Nicholas Roerich Museum New York

The Museum is on 107th street, between Broadway & Riverside Drive closer to Riverside Drive.

Subway:, #1 train to 110th Street and Broadway.

Bus: M104 bus to 108th Street and Broadway; M5 bus to 108th Street and Riverside Drive

Car: The Museum does not provide for parking, which can be found on nearby streets. Parking garages can be found on 108th Street, east of Broadway.

One hundred years ago, the Roerich Museum opened its doors to a gathering that would quietly change the course of American art history. In February 1926, thirty-nine paintings by nine Pueblo artists went on view — among the first such exhibitions to reach a major cultural center in the Northeast. It was a project born of an extraordinary friendship: between Nicholas Roerich, visionary painter and cultural philosopher, and Edgar Lee Hewett, the archaeologist who had spent decades listening to the living traditions of the American Southwest.

Primordial America marks the centennial of that moment.

The exhibition brings together paintings by Roerich alongside works by more than thirty Native American painters representing six cultural regions — Southwest, Eastern Woodlands, Southeast, Great Plains, Northwest Coast, and California through Northern Mexico — drawn from the collection of Dmitry Popov, Chief Curator and Collection Manager of the Nicholas Roerich Museum, who has spent three decades assembling one of the most comprehensive collections of Native American visual art in existence.

Alongside the paintings, archival photographs taken in Santa Fe and the Pueblo villages of New Mexico in 1925 — by members of the Roerich institutions, preserved in the Museum’s archives, and presented publicly here for the first time — offer an intimate glimpse of the encounter that sparked the original project.

The exhibition opens with remarks by poet and editor Murielle Mobengo, whose essay The Beauty Reunion: A Silent Homecoming — a meditation on beauty, reunion, and the universal language of primordial art — serves as the foreword to the accompanying catalogue.

Primordial America is co-organized with Revue Révolution (Journal of Cultural Diplomacy, New York · Paris), which also produced the exhibition catalogue. A full conversation with Dmitry Popov on Roerich’s legacy, Native American art, and the vision behind this project appears in Revue Révolution Vol. VII (2026).

Nicholas Roerich saw the Himalayas not merely as the highest of mountains but as HIMĀLAYA, the Abode of Snows — a source of beauty, inspiration, and spiritual aspiration.

In this gallery, the paintings are joined by music and by a subtle aromatic blend composed in part from Himalayan cedar, pine, and juniper gathered high in Himachal Pradesh, the Indian Himalayan region where Roerich made his home. Cedar and juniper have been carried as offerings through these mountains for centuries.

Let image, scent, and sound become your passage to the Abode of Snows — where Roerich saw heaven touch the earth and the human spirit rise toward the stars.

Scent created by RASAYAN », in collaboration with NYN » / @nyn_aroma.

This gallery is continuously scented with natural botanical oils. Visitors sensitive to fragrance may wish to limit their time in the space.

Audition

If you are passionate about ensemble singing, have experience, possess good sight-reading skills, and want to enhance your ensemble singing abilities, come to an audition.

We are a small group of enthusiasts of ensemble singing under the direction of Nikolai Kachanov. Our free master classes take place two Tuesdays per month from 6:30 to 8:30, in the warm atmosphere of the Nicholas Roerich Museum. Our main focus is…