Decorative Arts - American Wing - Met

The American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the Met's largest curatorial departments, occupying more than 75 galleries across the ground and second floors on the west side of the building. Since the Met's establishment in 1870, the museum has acquired significant examples of American art, and a separate American Wing to display Euro-American domestic arts of the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries opened in 1924, with painting and sculpture galleries and a skylit courtyard added in 1980. The collection is overseen by two curatorial departments: American Paintings and Sculpture, established in 1948, and American Decorative Arts, organized in 1934. Its decorative arts holdings span furniture, silver, ceramics, glass, textiles, and metalwork, often displayed within evocative period-room settings that recreate historical American interiors from colonial times through the early twentieth century. As of 2026, the Wing continues to evolve; in 2024, the department marked its 100th anniversary with a new reinstallation highlighting its history and ongoing evolution. That anniversary installation, "The American Wing at 100," remains on view, juxtaposing well-known objects with recent acquisitions about American art, history, and culture. Other current and upcoming decorative-arts-focused presentations include "The Calculated Curve: Eighteenth-Century American Furniture," displays on Native American art from the Diker Collection, and "Designing the Gilded Age: Drawings from the Studios of Louis C. Tiffany," which ran in October 2026 — reflecting the Wing's continued emphasis on craftsmanship, design history, and the material culture of American life.