The Brant Foundation

Tucked along a quiet, tree-lined stretch of East 6th Street, The Brant Foundation is an improbable cultural heavyweight in the East Village. Inside a former yellow-brick ConEd substation, it (mostly) showcases artistic legends of the 80s and 90s with just enough curveballs to keep it from feeling like a greatest-hits reel.

Before its third act as a private museum, the building belonged to Walter De Maria, the legendary land artist behind The Lightning Field. This tracks: the place still has a slightly mythic, off-grid energy, even if the lighting is now perfect and the floors are spotless.

When the Brants took over, they had architect Richard Gluckman transform it into a four-story exhibition venue, keeping the building’s industrial bones: high ceilings, heavy-duty steel details, and cavernous galleries. You’ll still find the monumental metal staircase and towering gantry crane hanging overhead.

Exhibitions draw from the Brant family’s collection, which began with an obsession with Andy Warhol in the 1970s and kept pace into the go-go 1980s with media-savvy art by Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Jeff Koons. They often appear alongside sharper, moodier counterpoints such as Mike Kelley, Glenn Ligon, Cady Noland, and Julian Schnabel.

Despite the blue-chip pedigree, the place is refreshingly relaxed. There are guides and interns on every floor who are ready to walk you through the work. You'll always leave knowing something you didn't when you walked in.

The Brant Foundation was founded in 1996 by collector and publisher Peter Brant, a paper magnate turned art world fixture and publishing figure. (He bought Interview from Andy Warhol in the late 1980s.) The foundation opened its first space in Greenwich, Connecticut, as a way to share works from his collection. The current East Village location opened in 2019. Since 2009, the foundation has been run by Brant’s daughter Allison, who keeps the program sharp, relevant, and self-aware.