The new galleries will enable The Met to present an array of art and artists that reflects the diversity of New York City and its global audiences
Mexican architect Frida Escobedo will be the first woman to design a wing in the Museum’s 154-year history
(New York, May 1, 2024)—The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today that it has raised $550 million in private donations for the Museum’s new Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing, named in recognition of the couple’s historic lead gift of $125 million. The announcement comes as The Met moves forward with its design process to transform its outdated wing into a world-class home for the Museum’s renowned holdings of 20th- and 21st-century art where all New Yorkers can see themselves reflected in the works on view. The major overhaul will allow The Met to best present the diversity and range of perspectives represented throughout its collection. Construction is expected to generate 4,000 union jobs, targeting 30-40 percent Minority and Women-owned Business Enterprise participation, and the new wing is expected to open in 2029.
“Our artists and creative economy are the heart and soul of New York City, and the cornerstone of our economic rebound,” said New York City Mayor Eric Adams. “The Metropolitan Museum of Art stands as a beacon of art, history, and inspiration for New Yorkers and visitors from around the globe and helps strengthen New York City’s reputation as the cultural capital of the world. As evidenced by our recent $22 million investment in cultural organizations across the five boroughs, our administration values institutions like The Met and applauds its efforts to expand the Museum’s world-class collection.”
"The Met has long been part of Central Park's identity, and the art displayed in its collections complements the beauty and complexity of the natural world on display in the park," said New York City Parks Commissioner Sue Donoghue. "This administration values our city’s world-class cultural institutions, and we congratulate The Met on reaching this milestone.”
Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer stated: “Since its founding over 150 years ago, The Met has been a vital center for the art and artists of its time. The new Tang Wing will enable the Museum to highlight the diverse array of artists and narratives represented in the collection, inviting everyone to feel at home at The Met. I am deeply grateful to our many donors and supporters for their commitment to this critical improvement for The Met and New York, and thrilled to have Frida Escobedo bringing her inspired vision to the design.”
The Met’s Board of Trustees Co-Chairs Candace K. Beinecke and Hamilton (“Tony”) E. James remarked, “This important project will allow The Met to better present its outstanding collection and expand the ways it reflects the diversity of New York City and the world for its local and global audiences. It will be a crown jewel and a global draw for New York City.”
“The new Tang Wing will be a world-class addition to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, providing a unique platform to tell the diverse stories of artists throughout the 20th and 21st centuries,” said Speaker Adrienne Adams. “I’m excited that the new galleries will be designed by Frida Escobedo, whose vision will be on display for the entire world to see and enjoy. I congratulate The Metropolitan Museum of Art for reaching this important milestone, and I look forward to visiting the new Tang Wing upon completion to celebrate this historic project.”
“More than 150 years ago, The Met helped to create the model for how New York City works with the cultural institutions that thrive here to provide world-class facilities and arts programming that engages New Yorkers and attracts visitors from far and wide,” said Cultural Affairs Commissioner Laurie Cumbo. “This new wing will mark the next phase in this historic partnership, giving The Met’s contemporary collections a fitting home for the first time. This project will also create thousands of jobs while building on The Met’s commitment to connecting audiences with artwork that spans global history. Congratulations on this important milestone.”
New York City Council Member and Chair of the Cultural Affairs Committee Carlina Rivera said, “The Met’s new Tang Wing is New York City at its best. The commitment to representing and uplifting diverse artists in what will be a stunning new gallery space is the exact kind of project our city's culture needs to flourish. I applaud The Met and Frida Escobedo on pursuing a project that will be the pride of all New Yorkers.”
"The reimagined Tang Wing will make history with Frida Escobedo at the helm as the first woman to design a wing for the 154-year-old New York City institution. The Met plays such a critical role in our city and on the Upper East Side—driving millions of visitors to the area each year. Congratulations on an important milestone!” stated Councilmember Keith Powers.
Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, stated, “While The Met has long been a haven of art and creativity, certain artists and cultures have historically been underrepresented. This project signals an important commitment to expanding and diversifying the stories told by the art and artists the Museum displays. The Tang Wing project is critical to The Met’s mission to connect all people to art and ideas, and the new galleries will lift up ever more diverse voices and vibrant works of art.”
Artist and Met Trustee Jordan Casteel commented, “The Tang Wing will provide a thoughtful space for artists like me, long inspired by many of the iconic works of art displayed here but not always represented in its galleries. The transformed wing will create a space where everyone can gather and see their likeness and communities reflected in the works on view.”
Frida Escobedo said, “Situated in Central Park, a masterpiece in itself, the Tang Wing will draw on its surrounding context, while also breathing new life into The Met’s 20th and 21st-century collections. By weaving these connections with other areas in the Museum, we can acknowledge and celebrate the common threads that span different times, geographies, and ideologies. We eagerly anticipate continued collaboration with the Met's team as the design takes shape, providing a home for culture that belongs to all.”
“Today’s announcement marks a major milestone in not only improving one of New York’s most iconic institutions, but also creating thousands of good paying union construction careers,” said Gary LaBarbera, President of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York. “This significant investment in a treasured public asset will open countless opportunities for hardworking New Yorkers to pursue the middle class and support their families, all while giving visitors of The Met an elevated experience. We look forward to partnering with the Museum to advance their vision for the Tang Wing, which will serve as a boon for the city, its economy, and tradesmen and tradeswomen from across the five boroughs.”
The Met has sought to revamp its modern wing for more than a decade. Upon his arrival in 2018, Max Hollein, together with a core team at The Met, began a comprehensive review and revised plan for the Museum’s modern and contemporary art galleries. The new galleries will enable the Museum to approach 20th- and 21st-century art from a range of global and local perspectives and expand and diversify the stories told at The Met.
