15 Outdoor Art Shows to See in NYC This Summer
Slide through a teddy bear, get weird with a neural network’s hallucinations, play ping-pong on an artist-made table, and so much more.
You know what they say: When the heat, and smoke, and floods go away, New York comes out to play. It's finally time, and you've more than earned it. We've put together a playlist of sorts, one that takes you to islands, beaches — even bus shelters — across all five boroughs.
See the city through a different lens via giant kaleidoscopes in Pelham Bay. Have yourself a game of ping-pong on artist-designed tables at Rockaway Beach. Get a little intimate with a massive teddy bear in a courtyard in Queens. Get weird with a neural network's hallucinations in a Midtown sculpture garden. Frolic on Governors Island, my personal paradise.
It's the best time of year on the best city on earth. 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 nothing better than that moment when routine life parts like a curtain and a moment of artistic interest shines through. Like encountering one of Gabriel Orozco’s photos at a bus shelter across the city (plus Boston and Chicago). These trompe-l'oeil depictions intertwine natural and urban life — a tree shoots through a wall in one — transporting you when you least expect it.
Between Tides
Beach 67, Rockaway Beach, Beach 67th Street, Arverne, Queens
Through Sep. 13
Summer brought us to the intersection of art and athletics with basketball and soccer, but Rockaway Beach is holding down the vibe for the rest of the season with several sculptural ping-pong tables. Crafted by Moko Fukuyama, Ilana Harris-Babou, Las Hermanas Iglesias, Carlos H. Matos, Amalia Pica, and the collective SUPERFLEX, the tables function as interactive art installations that encourage play and public convening. It’s BYOP (bring your own paddle … and balls), but there are free equipment rentals available throughout the 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 refract the landscape and craft it anew through steel, mirrors, and the visitor’s own gaze. Argentina-born artist Graciela Cassel offers these monumental kaleidoscopes as lenses through which we might refocus our perception of the natural world as it changes 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
This presentation of three sculptures by Genesis Belanger establishes City Hall Park as a rendezvous site for both reflection and recreation. Belanger calls on park visitors to embrace their own beauty, as well as that of their surroundings and broader ecosystem, with weighty sculptures that somehow manage to emphasize the lightness of life.
Pierre Huyghe: UUmwelt
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan
Through Nov. 29
Generative artificial intelligence is dependent on human output, but can it interpret our own thoughts before we externalize them? Pierre Huyghe investigates AI’s potential to realize the human imagination in an interactive, multimedia body of work in MoMA's courtyard. Born from an artificial neural network’s interpretation of recorded brain activity from a person asked to imagine a series of images, UUmwelt is also activated by visitors whose gazes alter the network’s generative imagery in real time.
Roberto Lugo: Alfarero del Barrio (Village Potter)
Madison Square Park, 11 Madison Avenue, Flatiron, Manhattan
Through Dec. 6
In this joyous display of Puerto Rican pride, Roberto Lugo adapts his singular painted ceramics into a two-part colossal sculpture series in Madison Square Park. Lugo's egalitarian urn subverts historic associations of pottery with aristocracy via portraits of his own parents alongside renowned Puerto Rican figures including 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 talismanic sculptures stand watch on the shores of Brooklyn, overlooking Manhattan and Governors Island. Artist Woody De Othello’s totemic guardians accompany four monumental bronzes in this installation, reimagining Kongo nkisi objects often inhabited by spirits. Together they invite us to pause and reflect on the rituals, people, and small moments of tenderness that give form to our days.
Homecoming: Chakaia Booker
Socrates Sculpture Park, 32-01 Vernon Boulevard, Long Island City, Queens
Through April 2027
Chakaia Booker, who cuts and bends tires into transfixing abstract sculptures, returns to Socrates Sculpture Park to exhibit three works she made there in the late 1990s and early 2000s. On the occasion of the park’s 40th anniversary, Homecoming reunites the sculptures with the site of their inception, 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
Next to the historic New York City AIDS Memorial, a starlit sentinel reaches into the sky like a beacon. Artist 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 reimagining his last public commission. Though Burton's piece was decommissioned in 2022, Tuazon’s “Eternal Flame” keeps the spirit of his practice burning brightly in our collective memory.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen: The Light That Shines Through the Universe
High Line, Chelsea, Manhattan
Spring 2026–Fall 2027
Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s commission for the High Line pays homage to cultural loss and spiritual persistence through a 30-foot sandstone Buddha. The sculpture is a reference to two sixth-century statues in Afghanistan that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. In Nguyen’s reimagining, the statue stands tall, 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
A culmination of her multiyear artist residency with NYC’s Department of Homeless Services, Alex Strada’s Public Address transposes handwritten reflections from the residents and frontline workers of city-operated shelters onto aluminum street signs installed along the streets of four boroughs. Alongside Strada’s main installation in Columbus Park, the street-side insights of our impacted neighbors open a channel for dialogue between NYC’s “right to shelter” obligation, the increasing privatization of public space, and the worsening housing affordability crisis.
Courtyard Commission: Precious Okoyomon
MoMA PS1, 22-01 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
Through 2028
Precious Okoyomon humanizes the very institutional MoMA PS1's courtyard with a tiny forest filled with a cornucopia of plants. At the center is "The Pleasure Principle," the latest iteration of the artist's lost childhood teddy bear, which invites you to slide through its butt until you exit through its mouth. A tranquil — and welcome — patch of green in a neighborhood increasingly crowded out by tall condo buildings.
Public Art on Governors Island
Governors Island
Long-term view
Trust us, Governors Island is worth the trek, or more accurately, the short ferry ride — even more so for the wonderful public art offerings. This season, highlights are Mohawk artist Alan Michelson’s installation consisting of hundreds of thousands of oysters, drawing on New York’s little-known history as an oyster hub. Plus, 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 still.
Photoville Festival
Various Locations
Long-term view
New York City’s premier photo festival stages free outdoor photography exhibitions across the five boroughs. Among the ongoing highlights are an ode to grassroots soccer communities on a global scale in Goal Click: Window to the World at the South Street Seaport, a celebration of the quiet and quotidian in My Love Letter to Queens at Astoria Park, and a closer look at a Bolivian youth subculture inspired by manga and kawaii accessories through Identity at Travers Park.
Sara Ouhaddou: Al Qalam (The Pen)
Elizabeth H. Berger Plaza, Financial District, Manhattan
Ongoing
Sara Ouhaddou’s vivid mosaics, a monument to the city’s first Arabic-speaking enclave, animate a lush plaza in Manhattan’s financial district. Ouhaddou, born in France to a Moroccan family, tenderly places her own experience as an immigrant in dialogue with the literary history of Manhattan’s “Little Syria,” a thriving neighborhood of immigrants from Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine that was dismantled by the creation of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel in the 1940s. This work translates excerpts of works by nine of the neighborhood’s prolific writers, such as Khalil Gibran, into her own mosaic language, emulating the complex linguistic and cultural exchanges that defined the neighborhood.
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.
