gallery for British art designed by modernist architect Louis Kahn that counts as his masterpiece. Free and open to all, those galleries hold Greek and Roman antiquities, African sculpture and textiles, paintings by some of America’s foremost chroniclers—Winslow Homer, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Edward Hopper, among others—and more than 50,000 works on paper, from the Renaissance to today. Can’t make it to New Haven? The gallery is known for sharing its collection through long-term installations and organizing traveling exhibitions, such as a Yale-conceived Sol LeWitt retrospective that has been on view at MASS MoCA since 2008 and will remain there through 2043. —Tessa Solomon

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture isn’t solely an art museum, but since opening in 2016, it has left a major mark on the US art world, thanks in large part to founding director Lonnie G. Bunch, now the Smithsonian’s first secretary. Under Bunch, and later poet Kevin Young, the NMAAHC developed its curatorial approach, which blends Black popular culture, history, and art—often questioning why we separate these categories at all. Its collection spans over 40,000 objects, including near-totemic artifacts like Louis Armstrong’s trumpet, Chuck Berry’s red Cadillac, and Harriet Tubman’s shawl, alongside an art collection that stretches from the colonial period to today. Those artworks include pieces by David Hammons, Sam Gilliam, Rashid Johnson, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, Elizabeth Catlett, and Alma Thomas. There’s something undeniably thrilling about seeing their work embedded in a context that deepens one’s understanding of both their practice and the culture and history that helped produce them. —Harrison Jacobs

Located about 45 minutes outside Dallas’s bustling center, the comparatively quiet city of Fort Worth is host to a museum district whose serenity works to the advantage of this institution. Its Tadao Ando–designed building, opened in 2002, threads a difficult needle: it acts as a beautiful place of contemplation, with a sizable reflecting pool and several glassy pavilions, while also never managing to defang the art on view, which tends to be politically thorny and conceptually knotty. The museum’s grand size allows it to show off monumental works few others can exhibit, including a 2012 Jenny Holzer installation whose LED signs feature text that appears to flow like a river, with her words streaming onward for hours before looping. Alongside a rich exhibition program that includes retrospectives so big that most other institutions can’t host them, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth also maintains well-manicured grounds that are themselves worth exploring; they host epically scaled pieces by Richard Serra, Roxy Paine, and others. —Alex Greenberger

Nestled in the heart of Atlanta, the High Museum of Art holds many distinct honors. Designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Richard Meier, its building is the largest art museum in the southeastern United States; within its expansive walls is one of the nation’s largest collections of photographs documenting the American civil rights movement, with images by storied photographers including Gordon Parks, Ernest Withers, and Danny Lyon. Its photography holdings are matched by a renowned collection of folk and self-taught art, with works by artists including Ted Gordon, Nellie Mae Rowe, and Ulysses Davis. Its present is defined by an intellectually curious curatorial program: in recent years, the High organized the first major retrospective of self-taught artist Minnie Evans in three decades, which later traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art; a sweeping exhibition dedicated to unraveling misconceptions about Isamu Noguchi’s relationship to design; and a photography exhibition that reexamined avant-garde movements of the 1920s and ’30s through a contemporary lens. Director Rand Suffolk, meanwhile, has a proven track record of community engagement. And years before the 2020 George Floyd protests sparked museums around the country to diversify their audiences, the High tripled the share of its nonwhite audience in two years, from 15 percent in 2015 to 45 percent in 2017. – Tessa Solomon

Collector and Walmart heiress Alice Walton founded Crystal Bridges in 2011 “to celebrate the American spirit in a setting that unites the power of art with the beauty of nature,” and the 120 forested acres of Bentonville, Arkansas, are matched in majesty by the museum’s 3,000-piece collection of modern and contemporary American art. The more than 3.5 miles of Ozark trails on this campus are home to sculptures by Dave Chihuly, Louise Bourgeois, and Marina Abramović, among others. Indoors, the museum has been quietly shaping the history of American art. In 2018, the museum recentered its early American art galleries around Native American, folk, and Spanish colonial art; and in 2020, Crystal Bridges announced the acquisition of 31 historic and contemporary artworks by 25 Native American painters and illustrators, including a rare selection of San Ildefonso self-taught artists. And, just this year, the museum opened a new expansion that adds 114,000 square feet of new galleries, education and programming spaces. Complementing these galleries are blockbuster surveys for artists such as Annie Leibovitz and KAWS, as well as rich group shows about sports, sculpture, Indigenous art, and more. —Tessa Solomon

