MoMA PS1

PS1 is exactly what the name says: Public School 1, a looming Romanesque Revival schoolhouse from the 1890s that artist-organizer Alanna Heiss turned into an exhibition space in 1976, when Long Island City was all factories and the art world needed rooms too big and too rough for Manhattan. It later joined forces with MoMA, but the temperament never changed — this is the experimental wing, where the work is newer, stranger, and installed into classrooms, stairwells, the boiler room, and the old coal bunker.

The building is half the exhibition. Long-term installations hide in its odd corners — including a James Turrell skyspace that opens the ceiling to the weather — and the concrete courtyard hosts a summer architecture commission and the long-running Warm Up music series. Pair it with the galleries' neighbor across the street: a wall of the city's best large-scale graffiti commissions along Jackson Avenue.