Exhibition sponsorship is a creative way to achieve corporate goals for international, governmental, customer, or shareholder relations. We work closely with your corporation to customize a strategy for your particular needs. Exclusive sponsorship, partial sponsorship, and co-sponsorship are available for most exhibitions.
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For more information, please call the Development Office at 212-650-2390 or email sponsor.exhibitions@metmuseum.org.
2012
2013
2014
2012
Bashford Dean and the Creation of the Arms and Armor Department
October 2012–September 2013
To mark the centennial of the Arms and Armor Department, this exhibition will survey the career of Dr. Bashford Dean (1867–1928), the department's founding curator. A zoologist by training, Dean was for a time simultaneously a full professor at Columbia University, Curator of Fossil Fishes at the American Museum of Natural History, and Curator of Arms and Armor at the Met. In 1904 he was invited to install and catalog the Museum's first significant acquisitions of arms and armor as a guest curator. He continued on as honorary curator until joining the staff full time in 1912 as head of the newly created Arms and Armor Department, rapidly building the collection into one of international importance. In the process he fostered an influential group of private collectors, established American scholarship on the subject, and laid the foundations for the growth of the collection as it exists today.
Exhibition sponsorship: Exclusive and partial corporate sponsorship at the Metropolitan Museum available.
African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde
December 2012–April 2013
The celebrated 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art known as "The Armory Show" was a major turning point for the art world in America. Inextricably tied to the introduction of the European avant-garde and the development of a more specific American modernity was its role in awakening an appreciation for African sculptures as fine art. As an extension of the Centennial celebrations that will take place in New York City next year, this installation will foreground the specific African artifacts acquired during the years that directly followed the Armory Show by the New York avant-garde and its most influential collectors and patrons. It will bring together for the first time in a century African works from the collections of influential figures such as Robert J. Coady, Alfred Stieglitz, Marius de Zayas, Max Weber, John Quinn, Louise and Walter Arensberg, Alain Locke, and Eugene and Agnes Meyer.
The exhibition will feature some forty wood sculptures from West and Central Africa displayed alongside photographs, sculptures, and drawings by Picasso, Stieglitz, Picabia, and Brancusi relevant to the original contexts in which these works were first viewed in New York. In addition to works from the Metropolitan's collection, the exhibition will feature loans from public and private collections, including the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art and Artifacts Division of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, and the National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.
Exhibition sponsorship: $250,000 for exclusive corporate sponsorship at the Metropolitan Museum; partial sponsorship also available.
Matisse: In Search of True Painting
December 2012–March 2013
In 1905, French artist Henri Matisse was proclaimed the leader of a new school of painting. From that point until just before the outbreak of World War I, Matisse pushed the boundaries of his art by painting in pairs. These large canvases, such as Young Sailor I and II (1906–7), and Le Luxe I and II (1907–8), each feature identical figural motifs painted in markedly different styles and palettes. Over the ensuing decades, Matisse continued his aesthetic explorations, sometimes painting in pairs, but other times in trios or series: still lifes on the beach at Normandy, views from his hotel window in Nice, odalisques. "My idea" he explained, "is to push further and deeper into true painting." Matisse: In Search of True Painting will include forty-seven paintings by Matisse, as well as one large drawing and photographs showing states of his work-in-progress, which he first exhibited publicly in December 1945.
This exhibition has been organized by the Metropolitan Museum, in collaboration with Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. The Metropolitan will publish an accompanying catalogue.
Exhibition sponsorship: $925,000 for exclusive corporate sponsorship at the Metropolitan Museum; partial sponsorship also available.
2013
Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity
February–May 2013
This exhibition will present a revealing look at the role of fashion in the works of the Impressionists and their contemporaries. Some seventy-five major figure paintings, seen in concert with period costumes, accessories, fashion plates, photographs, and popular prints, will highlight the vital relationship between fashion and art during the pivotal years from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s, when Paris emerged as the style capital of the world. At a time that witnessed the rise of the department store, the advent of ready-made wear, and the proliferation of fashion magazines, those at the forefront of the avant-garde—from Manet, Monet, and Renoir to Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Zola—turned a fresh eye to contemporary dress, embracing la mode as the harbinger of le modernité. The novelty, vibrancy, and fleeting allure of the latest trends in fashion proved seductive for a generation of artists and writers who sought to give expression to the pulse of modern life in all its nuanced richness. Accompanied by a catalogue published by the Art Institute of Chicago. Other venues: Musée d'Orsay, Paris (September 2012–January 2013); Art Institute of Chicago (June–September 2013). Organized by the Metropolitan Museum, the Musée d'Orsay, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Exhibition sponsorship: $2.2 million for exclusive corporate sponsorship at the Metropolitan Museum; partial sponsorship also available.