When it comes to museum architecture, there’s nothing quite like the Guggenheim Museum’s swirling rotunda. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, this museum broke the mold when it comes to what an institution can look like and how it feels to navigate one, favoring a slow ascent that offers a totally different viewing experience from most other art spaces. It’s all the more notable because the Guggenheim generally functions like a traditional museum otherwise, with a collection of some 8,000 objects spanning the late 19th century to today. (The collection’s strength remains high modernism, or what was formerly termed non-objective art, a style that lent this museum its name before it was changed to honor its founder in 1952.) But generally, the museum devotes its rotunda not to its permanent collection but to its robust exhibition programming, which includes retrospectives for art stars, surveys for artists awaiting canonization, and exhibitions about under-researched international art movements.—Maximilíano Durón

There is a reason why Alfred Hitchcock chose to feature the Legion of Honor, one of two museums run by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, so prominently in Vertigo (1958), his dreamy thriller about a man obsessed with looking. You, too, will find much to obsess over at the Legion of Honor, which is set within a park that seems to remove it from the rest of San Francisco. Here, there are many Old Masters paintings by artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Tiepolo, Rembrandt, and Thomas Gainsborough. And then, in a class all its own, there is the Rodin gallery, a cavernous room with an organ that is sometimes played for the public. Few other US museums can provide the otherworldliness that the Rodin room offers, though the galleries of the nearby de Young Museum have their own virtues. There, great modern and contemporary pieces share space with an exceedingly rich collection of African art—an unlikely marriage that the institution has imaginatively used to its benefit by commissioning living artists to make work in response to what’s on view. —Alex Greenberger

Reasons to visit the Detroit Institute of Arts may include Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals, a floor-to-ceiling ode to the auto sector; an 1887 Vincent van Gogh self-portrait, the first work by the painter acquired by an American cultural institution; or its center for African American art, one of the first curatorial ventures dedicated to the subject at a major museum. But there are 65,000 more reasons to visit in its collection, which spans prehistory to the present and represents the Indigenous Americas and Pacific Islands, the ancient Mediterranean, and European art. The museum has earned praise for its service to the majority-Black population of Detroit; thousands of schoolchildren have been bused to its galleries, which are free to enter for residents of the surrounding counties. The museum has also strived to correct its oversight of Michigan’s prodigious Arab American community. Last year, the DIA staged a show of food culture in the “Islamic World,” with consultation from the director of the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn—and promised that still more was ahead. —Tessa Solomon

Unlike pretty much any other institution on this list, the Walker Art Center is even more notable for its venturesome exhibition program than its permanent collection, which is rich in modern and contemporary art by Andy Warhol, Joan Mitchell, Edward Hopper, and other pillars of the 20th and 21st centuries. Founded in 1879 and transformed in the 1940s into the institution it is today, the Walker is the kind of museum that mounts retrospectives and historical surveys that few others would. Its programming leans conceptual and international; the curators show a willingness to embrace mediums other than painting and sculpture. But if it’s sculpture you want, you’re also in luck: the Walker manages the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, the permanent home of such works as Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Spoonbridge and Cherry (1985–88), a piece so iconic that images of it have become a shorthand for this Minnesota city. —Alex Greenberger

As a collector, Boston philanthropist and heiress Isabella Stewart Gardner had a singular eye. She put care into every aspect of her collection, from the masterpieces themselves to the home where she housed them. When she made her first major art purchase in 1892, buying the Vermeer painting The Concert (ca. 1664) for $5,000, she made international headlines and set the tone for what would come. Working alongside architect Willard Sears, Gardner personally conceived this museum so that it resembled a Venetian palazzo and meticulously chose the location of each artwork, with her will stating they could never be moved. The works have thus all stayed in place for over a century—minus the 13 works, including The Concert and three Rembrandt paintings, that were stolen in 1990, in what is today considered the largest art heist in history. Decades later, empty frames hang where these canvases once appeared, a poignant specter of the great works that were taken. —Maximilíano Durón

