New York has no shortage of art museums. But if you’re drawn to the lives behind the work, the NYC metro area offers something rarer: the artists’ homes, which reveal the domestic corners where artists cooked, hosted friends or built sculptures from the basement up.

These house museums and foundations, all open to the public, invite visitors into preserved spaces that shaped some of the most influential artistic visions of the 20th century. The Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens is a famous example, winning the National Medal for museums in 2024. And Hamptons visitors often stop by the Pollock-Krasner House and studio in the hamlet of Springs, in East Hampton.

Here are some other options in and around NYC, some equally well-known and others less visited. Reservations often need t

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