Photography and the American Civil War
April–September 2013
Six hundred thousand lives were lost between 1861 and 1865, making the conflict between North and South the nation's deadliest war. If the "War Between the States" was the great test of the young republic's commitment to its founding precepts, it was also a watershed in photographic history as the camera recorded from beginning to end the heartbreaking narrative of the epic war. Focusing on the evolving role of the camera during the four-year war, this exhibition will feature a wide variety of images, including: haunting battlefield landscapes strewn with human remains; intimate studio portraits in small leather cases of armed confederate and union soldiers preparing to meet their destiny; rare multi-panel panoramas of Gettysburg and Richmond; languorous camp scenes showing exhausted troops in repose; diagnostic medical studies of wounded soldiers who survived the war's last bloody battles; and portraits of Abraham Lincoln as well as his assassin John Wilkes Booth.
There has been no major exhibition or scholarly survey in New York City featuring Civil War photographs in many decades; this show is timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg (July 1863). The exhibition will draw extensively on the Museum's celebrated holdings of Civil War photographs by Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, Timothy O'Sullivan, and George Barnard, among many others, and will also include judicious selections from important American private and public collections. Accompanied by a catalogue.
Exhibition sponsorship: $300,000 for exclusive corporate sponsorship at the Metropolitan Museum; partial sponsorship also available.
The Civil War and American Art
May–September 2013
This major loan exhibition will explore how American artists responded to the Civil War and its aftermath. The exhibition follows the trajectory of the conflict: from the palpable unease on the eve of war to the heady optimism that it would be over with a single battle, to the growing realization that this conflict would not end quickly, to grappling with the issues surrounding emancipation, the need for reconciliation as the war ended, and the uncertainty about how to put the country back together in its wake. It will feature some of the finest works made by leading figure painters such as Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson, landscape painters such as Sanford R. Gifford and Frederic E. Church, and photographers such as Mathew Brady and George Barnard. The exhibition at the Metropolitan coincides with the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863) and the New York City Draft Riots (July 13–16, 1863), violent disturbances that made New Yorkers more painfully aware than ever before of the war and its implications. Accompanied by a catalogue published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Other venue: Smithsonian American Art Museum (November 2012–April 2013). Organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Exhibition sponsorship: $500,000 for exclusive corporate sponsorship at the Metropolitan Museum; partial sponsorship also available.
Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective
June–September 2013
This long overdue retrospective, the first major museum exhibition of Ken Price's work in New York, will trace the development of his small ceramic sculptures with approximately sixty-five examples from 1959 to the present. The selection will range from the luminously glazed ovoid forms of Price's early work to the suggestive, molten-like slumps he had made since the 1990s. In addition to the sculpture, there will be a small group of Price's landscape drawings from the past ten years. The architect Frank Gehry, a close friend of the artist, will collaborate on the design of the exhibition. Accompanied by a catalogue published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Also on view at LACMA (September 2012–January 2013) and Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (February–May 2013). Organized by LACMA.
Exhibition sponsorship: $325,000 for exclusive corporate sponsorship at the Metropolitan Museum; partial sponsorship also available.
The Interwoven Globe: Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800
September 2013–January 2014
Beginning in the sixteenth century, the golden age of European navigation in search of spice routes to the east brought about the flowering of an abundant textile trade. Textiles often acted as direct currency for spices, as well as other luxury goods. Textiles and textile designs made their way throughout the globe, from India and Asia to Europe, between India and Asia and Southeast Asia, from Europe to the east, and eventually west to the American colonies. Trade textiles blended the traditional designs, skills, and tastes of all the cultures that produced them, resulting in objects that are both beautiful and historically fascinating. This interdepartmental show will include works from across Museum departments (augmented by a few international loans) in order to make worldwide visual connections, and will highlight an important design story that has never before been told from a truly global perspective. Accompanied by a catalogue published by the Metropolitan Museum.
Exhibition sponsorship: $900,000 for exclusive corporate sponsorship at the Metropolitan Museum; partial sponsorship also available.
