Overview & visitor information
The Metropolitan Museum of Art occupies a vast Beaux-Arts complex on Fifth Avenue beside Central Park. Founded in 1870, the institution presents art across five millennia, arranging objects by culture, period and medium while allowing direct visual connections between galleries that would otherwise belong to separate histories.
The Egyptian collection includes the monumental Temple of Dendur, reconstructed in a glass-walled gallery overlooking the park. The Islamic Art galleries span lands from Spain and North Africa to Central and South Asia, with manuscripts, ceramics, textiles, metalwork and architectural interiors such as the Damascus Room.
Other major departments encompass Greek and Roman art, European paintings, Asian art, African art, American decorative arts and an encyclopedic arms-and-armor collection. The building itself records successive expansions, so a visit moves through changing museum architecture as well as collections whose scale makes the Met closer to a cultural campus than a single linear exhibition.
