The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the fourth-largest museum in the world and the largest art museum in the Americas. With 5,727,258 visitors in fiscal year 2025, it was the most-visited museum in the United States and the fifth-most visited art museum in the world.
In 2000, its permanent collection had over two million works; it currently lists a total of 1.5 million works. The collection is divided into 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is by area one of the world's largest art museums. The first portion of the approximately 2-million-square-foot (190,000 m2) building was built in 1880. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from medieval Europe. A third site, currently the Neue Galerie New York, is set to become the museum's newest location in 2028 when the museum merges with and absorbs the smaller Neue Galerie and its collection of early 20th century Austrian and German art.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870. The museum was established by a group of Americans, including philanthropists, artists, and businessmen, with the goal of creating a national institution that would inspire and educate the public. The museum's permanent collection consists of works of art ranging from the ancient Near East and ancient Egypt, through classical antiquity to the contemporary world. It includes paintings, sculptures, and graphic works from many European Old Masters, as well as an extensive collection of American, modern, and contemporary art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanian, Byzantine, and Islamic art. The museum is home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes, and decorative arts and textiles, as well as antique weapons and armor from around the world. Several notable interiors, ranging from 1st-century Rome through modern American design, are installed in its galleries.
The Met's permanent collection is curated by seventeen separate departments, each with a specialized staff of curators and scholars, as well as six dedicated conservation departments and a Department of Scientific Research. The permanent collection includes works of art from classical antiquity and ancient Egypt; paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters; and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanian, Byzantine, and Islamic art. The museum is also home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes and accessories, and antique weapons and armor from around the world. A great number of period rooms, ranging from first-century Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in the Met's galleries. Since the late 1800s, the Museum has been collecting diverse materials from all over the world. Its outreach to "exhibition designers, architects, graphic designers, lighting designers, and production designers" helps the museum to maintain its collection in good condition.
Geographically designated collections
Beginning in the late 19th century, the Met started acquiring ancient art and artifacts from the Near East. From a few cuneiform tablets and seals, the museum's collection of Near Eastern art has grown to more than 7,000 pieces. Representing a history of the region beginning in the Neolithic Period and encompassing the fall of the Sasanian Empire and the end of Late Antiquity, the collection includes works from the Sumerian, Hittite, Sasanian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Elamite cultures (among others), as well as an extensive collection of unique Bronze Age objects. The highlights of the collection include the Sumerian Stele of Ushumgal, the Elamite silver Kneeling Bull with Vessel, the Pratt Ivories, and a set of monumental stone lamassu, or guardian figures, from the Northwest Palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II.
Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas
Though the Met first acquired a group of Peruvian antiquities in 1882, in addition to Mesoamerican antiquities, the museum did not begin a concerted effort to collect works from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas until 1969, when American businessman, philanthropist and then NY Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller donated his more than 3,000-piece collection to the museum. Before Rockefeller's collection was gifted to the Met, Rockefeller founded The Museum of Primitive Art in New York City with the intention of displaying these works, after the Met had previously shown little interest in his art collection. In 1968, the Met had agreed to a temporary exhibition of Rockefeller's work. However, the Met then requested to include the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in their permanent collection. The arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas opened to the public in 1982, under the title, "The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing". This wing is named after Nelson Rockefeller's son, Michael Rockefeller, who died while collecting works in New Guinea. The collection shows the cultural and artistic traditions of communities from across these regions.
Today, the Met's collection contains more than 11,000 pieces from sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas and is housed in the 40,000-square-foot (4,000 m2) Rockefeller Wing on the south end of the museum. The Wing exhibits Non-Western works of art created from 3,000 BCE – present, including a wide range of particular cultural traditions. Significantly, this work was regarded as art, judged on aesthetic terms, in a Western art museum. Before then, objects from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas were often considered to be the work of "primitives" or ethnographic work, rather than art.
The Wing exhibits the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in an exhibition separated by geographical locations. The collection ranges from 40,000-year-old indigenous Australian rock paintings, to a group of 15-foot-tall (4.6 m) memorial poles carved by the Asmat people of New Guinea, to a priceless collection of ceremonial and personal objects from the Nigerian Court of Benin donated by Klaus Perls.
Curator of African Art Susan Mullin Vogel discussed a famous Benin artifact acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972. It was originally auctioned in April 1900 by a lieutenant named Augustus Pitt Rivers at the price of 37 guineas.
In December 2021, the Met began its $70 million (~$81.9 million in 2025) renovation of The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing's African, ancient American, and Oceanic art galleries, originally planned to begin in 2020 but now set for completion in 2024. The 40,000 square-feet renovation includes the reinstallation of an exterior glass curtain, which had deteriorated, as well as the galleries in their entirety, which house 3,000 works.
The Met's Asian department holds a collection of Asian art of more than 35,000 pieces, which the museum refers to as "one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world." The collection dates back almost to the founding of the museum: many of the philanthropists who made the earliest gifts to the museum had Asian art in their collections. Notable early donors include J. Pierpont Morgan, Benjamin Altman, and the Havemeyer and Rockefeller families. The museum created the Department of Far Eastern Art (which did not include India) in 1915, though the "real impetus for creating a comprehensive collection of Asian art came from Douglas Dillon," who became board chair in 1970 and made Asian a museum priority. At the time, it was deemed "the weakest curatorial department in terms of staff, galleries, and collection," and the museum only devoted one gallery and cases in the balcony above the Great Hall to Asian art. Dillon partnered with Wen C. Fong, a Princeton art professor, hired in 1971 to develop the Asian collection. Fong advocated collecting entire collections. Today, an entire wing of 64,500 square feet is dedicated to what is now called The Department of Asian Art, which spans 5,000 years.