Medieval Treasures from Hildesheim
September 2013–January 2014
Hildesheim Cathedral has one of the most complete surviving ensembles of church furnishings and treasures in Europe, with many masterpieces made between 1000 and 1250. As a result, it was designated a UNESCO world cultural heritage site in 1985. A major renovation of the cathedral provides an opportunity for an extraordinary exhibition of medieval church treasures. The exhibition, consisting of about fifty works, will focus primarily on Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim (960–1022), one of the greatest patrons of the arts in the Middle Ages. In addition to the famous monumental bronze doors and the column in Hildesheim Cathedral, which cannot travel, Bernward commissioned many precious works of art, mostly for his monastic foundation St. Michael's, among them the Golden Madonna, a silver crucifix and candlesticks, and numerous illuminated manuscripts, which will be part of the exhibition. The exhibition will also examine the artistic production of Hildesheim in the high Middle Ages, including the monumental bronze baptismal font that is a masterpiece of thirteenth-century metalwork. Accompanied by a catalogue published by the Metropolitan Museum.
Exhibition sponsorship: Exclusive and partial corporate sponsorship at the Metropolitan Museum available.
The Art of Etching in Eighteenth-Century France
October 2013–January 2014
Over the course of the eighteenth century, a great number of artists—painters, sculptors, draftsmen, and amateurs—experimented with etching, a highly accessible printmaking technique akin to drawing. Some, like Antoine Watteau and François Boucher, encountered the process within the thriving commerce of the Paris print market. Others, like Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Hubert Robert, were introduced to the technique during their student years in Rome. Over the course of the century, the free and improvisational aesthetic of the etching process increasingly was embraced, and French artists looked to seventeenth-century masters, such as Rembrandt in the North, and Salvator Rosa and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione to the South, for inspiration. The expressive potential of the technique was also explored in a more experimental manner by artists like Gabriel de Saint-Aubin and Louis Jean Desprez, who harnessed the inky tonalities of the medium to their personal and idiosyncratic vision. The exhibition will include loans from North American museums and private collections. Accompanied by a catalogue published by the Metropolitan Museum.
Exhibition sponsorship: $200,000 for exclusive corporate sponsorship at the Metropolitan Museum; partial sponsorship also available.
Balthus: Cats and Girls
September 2013–January 2014
Balthus was a master of conveying the ambivalence that is part of adolescence. The children in his paintings are usually withdrawn, self-absorbed and unsmiling. They while away their time in rooms closed to the outside world. Cats are usually their sole playmates. The rare presence of adults enhances the remoteness of these adolescents.
Focusing on the finest works, the exhibition will be limited to approximately thirty-five paintings dating from the mid-1930s to the 1950s. Between 1936 and 1939 Balthus painted the celebrated series of portraits of Thérèse Blanchard, his young neighbor in Paris. Thérèse posed alone, with her cat, or with her brother Hubert. When Balthus lived in Switzerland during World War II, he replaced the forbidding austerity of his Paris studio with more colorful interiors in which different nymphets continue to daydream, read, or nap. The exhibition concludes with images that he created of Frédérique Tison, his favorite model, at the château de Chassy in the Morvan during the 1950s. Four works belong to the Museum's collection and, except for several loans from France, England, and Switzerland, the rest will be from museums and private collections in the United States. Accompanied by a publication produced by the Metropolitan Museum.
Exhibition sponsorship: $750,000 for exclusive corporate sponsorship at the Metropolitan Museum; partial sponsorship also available.
Silla, The Golden Kingdom
October 2013–February 2014
This exhibition will highlight the magnificent art created in the Silla Kingdom on the Korean peninsula ca. 400–800. Among the highlights are striking gold regalia from royal tombs; unique objects of foreign origins or with foreign imagery which connect Silla to Eurasia through the steppes of the Silk Road; and elegant Buddhist art illustrating Korean interpretations of a pan-Asian phenomenon. Drawn from the holdings of the National Museums of Korea in Gyeongju and Seoul, many of the artworks are designated National Treasures or Treasures preserved only in Korea with few, if any, parallel examples in Western museums. The exhibition and catalogue—written by a team of Western and Korean scholars—will represent the first introduction of current scholarship on Silla culture to an English-language audience.
Exhibition sponsorship: $750,000 for exclusive corporate sponsorship at the Metropolitan Museum; partial sponsorship also available.
The Jewelry by JAR
Late fall 2013
This exhibition will feature some 150 pieces by the most acclaimed jewelry designer of the last twenty-five years, Joel A. Rosenthal. Rosenthal was born in New York, educated at Harvard University and moved to Paris immediately after his graduation in 1966. It was there that he began to experiment with jewelry making and quickly became well known for his designs of vibrant colors and organic shapes. Very early he revealed his special sensitivity to color whether in the hue of an exotic apricot diamond, the shimmer of topaz and ruby, or the simple clarity of a perfect diamond. He has focused on the pavé technique and most often uses a dark metal alloy for the settings to highlight the gem's color. This exhibition will be the first retrospective of his work in America. Accompanied by a catalogue published by the Metropolitan Museum.
