Cultural Museums

In addition to the homes and hometowns of artists, writers and performers that you can explore as part of the Arts & Culture Path Through History, great artistic achievements are on display at historic cultural museums and sites across the Empire State. 

For over 100 years, the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls has presented art in a historic Italiante Renaissance villa, and now combines Adirondack heritage with a permanent collection of European old and modern masters.   The Albany Institute of Art was founded in 1791 during the presidency of George Washington -- making it older than the Louvre, the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- and its exhibits include an extensive collection of Hudson River School paintings. 

Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery is over 150 years old with a collection of modern and contemporary art, and the Darwin Martin House Complex is one of Frank Lloyd Wright's greatest tour-able masterpieces.  Boscobel Restoration, a 19th-centry Federal-style museum overlooking Hudson River and West Point, contains the nation's leading collection of furniture and decorative arts made by premier New York cabinetmakers.

The Rockwell Museum in Corning houses the largest collection of Western and Native American art east of the Mississippi.  The Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown features American folk art and American Indian art, as well as important holdings in American decorative arts.  The museum at the Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute in Utica is in a restored 1850 Italiante mansion redesigned in 1960 by Philip Johnson and includes works by Dali, Mondrian, O'Keefe, Picasso, Pollock and Tiffany.

The Byrdcliffe Art Colony in Woodstock is on the National Historic Register of Places with 30 picturesque buildings on 250 wooded acres, and is America's oldest continuing arts and crafts colony.  Nearby, at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, the highlight of the 1960's countercultural movement - the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival - is remembered and interpreted at the very site where the event took place.

El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem explores New York's long connection with the Spanish-speaking world with its focus on Latin America and Caribbean art.