According to the logic of coastal elitism, the center of the country is a dead zone for museums. Not so, because just as you can spend days on end taking in the greatness of the Met’s galleries, you can also spend days on end in the treasure-filled permanent collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. The offerings of this encyclopedic institution run the gamut from remarkable ancient Greek vases to prime examples of Hudson River School painting, which gained acclaim in the US during the 19th century. Nestled among them are all sorts of works that have gained worldwide fame. Did you know, for example, that La Vie (1903), the high-water mark of Picasso’s Blue Period, resides at this Ohio institution? Well, it does, along with many other masterworks that can only be found here, in the Rust Belt. —Alex Greenberger

Ever since its opening in 1935, the Frick Collection has exuded old-world charm, acting as a first-class repository for Henry Clay Frick’s dazzling art collection. (Even the museum’s 2025 overhaul by Annabelle Selldorf, done at a whopping cost of $330 million, wasn’t flashy: It may have added a whole other floor to the Frick, but the bulk of the institution appeared untouched, with much of the money going toward behind-the-scenes upkeep.) And what a collection! The Frick contains too many capital-G Great works to count, among them an entire cycle of Fragonard works, unforgettable portraits by James McNeill Whistler, and not one but three Johannes Vermeer paintings. (The Louvre, by comparison, has just two Vermeers.) The Frick may be smaller in scale than the Met, its main Upper East Side counterpart, but a visit to this museum could require nearly as much time because of all the masterpieces on hand. One could easily devote hours alone to Giovanni Bellini’s ca. 1475–80 painting St. Francis in the Desert, one of the Frick’s crown jewels. —Alex Greenberger

There are many museums that have holdings of Marcel Duchamp, but there is only one that has what, to my mind, amounts to a shrine to him, and that is the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In one room, you will find two of Duchamp’s most mysterious and compelling (and big!) pieces: The Large Glass and Étant donnés, the latter of which requires that you peer through a hole in an old wooden door to catch a glimpse of a nude woman holding up a lantern. (Today’s so-called experiential art has nothing on Duchamp.) Of course, the museum isn’t just for Duchamp fans. There’s a mind-blowing room of works by Constantin Brancusi, and an atrium-like space where you can lose hours figuring out whose limbs belong to whom in Paul Cézanne’s Large Bathers. Tertiary to all of this is the fact that fictional boxer Rocky Balboa in Rocky ran up the museum’s famous steps while he was in training. So even if you hate art, there are ways to engage with this place: if you’re in good enough shape, you can make your way down Benjamin Franklin Parkway and recreate that iconic moment. —Sarah Douglas

There would be no Museum of Modern Art without the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (née the Albright-Knox Art Gallery). Its first director, A. Conger Goodyear, was ousted after acquiring a now-famous Picasso—then went on to help found MoMA. While the AKG cannot rival MoMA in scale, it can in quality. The AKG, too, can comprehensively tell the story of modern art in the West, with a multitude of treasures in its galleries: Frida Kahlo’s beloved Self-Portrait with Monkey (1938); Giacomo Balla’s hypnotic 1912 painting of a moving dog, blurred as though shot by a camera; major Post-Impressionist works by Paul Gauguin and Georges Seurat. Recent expansions of the collection include Marisol’s estate, key works of video art, and digital artworks that more conservatively minded institutions wouldn’t dare touch. Since opening in 1905, the AKG has always merited a visit to Buffalo, an Upstate New York city not far from the Canadian border that boasts few other notable art spaces. Now, following a 2023 expansion that doubled its footprint, the museum’s brilliance is harder than ever to ignore. —Alex Greenberger

