Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met is in New York City, in the United States.

It sits next to a big park called Central Park. Inside are paintings, statues, mummies, armor and musical instruments. Its front has big arches, tall columns and lots of steps.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art stands on Fifth Avenue, at the edge of Central Park in Manhattan, New York City. Britannica calls it the largest and most complete art museum in New York City and one of the most important in the world.

Its collections come from all over the world and from thousands of years of history: art from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, from Asia, Africa and the Islamic world, from Europe and from the Americas. You can find paintings and statues, but also furniture, clothing, musical instruments, armor and whole rooms brought from old houses. The Met also runs a second museum, the Met Cloisters, for art from medieval Europe.

Britannica describes the Met as the largest and most comprehensive art museum in New York City and one of the foremost in the world. Its main building, called the Met Fifth Avenue since 2016, faces Fifth Avenue in Central Park; the Met Cloisters, in Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan, holds over 5,000 works of European art from about 800 to 1600 CE.

The collections span Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, East Asian and Middle Eastern, Greek and Roman, European, pre-Columbian, New Guinean, Islamic and American art, and include architecture, sculpture, painting, drawings, calligraphy, prints, photographs, glass, bronzes, ceramics, textiles, metalwork, lacquerwork, furniture, period rooms, arms and armor and musical instruments. New York City's Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the building a landmark in 1967.

Inside the Met, there is a real temple from Egypt!

It stands in a big, bright room. There are also rooms full of paintings, armor and old clothes. You could spend a whole day there.

One of the Met's most famous treasures is the Temple of Dendur, an ancient stone temple that Egypt gave to the museum. It stands in its own wing, opened in 1978. The American Wing, opened in 1980, holds a huge collection of American art, and other wings show art from Africa, Oceania and the Americas, and from Europe.

The Met also has the Costume Institute, a collection of fashionable clothing from the 1400s to today, and a library for scholars. In 2024 the museum announced a new wing for modern art, designed by Frida Escobedo, the first woman to design a wing for the Met, expected to open in 2030.

Britannica lists the late-20th-century additions by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates: the Robert Lehman Wing (1975), the wing housing the Temple of Dendur, a monument given by Egypt (1978); the American Wing (1980), a four-acre addition wrapped around the original building and holding, in Britannica's words, the largest collection of American arts in the world; the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing (1982) for the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, whose renovation was completed in 2025; the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing (1987) for modern and contemporary art; and the Henry R. Kravis Wing (1990).

Fifteen renovated galleries for the art of the Arab lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and later South Asia opened in 2011. The Costume Institute, formed when the Museum of Costume Art merged with the Met in 1946, became a curatorial department in 1959. A wing for 20th- and 21st-century art by Frida Escobedo, announced in 2024, was expected to open in 2030.