2024 NYC Gallery Exhibitions Recap
Happy end of 2024! Thanks for your feedback so far on my recent post looking at the geographic shifts in New York’s gallery landscape, and for your support and encouragement throughout the past couple of months since I started this Substack. I’ve got some exciting things planned for 2025!
Today, I’m sharing a very high level look at where and when exhibitions happened this year in New York.
Where did exhibitions take place?
There were a total of 3012 exhibitions at 553 galleries in 2024, with nearly a third of those taking place in the Lower East Side.
I’m not at all surprised that the Lower East Side, followed by Chelsea and Tribeca were the top neighborhoods to see exhibitions in 2024. A lot of mainstream media articles keep trying to tell us that the “center” of the New York art world has shifted from Chelsea to Tribeca, which is objectively not true (at least by volume of exhibitions).
I’m broadly categorizing all of the sub-neighborhoods of the East Side of Lower Manhattan including the East Village, Chinatown, Two Bridges, Nolita, etc., as Lower East Side.
I’m also counting a gallery as a business — if a gallery has multiple locations, it’s still counted as 1 gallery.
When did exhibitions take place?
September was (unsurprisingly) the busiest month for exhibition openings, with an astounding 520 exhibitions opening. I’m a little surprised that January came in second with 331 exhibitions (I guessed May would have been second), but the Spring exhibition cycle is a little more scattered. No surprise that there’s a big dip in the Summer, though I was surprised that November had the relatively high volume of 279.
The top 10 individual days for openings, throughout the year
September 6th — 110 exhibitions
September 5th — 90 exhibitions
January 11th — 63 exhibitions
May 2nd — 59 exhibitions
September 4th — 59 exhibitions
February 8th — 56 exhibitions
September 12th — 55 exhibitions
March 7th — 49 exhibitions
June 20th — 48 exhibitions (tie)
November 14th — 48 exhibitions (tie)
With a total of 637 exhibitions opening over these top 10 days, that’s 21% of all exhibitions for the entire year — also noteworthy is that 259 (8% total for the year!) of these took place over the intense 3 day span of September 4th - September 6th.
Which galleries held the most exhibitions?
Miles McEnery — 27 exhibitions
AIR — 25 exhibitions
Carter Burden — 24 exhibitions
Gagosian — 19 exhibitions (4 way tie)
Hauser & Wirth — 19 exhibitions (4 way tie)
James Cohan — 19 exhibitions (4 way tie)
Karma — 19 exhibitions (4 way tie)
Kathryn Markel — 18 exhibitions
Ceres — 17 exhibitions (tie)
Gladstone — 17 exhibitions (tie)
I was not surprised that Miles McEnery came out on top (that was my guess) since they have 4 spaces and run on a tight and consistent schedule of changing over approximately ever 6 weeks. I was surprised that Carter Burden and AIR closely followed, as I don’t think of either as especially major, but both usually do 3 shows per cycle.
Quick note on this, I counted exhibitions by location — so if an exhibition spanned multiple locations of a single gallery, it was counted for each location. (This has to do with how I aggregate my data, and I couldn’t figure out an easy way to remove duplicates without messing up the entire dataset).
I’ll be interested to see how 2025 compares to 2024 — if I had to make a couple of broad strokes guesses, I’d say that we’ll probably see overall fewer exhibitions (though not drastically fewer), as galleries are trying to tighten the belt a bit given the contracted and uncertain market climate. I also think we will see an increase in the percentage of exhibitions in Tribeca in 2025, given that several galleries moved there during the past year.
Let me know if you have different thoughts on what we might expect, and if there are other specific insights that you’re interested in seeing!
Note about my dataset / method, in case people are curious: I source all of this info myself, and am not pulling from any platform or aggregator. I’m not using AI, scrapers, or other automation of any sort. I’m not paying anyone to give me information nor am I getting paid!