For a museum with a somewhat encyclopedic collection, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a rather young one, having been established in 1961 when it split off from the county’s natural history museum. It soon moved to Wilshire Boulevard, near the La Bear Tar Pits, and in the decades since, has become the largest art museum in the Western United States, with some 155,000 objects spanning 6,000 years. The past two decades have also seen the museum undergo a major transformation of its campus, which was capped off in April when it opened its long-awaited, at times controversial, Peter Zumthor–designed building, officially known as the David Geffen Galleries. Spanning Wilshire Boulevard, LACMA’s new digs elegantly display the strengths of its collection—mostly ceramics, furniture, sculpture, and other objects that need room to breathe. That’s not say it doesn’t have a smattering of great paintings, from Rembrandt’s Portrait of Martin Looten (1623) to Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969), donated by the museum’s late board cochair Elaine Wynn upon her death. With this reimagining of its campus, LACMA also commissioned several outdoor works and reinstalled its famed Calder fountain, which now join its other iconic outdoor works, Chris Burden’s Urban Light and Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass (2012), now considered must-see landmarks in the City of Angeles. —Maximilíano Durón

The Menil Collection has an intimate sense of scale and a rare mix of serenity and dynamism, making it a peerless sanctuary for seeing—and truly sensing—art. Founded to house the collection of John and Dominique de Menil (he died 10 years before the museum opened; she lived 10 years beyond its 1987 debut), the museum’s main building was designed by Renzo Piano. It features modes of display that feel animated and even playful, with orderly but idiosyncratic shelves, plinths, and chambers presenting spirited groupings of objects (including installations titled “A Surrealist Wunderkammer” and “Animals, Monsters, and Creatures from the Collection”). Adjoining buildings complete an expansive campus that includes the Cy Twombly Gallery, the Menil Drawing Institute, and a dedicated space for a Dan Flavin installation, as well as the affiliated Rothko Chapel nearby. —Andy Battaglia

There is a long lineage of disused postindustrial spaces being transformed into dreamy art havens, and Dia Beacon—a 300,000-square-foot former cardboard-box factory that opened in 2003—is a particularly weighty chapter in that history. Today, the museum is a pilgrimage site in New York’s Hudson River Valley. A scenic riverside train ride from Manhattan leads to spacious, austere galleries devoted to holdings of the Dia Art Foundation, with a focus on long-term installations of Minimalism and related practices from the 1960s and ’70s (Michael Heizer, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, among others). Contemporary programming complements the historical core, and the museum’s monumental Richard Serra sculptures—installed outdoors—are must-sees. —Andy Battaglia

Since its founding in 1931, the Whitney Museum of American Art has championed living artists, beginning with Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s own collection of six hundred works. Today, the museum’s holdings have grown to over 25,000 pieces by more than 3,600 artists, offering a sweeping view of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American art. The collection traces movements from the Ashcan School to Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism, and politically engaged work from the 1980s onward, with a special emphasis on works on paper and underrecognized voices. Anchored by major figures like Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jasper Johns, and Lorna Simpson, the collection also celebrates experimental and emerging artists. The Whitney Biennial is one of the most important, and hotly debated, events in the art world. And for my money, there were few things more worth doing than alternating time between George Bellows’s Dempsey and Firpo and Franz Kline’s epic, scrawling Mahoning, both on view on the 7th floor of its Renzo Piano-designed building in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. —Daniel Cassady

Hear me out: it is well worth traveling to Sheboygan, Wisconsin—population ca. 50,000—to visit this museum operated by a toilet company. Yes, there are great exhibitions you can’t see anywhere else, like a solo show by the pictorial sweater knitter Sam Barsky or an exhibition on Midwestern grottoes—pilgrimage-worthy vernacular concoctions comprising shells, fossils, and geodes. There is a residency allowing artists unique access to industrial porcelain and metal facilities. And most memorably, there is the Art Preserve—home to entire oeuvres of various self-taught artists, like Eugene von Bruenchenhein, who crafted for his wife ornate crowns made of chicken bones and fastened miniature thrones from them, too. Here art and life blur—even on bathroom breaks, since each restroom is its own artist collaboration. Every inch is wonderfully weird. —Emily Watlington

