Today, October 4, is the last day of Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions at the Morgan Library & Museum on Madison Avenue at East 36th Street. It's the first of several closings. Look at the Morgan's current exhibitions list: every show with an announced end date closes by November 8 except Collections Spotlight. Four new exhibitions open in the same stretch, one per week, from October 23 to November 13.
So for six weeks, the Morgan is a different building from one week to the next. If you live a few blocks away, one long visit won't cover it. The schedule favors several short ones, and the museum's free and partial-access options suit that pattern well.
The calendar, in order
- October 4: Tarot! closes.
- October 11: The Collected Photograph, 1970–1989 closes.
- October 23: Rembrandt's Lions: Art and Exile in the Dutch Republic opens.
- October 25: Hujar:Contact and Friends Who Came to See Me: Drawings from John Ashbery's Collection both close.
- October 30: Fantasy and Reality: The Art of Johan Tobias Sergel opens.
- November 6: Graphic Devotions: Late Medieval European Blockbooks opens.
- November 8: Luminous Color closes.
- November 13: Ragtime: Cakewalk in Pianoland opens.
Collections Spotlight runs through all of it. It opened September 15 and stays up until January 10, 2027, with changing selections from the Morgan's holdings.
Three days when both seasons share the building
Two of the outgoing shows stay up just long enough to overlap with the first incoming one. Rembrandt's Lions opens Friday, October 23. Hujar:Contact and the Ashbery drawings stay on view through Sunday, October 25. That gives you three days to see the end of the summer program and the start of the fall one in a single visit.
The Friday is the best of the three. The Morgan stays open until 8 PM on Fridays, and admission is free from 5 to 8 PM. Free Friday reservations are required and open one week ahead. For October 23, that means tickets should become available around October 16. That evening, from 6 to 7 PM, curator Sarah W. Mallory gives a free opening lecture on Rembrandt's depictions of war, diaspora, and migration. Registration is encouraged but doesn't guarantee a seat.
What closes October 25, and what critics said about it
Hujar:Contact shows Peter Hujar's photography through his contact sheets alone. Hyperallergic, in its July 13 review, called the format unusual and questioned the mining of Hujar's archive, but still judged the result positively. Nicholas Gamso's July 1 essay in The Paris Review argued that the show gives the public wider access to Hujar's process and range through the sheets, his annotations, and his sequences.
Before it closes, the show has three related programs left:
- Wednesday, October 7, 7 to 8 PM: "Harp, Voice, and Lens," a concert. It's listed as sold out, with a waitlist.
- Friday, October 16, 6:30 to 7:30 PM: a free gallery talk on the show in Spanish. Space is limited.
- Saturday, October 17, 2 to 3:30 PM: a screening of Peter Hujar's Day. It's free with museum admission. Seating is first come, first served, and registration is encouraged.
The Ashbery show closes the same day. The Wall Street Journal's August 24 review called it an intimate portrait built from works that hung in, or were stored in, the poet's home. Apollo's September 29 review described the collection as idiosyncratic, and stressed that many works were gifts reflecting Ashbery's friendships and artistic circles. Seen together, the two shows make a matched pair. Both look at New York artistic life through private material: a photographer's working sheets and a poet's walls.
The four arrivals, one week apart
The incoming shows also fit together, more than their subjects suggest. Three of them draw on the Morgan's own deep holdings of prints, books, and printed music, then add loans.
Rembrandt's Lions brings together drawings, etchings, and paintings to show how migrants, exiles, and refugees shaped Rembrandt's world. According to the Morgan, up to 60 percent of Amsterdam's residents in the seventeenth century came from elsewhere. The show features the best impressions of the museum's celebrated but rarely shown Rembrandt etchings, alongside selected loans. A free online program on lions in life and art follows on November 4 at noon, and it requires registration.
Fantasy and Reality: The Art of Johan Tobias Sergel is the first exhibition devoted to the Swedish artist outside Europe. It pairs his drawings, including self-portraits and scenes from his life and relationships, with sculpture in terracotta, marble, and plaster. Morgan curator John Marciari gives a free lecture on Sergel on Friday, November 6, from 6 to 7 PM.
Graphic Devotions opens that same day. It covers a short-lived kind of book made between about 1450 and 1480, printed entirely from woodcut blocks carrying both text and images. The centerpiece is the Morgan's reunited, complete Ars moriendi blockbook. A free online lecture on blockbooks follows on November 11 at noon, and it requires registration.
Ragtime: Cakewalk in Pianoland has the longest run of the four, through June 13, 2027. It's built on The John Davis Collection of Early Printed Musical African Americana. In seven sections, it follows the genre from its roots to its part in the emergence of jazz, and it sets songwriter Ernest Hogan beside composer Scott Joplin. A free curator roundtable marks the opening on November 13, from 6 to 7 PM. The John Davis Caravan concert on November 18 is already listed as sold out, with a waitlist.
Count the Fridays. Rembrandt opens with a talk on October 23, Sergel gets one on November 6, and Ragtime opens with a roundtable on November 13. Each of those talks happens during free Friday hours.
Ways in that don't take an afternoon
With a new show every week, the Morgan's lighter-commitment options become more useful than usual.
| Option | When | What it covers | Booking |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free Fridays | Fridays, 5 to 8 PM | Full museum | Required; tickets released one week ahead |
| Historic library rooms | Tuesdays and Sundays, 3 to 5 PM | J. Pierpont Morgan's Library rooms; special exhibitions not included | Not required |
| Morgan Café | Tue–Thu and Sat–Sun, 11 AM to 4 PM; Fri until 7:30 PM | Café only; no museum admission needed | Reservations not required |
| General admission | Museum open Tue–Sun; closed Mondays | Full museum | $25 adults, $17 seniors 65+, $13 students, free for children 12 and under |
On the first Sunday of each month, college students get in free. Tickets open a month ahead. For younger visitors, Family First Saturdays presents "Storytime at the Morgan: Thankfulness" on November 7 from 11 AM to noon. It's aimed at ages 3 to 7 and is free with admission. Children 12 and under already get in free. The visit and dining pages don't show an update date, so check hours and prices before you go.
Where the museum calendar meets the block calendar
Two Saturdays in this window line up with Murray Hill Neighborhood Association events a few blocks east.
On Saturday, October 17, MHNA holds its next Coffee with Quality of Life at Semicolon Cafe + Flower Bar, from 9 to 10:30 AM. The Peter Hujar's Day screening starts at 2 PM the same day.
On Sunday, November 8, Luminous Color has its last day. It's a show of nineteenth-century oil sketches from the Thaw Collection about how artists painted sunlight, reflected light, and moonlight. That afternoon, from 2 to 4 PM, MHNA and the Lower East Side Ecology Center are planting daffodils around the neighborhood. Volunteers meet on East 37th Street between Third and Lexington, outside The Coffee Haus. The planting runs during the last afternoon of the Thaw sketches, so you'll need to see them earlier that day.
This weekend, the Amateur Comedy Club opened its 150 East 36th Street building and historic Sniffen Court for tours on October 3 and 4. That puts the clubhouse, the Morgan, and the Tarot! closing all on 36th Street on the same day.
Phyllis has watched Murray Hill's institutions shape its weekly rhythm for more than two decades. If you'd like to talk about how the Morgan's calendar and the blocks around Madison and 36th fit into your plans for a home here, reach out to Phyllis M Mehalakes. Let's Connect.