Exhibition sponsorship: Exclusive and partial corporate sponsorship at the Metropolitan Museum available.
The American West in Bronze, 1850–1925
December 2013–April 2014
This exhibition of sixty-five bronze statuettes will be the first to broadly examine sculpture's role in the socio-cultural transformation of the American West between the years 1850 and 1925. Representations of cowboys and cavalry, American Indians, pioneers and settlers, and animals served as visual metaphors for the overarching theme of "the Vanishing West" and were eagerly collected by an urban-based clientele in the early decades of the twentieth century. These three-dimensional interpretations of Old West history, ritual, and myth will be explored thematically and aesthetically, with attention given to the complex self-identification of sculptor as Paris- or New York–trained cosmopolite as well as Western explorer. Among the artists represented are Frederic Remington, Charles Marion Russell, and Paul Manship. Accompanied by a catalogue published by the Metropolitan Museum. Other venues: Denver Art Museum (May–August 2014); possible additional venue (fall 2014). Organized by the Metropolitan Museum in association with the Denver Art Museum.
Exhibition sponsorship: $800,000 for exclusive corporate sponsorship at the Metropolitan Museum; partial sponsorship also available
2014
Charles Marville, Photographer of Paris
January–May 2014
Long associated primarily with the documentary photography of "Old Paris" at the moment of its historical transformation during the second Empire, Charles Marville (1813–1879) was in fact a versatile and gifted photographer who worked in many genres, from romantic portraits and artistic studies made across Europe in the 1850s to extraordinary views of architecture and compelling images of "New Paris" made in the 1860s and 1870s. This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, both of which will include little known works, stand as the first to examine Marville's life and career in their entirety. Also on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (September 2013–January 2014) and Musée Carnavalet, Paris (fall/winter 2014).
Exhibition sponsorship: Exclusive and partial corporate sponsorship at the Metropolitan Museum available.
Lost Kingdoms of Early Southeast Asia: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture, 5th to 9th Century
March–July 2014
An exhibition exploring the sculptural traditions of the Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms of early Southeast Asia, spanning the fifth to ninth centuries. The exhibition will present the results of recent researches in art history and archaeology of the region, which have made it possible to define the cultural parameters of early Southeast Asia, mirroring remarkably the modern political states comprising the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). In the first millennium this region created some of the most beautiful sculpture of the Hindu-Buddhist world, celebrated here for the first time in this major loan exhibition from six Southeast Asian countries.
Exhibition sponsorship: $2 million for exclusive corporate sponsorship at the Metropolitan Museum; partial sponsorship also available.
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
March–May 2014
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux was the greatest nineteenth-century French sculptor before Rodin. Possessed of titanic gifts, he defines for many the artistic character of the Second Empire (1852–1870) at its best and most passionate. Known in America largely through the Metropolitan's agonized marble group Ugolino and his Sons, he was a non-stop and versatile draftsman, lively painter, maker of several key public monuments, and fashioner of unforgettable portraits. Most of his work has been unseen outside France. This monographic exhibition will present approximately 150 works by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, including drawings, paintings, and sculptures. The Metropolitan Museum of Art will serve as the first venue for the exhibition, and will be held afterwards at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris (summer/fall 2014). Accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the Metropolitan Museum. Organized by the Metropolitan Museum and the Musée d'Orsay.
Exhibition sponsorship: Exclusive and partial corporate sponsorship at the Metropolitan Museum available.
Garry Winogrand
June–September 2014
Garry Winogrand (1928–1984) is widely considered one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century. This large traveling retrospective exhibition organized by SFMoMA will feature approximately 150 of the artist's best-known photographs from his thirty-year career with the camera. In both the content of his photographs and his dynamic visual style, Winogrand emerged from the 1950s to become one of the principal voices of the eruptive 1960s and early 1970s. His work simultaneously expresses the hope and buoyancy of the decades after World War II as well as a powerful anxiety. In picture after picture, Winogrand presents an America that shines with possibility just as it threatens to spin out of control. Organized for SFMoMA by photographer and author Leo Rubinfien (a protégé of Winogrand in the 1970s), the show seeks to reappraise Winogrand's photographs for the first time since 1989. Accompanied by a catalogue published by SFMoMA. Also on view at SFMoMA and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Exhibition sponsorship: Exclusive and partial corporate sponsorship at the Metropolitan Museum available.
