NEW YORK, NY.- New York City becomes unspeakably humid. To afford a Sag Harbor quarter-share, you now need a loan from the International Monetary Fund. In the Hudson Valley, you must do battle with Brooklyn transplants cosplaying locavore Marie-Antoinette.

But there is a solution to summer in New York: Keep driving! In upstate New York — and we can debate the terminology; the citizens of Buffalo are convinced they do not live there — the holiday crowds are thinner but the attractions are just as fine. It has cultural institutions rivaling those in the five boroughs, and rambling Letchworth State Park may be the state’s most spectacular natural wonder. New York even has an upstate governor, Kathy Hochul, for the first time in a century — although, after her congestion pricing U-turn, her constituents in Manhattan have some thoughts about Buffalo rule.

This Labor Day, then, might it be time for a northern campaign? Recently I rented a zippy little car (actually it was a normcore sedan), breathed in the fresh air (actually it was a torrential rainstorm) and blasted the tunes (actually it was the BBC World Service) on a three-day cultural jaunt from the Finger Lakes to the Ontario frontier.

In the western stretches of New York are four of the best museums in the Empire State, not to mention some significant historical homes. You can stop at the house of William S. Seward, President Lincoln’s secretary of state, or at that of the women’s rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton, outside Seneca Falls.

Any of the museums below is worth a visit, but you can conjoin all four into a prime weekend of upstate culture, working southeast to northwest, and washed down with some good Empire State white wine. (Although, fair warning, three out of four are closed on Labor Day; the Corning Museum of Glass is open.)

Wrap up your upstate art circuit at Duff’s Famous Wings, the guardian of Buffalo’s local delicacy. Or, if you’ve got the gasoline in both your automotive and metaphorical tanks, do what I did and make the trip an international one. The toll on the Peace Bridge is just $4 with E-ZPass, and Niagara Falls really is nicer from the Canadian side.

ITHACA, New York

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

We start with a four-hour trundle northwest of Manhattan, until the green of the Catskills gives way to upstate ivy. Lording over a hill of the Cornell campus, the Johnson museum holds some 40,000 objects in a concrete rampart designed by I.M. Pei in the 1970s.

The European galleries contain some fine Dutch still lifes, and a plaster life mask of the Marquis de Lafayette broods against Pei’s Brutalist backdrops. In the modern wing, Giacometti’s “Walking Man II,” a 6-foot spindly survivor in texturized bronze, wittily shares a room with a newly acquired painting by Jean Dubuffet whose Parisian pedestrians have the same postwar gait.

The most dramatic spaces are the Asian galleries, on the cantilevered fifth floor. Take in the schist bodhisattvas of Afghanistan, delicate Korean ceramics or a 3,800-year-old Mesopotamian votive cone — if you can tear yourself from the panoramic view of Cayuga Lake through Pei’s ribbon window.

The highlight of the Johnson’s exhibition season is “Colonial Crossings: Art, Identity, and Belief in the Spanish Americas,” a jamboree of religious and secular art from what are now Mexico, Ecuador and Peru, as well as the Philippines. Cornell’s art history students helped curate these shining saints, avenging angels and a fearsome quartet (lent from the Hispanic Society in Upper Manhattan) of seven-inch polychrome wood carvings depicting three possible fates for your soul — burning in hell, pleading in purgatory, chilling out in heaven — and a certain fourth, of your skeleton decomposing on Earth.

These stunning figurines were carved by the Indigenous Ecuadorean artist Caspicara (“wooden face,” in Quechua), and elsewhere this show underscores the complex cross-pollination of European and Mesoamerican belief systems. There’s a painting here of an alien-looking Jesus with four eyes shared across his three faces: one of the most popular motifs in colonial Hispanic art, and one that was forbidden in Europe. A much older ceramic cone from Ecuador, topped by three startled gods, suggests this Trinity had roots on both sides of the Atlantic.

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 114 Central Avenue, Ithaca, New York; museum.cornell.edu.

CORNING, New York

Corning Museum of Glass

An hour southwest of Cornell is Corning, New York, the town that glass built: home to the Fortune 500 company that makes Pyrex measuring cups and windows for NASA, and home also to the world’s most important collections of goblets, vases, beads and beakers.

The fragile riches of the Corning Museum of Glass include rare enameled glass candlesticks from Mamluk Egypt, a Yoruba crown topped by thousands of white glass beads, and the exquisite, newly acquired Montataire Bowl: a green drinking vessel with four skillfully pulled claws, blown between 350 A.D. to 400 A.D. in the last days of Roman Gaul. (A few dozen prizes of the Corning collection have spent the summer in the Berkshires, in an exhibition at the Clark Art Institute.) Party animals will grow jealous in front of what the museum believes is the country’s largest cut-glass punch bowl, manufactured by Tiffany in 1904 and ready to hold 30 gallons of Tipsy Mermaid.