Looking out at the expanse of Los Angeles from the Getty Center is a magical experience. Nestled high in the hills of the Pacific Palisades, the Getty Center melds into the landscape, its lilac-hued trellises offering a subtle contrast to the museum’s Italian travertine limestone architecture and the surrounding gardens. The arrival at the center, via a short tram ride from the parking lot, is itself memorable, too, but the true experience lies inside the institution. With a collection spanning from 6000 BCE to today, the Getty attests to a wide array of artistic expressions, with deep holdings in Greco-Roman sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, early photography, European silver and porcelain, Byzantine icons, and masterpieces from Western art since the Renaissance. (Some ancient works are also housed at the Getty Villa in nearby Malibu.) The museum’s temporary exhibition program is also among the most diverse in the US, particularly during the Getty Foundation’s quinquennial PST ART initiative, which has focused on art-and-science collaborations, Californian art history, and Latinx and Latin American art in past editions. —Maximilíano Durón

Not many museums have a Georges Seurat masterpiece and a Gustave Caillebotte masterpiece and a Vincent van Gogh masterpiece and a Claude Monet masterpiece and a Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec masterpiece and an Edgar Degas masterpiece. But the Art Institute of Chicago sure does, and they can all be found in the heavenly galleries for 19th-cenutry European paintin. And those galleries, by the way, represent only a smallish slice of this mega-museum, which was founded in 1879 and currently spans around than one million square feet. Elsewhere across the museum’s two buildings are instantly recognizable works by Grant Wood, Edward Hopper, and Pablo Picasso, which is to say little of the museum’s exquisite galleries for Asian art and its glorious area for Narcissa Niblack Thorne’s ornate miniatures. With everything from mummies to modernist abstractions, this museum has it all. Its collection is tough to beat. —Alex Greenberger

Located just steps from the U.S. Capitol, the National Gallery of Art is one of Washington, D.C.’s crown jewels. Founded by financier Andrew W. Mellon in 1937, the museum spans two iconic buildings: the neoclassical West Building, inspired by the Roman Pantheon, and the strikingly modern East Building, designed by I. M. Pei. Together, they house a permanent collection that highlights some of the greatest achievements in European and American art—from Leonardo da Vinci and Johannes Vermeer to Vincent van Gogh and Jackson Pollock. As if that weren’t enough, there’s also the special exhibition program, which has announced the museum’s goals of diversifying its offerings. Recent shows have included a Jaune Quick-to-See Smith–curated survey of contemporary Native American art—historically a blind spot at this museum—and a celebrated exhibition of Indigenous art from Australia. —Daniel Cassady

It hardly seems like a stretch to say that this institution influenced 20th-century art history more than any other museum in the world. Alfred H. Barr, who directed the museum from its opening in 1929 to 1943, effectively wrote modern art history with what he displayed at MoMA, whose galleries notably put films, photographs, and design objects on the same playing field as paintings and sculptures. The museum has gone through many changes since the Barr days, with various expansions turning this modest museum into a veritable behemoth. But its commitment to defining and expanding recent art history, a core component of the Barr ethos, still remains today. Since MoMA’s 2019 reopening, the curators have repeatedly rehung the permanent collection galleries to account for new figures just entering the canon.

MoMA has come in for due criticism: activists have protested problematic board members, artists have staged impromptu demonstrations within its galleries, and laypeople have debated the cost of visiting the museum, which, at this time of writing, stands at $30—a towering fee that makes MoMA one of the most expensive museums in the US. And yet, the museum occupies a central place in the public discourse. Like it or not, this is a museum that everyone feels they must visit and revisit. —Alex Greenberger

There’s a reason why, most years, the Met ranks as the most visited art museum in the US. With around 80,000 objects on view from its permanent collection of over 2 million works, the iconic institution has something for everyone, from history buffs to contemporary art aficionados. Strictly on the basis of paintings alone, one can’t go wrong: there’s John Singer Sargent’s once-scandalous Portrait of Madame X, Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat, and the largest collection of Vermeer works in any US museum. But the main draws for many visitors are ancient artworks like the Temple of Dendur, centuries-old coats of armor, and masterpieces of Chinese jade. And that’s to say nothing of the blockbusters the Met regularly produces (recent ones focused on Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas’s artistic relationship and Sienese painting of the pre-Renaissance era), or even of the museum’s Cloisters annex uptown for medieval art. —Harrison Jacobs