You know the saying: once the heat, smoke, and floods lift, New York comes alive. That moment has arrived, and you’ve more than earned it. We’ve assembled a kind of playlist that leads you to islands, beaches, and even bus shelters across all five boroughs.
Take in the city from a new angle through giant kaleidoscopes in Pelham Bay. Play ping-pong on artist-made tables at Rockaway Beach. Get up close with a giant teddy bear in a Queens courtyard, or encounter a neural network’s hallucinations in a Midtown sculpture garden. Spend time on Governors Island, my personal paradise. And if you need air conditioning, check out our list of 30 indoor exhibitions for summer.
It’s the best season in the best city on earth. Go out and live a little! —Lisa Yin Zhang, associate editor
Gabriel Orozco: Public Nature
JCDecaux Bus Shelters in New York City, Chicago, and Boston
Through Sep. 6
There’s a special thrill in that instant when everyday life seems to part like a curtain and something artistic appears. That’s the experience of spotting one of Gabriel Orozco’s photographs at a bus shelter in New York City, as well as Boston and Chicago. These trompe-l’oeil works weave together natural and urban life — in one image, a tree bursts through a wall — and surprise you when you least expect it.
Between Tides
Beach 67, Rockaway Beach, Beach 67th Street, Arverne, Queens
Through Sep. 13
After bringing art and athletics together this summer with basketball and soccer, Rockaway Beach is keeping the energy going for the rest of the season with a set of sculptural ping-pong tables. Made by Moko Fukuyama, Ilana Harris-Babou, Las Hermanas Iglesias, Carlos H. Matos, Amalia Pica, and the collective SUPERFLEX, the tables serve as interactive art pieces that invite play and gathering. It’s BYOP — bring your own paddle and balls — though free equipment rentals are available on weekends.
Graciela Cassel: Nature Through Kaleidoscopes
Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum, 895 Shore Road, Pelham Bay, Bronx
Through Sep. 19
At this historic 19th-century manor house, two sculptures reframe the landscape through steel, mirrors, and the viewer’s own gaze. Argentina-born artist Graciela Cassel presents the monumental kaleidoscopes as lenses that ask us to reconsider the natural world as it shifts over the course of the show’s yearlong installation.
Genesis Belanger: Heads or Tails
City Hall Park, Broadway and Chambers Street, Civic Center, Manhattan
Through Nov. 15
Genesis Belanger’s trio of sculptures turns City Hall Park into a place for both contemplation and leisure. With these works, Belanger encourages parkgoers to embrace their own beauty, along with that of their surroundings and the wider ecosystem, through weighty sculptures that still manage to underscore life’s lightness.
Pierre Huyghe: UUmwelt
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan
Through Nov. 29
Generative artificial intelligence depends on human output, but can it grasp our thoughts before we even express them? Pierre Huyghe explores AI’s ability to give form to human imagination in an interactive multimedia work installed in MoMA’s courtyard. The project, shaped from an artificial neural network’s reading of recorded brain activity from someone asked to picture a sequence of images, is also activated by visitors whose looks change the system’s imagery in real time.
Roberto Lugo: Alfarero del Barrio (Village Potter)
Madison Square Park, 11 Madison Avenue, Flatiron, Manhattan
Through Dec. 6
In this exuberant tribute to Puerto Rican pride, Roberto Lugo transforms his signature painted ceramics into a two-part monumental sculpture series in Madison Square Park. His egalitarian urn challenges the historical link between pottery and aristocracy by pairing portraits of his parents with celebrated Puerto Rican figures such as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Broadway composer Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Read Staff Writer Isa Farfan’s report
Guardian Spirit
Brooklyn Bridge, Pier 1, and Manhattan Bridge View (Public Art Fund), Dumbo, Brooklyn
Through March 8, 2027
Three protective sculptures keep watch along Brooklyn’s shoreline, facing Manhattan and Governors Island. Woody De Othello’s totem-like guardians are joined by four monumental bronzes in this installation, which reimagines Kongo nkisi objects often believed to house spirits. Together, they ask viewers to pause and reflect on the rituals, people, and small gestures of tenderness that shape our lives.
