The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art ("The Met") is one of the world's largest and most prestigious art museums, located in New York City. It traces its earliest roots to 1866 in Paris, France, where a group of Americans agreed to create a "national institution and gallery of art" to bring art and art education to the American people. The Met was formally founded in 1870 by American businessmen, financiers, artists, and thinkers; on November 20 of that year it acquired its first object, a Roman sarcophagus.

The Met operates two sites in New York City. Its main building, facing Fifth Avenue and called the Met Fifth Avenue since 2016, was designed by Richard Morris Hunt and is located at 1000 Fifth Avenue. The Cloisters, dedicated to medieval art, sits in Fort Tryon Park in upper Manhattan at 99 Margaret Corbin Drive.

The museum holds an encyclopedic collection of over 2 million artworks spanning 5,000 years of history, including Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, East Asian and Middle Eastern, Greek and Roman, European, pre-Columbian, New Guinean, Islamic, and American art and architecture. It remains among the most-visited museums in the world, welcoming over 5.7 million visitors across its two locations in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2025 (FY25), with attendance growing 5 percent year-over-year.

At this scale of collection and visitorship, innovations in this space are relevant to how The Met preserves, presents, and broadens access to its vast holdings for the public.