A Chance to Walk Into Edward Hopper’s World

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today, and on Fridays through the summer, we’ll focus on things to do in New York over the weekend.

Credit…Nighthawks/Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago; Soir Bleu and Early Sunday Morning, via Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art

If you could inhabit a painting — walk into the scene, look around and maybe sit down and have a cup of coffee — which one would you want to be in?

This weekend you will have three well-known paintings by the stark urban realist Edward Hopper to choose from. You could take a seat at the counter as if you had found your way, tired and late, to the diner in his masterpiece, “Nighthawks.” Like the counterman in the painting, a barista will be on hand to pour coffee.

Or you could transport yourself to the Parisian nightclub in Hopper’s “Soir Bleu,” another scene where the people don’t seem to have anything to do with one another. You don’t have to wear a tuxedo, as one of the figures in the painting does. But a clown — made up to look like the one Hopper depicted — will be at the center of things.

Or you could step into the stillness of “Early Sunday Morning” and stand in front of what Hopper called “almost a literal translation of Seventh Avenue.”