If you’re an architecture buff, you will notice that the Corning Museum of Glass is a bit of a chimera. Its original building, a clean and clear International Style warehouse that now houses the museum’s postwar glass collection, was designed by Wallace K. Harrison in 1951 (when he was also completing the United Nations in Manhattan). The museum has grown a lot over time, most successfully with the opening of a serene extension by Thomas Phifer and Partners, which houses contemporary glass art by Kiki Smith and Fred Wilson.

None of these names matter much, at least not yet, to the museum’s most important visitors: the children who get to don safety goggles and collaborate with the Corning’s impressive demonstrators and artisans in daily glassblowing workshops. You can even take home your freshly made vases and ornaments; there may be no museum in America with better souvenirs.

Corning Museum of Glass, 1 Museum Way, Corning, New York; cmog.org.

ROCHESTER, New York

George Eastman Museum

Now head north, along the west coast of Lake Seneca; stop to taste the riesling at the Hermann J. Wiemer vineyard (use a spittoon if you’re driving!); and in two hours you will reach another upstate industry town with a museum to match. Kodak went into Chapter 11 more than a decade ago, but Rochester is still the hometown of American photography, and the medium’s past and present are the focus of the George Eastman Museum, a research institution and historic house.

This place was a true new media pioneer — at its founding in 1949, no other American museum except the Museum of Modern Art had departments for film and photography — and I found myself engrossed not only by formal daguerreotypes from Europe and casual snapshots from the United States, but even more by the gadgets used to make them. The collection includes early dry-plate cameras with accordion-style extension bellows; affordable Brownie kits that brought photography into daily life; and Kodak’s intricate Lunar Orbiter image system, incorporating dual lenses and onboard film development, to photograph the dark side of the moon.

Kodak’s replacement of chemical plates with roll film transformed photography from a specialty enterprise into a consumer activity, and turned the company’s founder George Eastman into a millionaire many times over.

This museum’s galleries and labs are attached to the grand/garish mansion that Eastman shared with his beloved mother, Maria Kilbourn Eastman, complete with a wood-paneled billiard room, a palm-bedecked conservatory, a full-scale organ and an elephant’s head. (Almost all the paintings throughout are copies; the real things are in the Memorial Art Gallery at the nearby University of Rochester.)

George Eastman Museum, 900 East Avenue, Rochester, New York; eastman.org.

BUFFALO, New York

Buffalo AKG Art Museum

We’re going to hit the interstate one last time, for a one-hour drive to New York’s second-largest city, home to one of the oldest public art institutions in the United States. Buffalonians have been collecting the avant-gardes of European and American painting and sculpture since 1862, and that philanthropic history is reflected not only in this museum’s collection but also in its ever-shifting name: Formerly the Albright Art Gallery, then the Albright-Knox Gallery, it reopened in 2023 as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

The G stands for (Jeffrey E.) Gundlach, who gave $65 million for the latest extension — a three-story beveled glass box, designed by Shohei Shigematsu at OMA, which adjoins the Neoclassical main building via a sinuous mirrored ramp. (Astute road trippers can compare and contrast with Shigematsu’s other upstate building: the architecture school at Cornell, near the Johnson Museum.)

The extension has doubled the museum’s gallery space, though the installations in the new wing feel rather crowded. And while you should stop in at a temporary exhibition of Nordic contemporary art, and another of the pop artist Marisol (who left her estate to the museum), the main draw of this western acropolis remains its outstanding collection of postwar American art. It includes a prime-time Jackson Pollock, one of Frank Stella’s greatest Black Paintings and “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb,” a renowned clash of color from 1944 by the Abstract Expressionist forerunner Arshile Gorky.

The AKG is also home to what I’m comfortable calling the two greatest Gauguins in any American museum. First is his woozy, world-departing “Yellow Christ,” from 1889, which reimagined Calvary as a mystic golden hillside in a pokey Breton village, where peasant girls in white coifs mourn the dying son of God.

Gauguin would plunge more fully into fantasies three years later in “Manao Tupapau,” the most uncertain and haunting of all his Tahitian pictures. It depicts Teha’amana, whom earlier art historians politely called the painter’s “bride,” nude and sleepless and frightened in a room of fervid violet, watched over by a tutelary ghost. It is the painting that most fully captures the invention and danger of Gauguin’s wanderlust, and his escape to the other side of the globe.

I only went to the other side of the state, but for culture sometimes you’ve got to hit the road.

Buffalo AKGArt Museum, 1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York; buffaloakg.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.