Ahead of a hotly contested group of midterm elections that include a heated gubernatorial race for New York State, New York City Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani shared a new video on social media encouraging voters to vote early—with a twist.
“Only in New York City can you vote in places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Mamdani says as he walks through the recently refurbished Rockefeller Wing, home to its holdings of art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.
“I just voted here on the first day of early voting. It only took five minutes,” adds the mayor, who dons an “I Voted 2026” sticker. He then pauses before Seated Elder (200 BCE–300 CE), a fragmented ceramic figure by an artist from the pre-Columbian Tolita-Tumaco people, before asking if he’s voted.
He then strikes a more serious note, providing voters with facts about voting in elections in an effort to combat misinformation, including that it’s “easy and safe,” voters don’t need to bring identification or anything else to cast a ballot, and that ICE and any other armed federal agents can’t be at voting sites without a signed warrant.
As part of his administration, Mamdani has made a significant commitment to supporting and funding the arts. The 2027 city budget gave the Department of Cultural Affairs a budget of $323.8 million, the most in its history. He also created the Cultural Stability Fund, which earmarked $10 million over the next three years to help stabilized arts and culture nonprofits in the city.
To announce the doubling of individual artist grants to $10,000, he posted a video similar to his Met tour, in which he and cultural affairs commissioner Diya Vij each painted a canvas. (Hers showed a realistic still life painting, while his was two green dollar signs on an unprimed canvas.) And for his birthday earlier this month, he visited the Studio Museum in Harlem, where Taylor Simmons’s 2026 painting The Hypnotist left an impression.
The Met Museum is just one of several institutions in New York City that is an early voting site (and a site to cast a ballot on election day). Others include the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side, the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, and the Brooklyn Museum.
At the end of the video, Mamdani reminds New Yorkers that early voting runs until Sunday, November 1, with election day on Tuesday, November 3, and that they can visit vote.nyc to find their polling site and see a sample ballot.
He concludes, “Voting is your fundamental right. No one, especially the government, can stand in the way of New Yorkers exercising it. See you at the polls.”
