The Scene: Out and About in Manhattan

Summering in the city doesn’t have to mean spending hours in air-conditioned captivity. From the Hudson River to the New York Botanical Garden, there are a bundle of events and outings in and around Manhattan this month that will offer a break and a blast of fresh air from the trade-show circuit. Here, a sampling of cultural, recreational and energy-boosting indulgences.

Art Matters

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s rooftop garden, visitors can catch Argentinean artist Tomás Saraceno’s “Cloud Cities/Air Port City,” a futuristic constellation of mirrored modules.

A few floors below, museumgoers can pass through Ellsworth Kelly’s seldom-seen botanical prints. Just a couple of blocks north, Rineke Dijkstra’s beach portraits and other photos and videos are on display at the Guggenheim Museum. The Dutch artist will be at the museum July 17 to talk shop. In the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda, patrons can listen to music from Earle Brown, John Cage and other Fifties composers while viewing works from the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Jackson Pollock and more in “Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949-1960.”

Fans of the Austrian artist Heinrich Kuehn can find shows of his work at the Neue Galerie, the Howard Greenberg Gallery and Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs. The latter, which is up until July 20, illustrates how Kuehn strove to create photography that would be accepted as fine art. It also features the work of Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz, who met in 1900 and joined forces to promote a new kind of art photography.

The New Museum will unveil “Ghosts in the Machine,” an exhibition that explores the shifting relationships between technology, people and art on July 18. Richard Hamilton’s 1955 “Man, Machine and Motion,” on view in New York for the first time, will be among the featured work from 70 artists, writers and visionaries. Guests can also check out “Pictures from the Moon,” which showcases images from such artists as Chuck Close, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha and James Turrell.

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