Homecoming: Chakaia Booker
Socrates Sculpture Park, 32-01 Vernon Boulevard, Long Island City, Queens
Through April 2027
Chakaia Booker, known for cutting and bending tires into arresting abstract sculptures, returns to Socrates Sculpture Park to show three works she created there in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Marking the park’s 40th anniversary, Homecoming reunites the sculptures with the place of their making, whose history has been shaped by the labor of countless staff members, visitors, and artists, including Booker herself.
Oscar Tuazon: Eternal Flame for Scott Burton
NYC AIDS Memorial, St. Vincent’s Triangle, Greenwich Village, Manhattan
Through May 30, 2027
Beside the historic New York City AIDS Memorial, a starlit figure rises into the sky like a beacon. Oscar Tuazon’s installation honors the life and work of American sculptor and performance artist Scott Burton, who died in 1989 from AIDS-related complications, by reinterpreting his final public commission. Though Burton’s piece was decommissioned in 2022, Tuazon’s “Eternal Flame” keeps the spirit of his practice alive in collective memory.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen: The Light That Shines Through the Universe
High Line, Chelsea, Manhattan
Spring 2026–Fall 2027
Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s High Line commission pays tribute to cultural loss and spiritual endurance through a 30-foot sandstone Buddha. The work references two sixth-century statues in Afghanistan that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. In Nguyen’s version, the statue stands tall as a symbol of resilience in the face of loss.
Read Staff Writer Rhea Nayyar’s report
Public Address by Alex Strada
Various locations
Through Oct. 2027
Drawing on her multiyear artist residency with NYC’s Department of Homeless Services, Alex Strada’s Public Address turns handwritten reflections from residents and frontline workers in city-operated shelters into aluminum street signs placed across four boroughs. Along with Strada’s central installation in Columbus Park, these street-level insights create a space for dialogue around NYC’s “right to shelter” obligation, the growing privatization of public space, and the deepening housing affordability crisis.
Courtyard Commission: Precious Okoyomon
MoMA PS1, 22-01 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
Through 2028
Precious Okoyomon softens the very institutional MoMA PS1 courtyard with a small forest packed with abundant plant life. At its center is “The Pleasure Principle,” the latest version of the artist’s lost childhood teddy bear, inviting visitors to slide through its butt and emerge through its mouth. It is a calm — and welcome — patch of green in a neighborhood increasingly overtaken by tall condo buildings.
Public Art on Governors Island
Governors Island
Long-term view
Governors Island is well worth the trip, or more precisely, the short ferry ride — especially for its exceptional public art. This season’s highlights include Mohawk artist Alan Michelson’s installation of hundreds of thousands of oysters, which draws on New York’s little-known past as an oyster hub. Also on view are Sam Van Aken’s public orchard as artwork with more than 100 fruit trees, Rachel Whiteread’s ghostly cabin, Mark Dion’s mad laboratory, and more.
Photoville Festival
Various Locations
Long-term view
New York City’s leading photo festival presents free outdoor photography exhibitions throughout the five boroughs. Current highlights include Goal Click: Window to the World at the South Street Seaport, an ode to grassroots soccer communities worldwide; My Love Letter to Queens at Astoria Park, which celebrates the quiet and everyday; and Identity at Travers Park, which looks closely at a Bolivian youth subculture shaped by manga and kawaii accessories.
Sara Ouhaddou: Al Qalam (The Pen)
Elizabeth H. Berger Plaza, Financial District, Manhattan
Ongoing
Sara Ouhaddou’s vivid mosaics, a tribute to the city’s first Arabic-speaking enclave, animate a lush Manhattan Financial District plaza. Born in France to a Moroccan family, Ouhaddou gently places her own immigrant experience in conversation with the literary history of Manhattan’s “Little Syria,” a thriving community of immigrants from Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine that was displaced by the construction of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel in the 1940s. The work translates excerpts by nine of the neighborhood’s prolific writers, including Khalil Gibran, into her own mosaic language, echoing the layered linguistic and cultural exchanges that defined the area.
Read Staff Writer Isa Farfan’s report
This guide was written by Hrag Vartanian, Rhea Nayyar, Lakshmi Rivera Amin, Lisa Yin Zhang, and Isa Farfan.