The Met’s bold new vision for the Tang Wing is helmed by Mexican architect Frida Escobedo—the first woman to design a new wing in the Museum’s 154-year history. Her design will weave the Tang Wing into the scale and design of the Museum’s campus and one of the great works of public art—Central Park. The new wing will remain within the existing wing’s footprint and be no higher than the original building the Museum is built around. Replacing the aging 120,000-square-foot wing with a new 125,000-square-foot building will create much-needed additional gallery space by rethinking and reconfiguring existing infrastructure and layouts.
The project will also address critical infrastructure needs that will improve accessibility for all visitors and staff. The new Tang Wing will improve the visitor experience by smoothing the transitions between galleries and by creating dynamic spaces for the exhibition of art of varying scales and media, thoughtfully designed outdoor spaces, and areas for expanded educational and community programming. The project will utilize cutting-edge sustainable design practices, with an eye to reducing its carbon footprint.
Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang commented, “The Met is a leader of culture and creativity that inspires and advances understanding of heritages across time and borders. We are deeply moved that so many generous donors—in the U.S. and around the world—have joined us to elevate and magnify The Met’s mission with the new modern and contemporary wing.”
Over the past decade, The Met has significantly expanded its exhibition and acquisitions program to include more diverse perspectives, with acquisitions of works by women and artists of color, and by telling underrepresented stories in our collection and exhibitions—including, recently, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art, and Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery. Recent commissioned projects have included artists Nairy Baghramian, Hew Locke, Kent Monkman, Jacolby Satterwhite, Lauren Halsey, and Petrit Halilaj.
Originally planned in 1871, The Met’s campus in Central Park has evolved into one of the most iconic and important New York institutions over the last 150 years. The location of the Museum within Central Park was part of the Park’s early design by its famed architects Frederic Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux and reflects their complementary missions to provide a source of respite and inspiration for all New Yorkers and visitors within the larger city. Over the years, the Museum has continued to renovate within its designated footprint, allowing a wide array of architects and architectural styles to work in harmony to house one of the most prominent and expansive art collections in the world. Today, it consists of 21 structures that operate as a single building located within Central Park, spanning five floors in addition to mezzanines and basements.
As the Museum continues work on the design of the new wing, it will continue to collaborate closely with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation and the Central Park Conservancy as it advances the project toward an environmental review and public review by relevant agencies, including the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Public Design Commission, starting in the fall and through 2025. The design and engineering team consists of lead design architect Frida Escobedo Studio, executive architect Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners LLC (BBB), Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBW), and engineering firms Kohler Ronan and Thornton Tomasetti.
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About The Met
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of American citizens—businessmen and financiers as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day—who wanted to create a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. Today, The Met displays tens of thousands of objects covering 5,000 years of art from around the world for everyone to experience and enjoy. The Museum lives in two iconic sites in New York City—The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters. Millions of people also take part in The Met experience online. Since its founding, The Met has always aspired to be more than a treasury of rare and beautiful objects. Every day, art comes alive in the Museum’s galleries and through its exhibitions and events, revealing both new ideas and unexpected connections across time and across cultures.
In the last year, the Museum welcomed 5.8 million visitors from around the world, including 2.2 million visitors from across the five boroughs and New York State and more than 150,000 K-12 students—with nearly 60,000 coming from New York City schools. The Museum also employs nearly 2,000 people.
The Museum’s engagement with art from 1890 to the present spans movements in modernism to contemporary practices from around the world and is represented across numerous curatorial departments. The Met’s holdings have grown through strategic acquisitions as well as generous gifts and bequests, including major collections like the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection of 78 Cubist masterpieces, the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, and significant works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. More recently, the Azari collection of contemporary Iranian art, a major promised gift of works by Philip Guston from the collection of Musa Guston Mayer, and the extraordinary James Van Der Zee Archive established in collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem have added key dimensions to the narratives of 20th-century art. Existing strengths in painting, sculpture, photography, and works on paper have also been augmented by substantial and growing collections of international decorative arts and design, installation art, and time-based media—from acknowledged masterworks by Diane Arbus, Romare Bearden, Max Beckmann, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, Aaron Douglas, Sam Gilliam, Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns, Lee Krasner, Roberto Matta, Isamu Noguchi, Georgia O’Keeffe, Lygia Pape, Pablo Picasso, Horace Pippin, Jackson Pollock, Man Ray, Diego Rivera, and Andy Warhol, to important newer works by El Anatsui, Mark Bradford, Jordan Casteel, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Peter Doig, Nicole Eisenman, William Kentridge, Nalini Malani, Kerry James Marshall, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Wangechi Mutu, Charles Ray, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, and Kay WalkingStick.
About Frida Escobedo Studio
Escobedo established her eponymous studio in Mexico City in 2006. The studio’s reputation—initially built on the strength of a series of competition-winning projects in her native country, including the renovation of the Hotel Boca Chica (2008), the El Eco Pavilion (2010), and the expansion of La Tallera Siqueiros in Cuernavaca (2012)—has achieved global scope since 2018, when she received the prestigious appointment to design the annual Serpentine Pavilion in London’s Kensington Gardens, becoming the youngest architect at the time to undertake the project. Following her appointment as the Design Architect for The Tang Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Escobedo opened a studio in New York City in 2022 and is working on other New York–based projects, such as Ray Harlem, a mixed-use development in Harlem in collaboration with Handel Architects that includes the permanent new home for the National Black Theatre (NBT).
About Beyer Blinder Belle
Founded in 1968, Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners (BBB) is an award-winning architecture, planning, and interiors practice with 175 professionals in New York City, Washington, D.C.; Boston; and Miami. The firm's multifaceted portfolio encompasses adaptive reuse and rehabilitation, urban design, and new construction across a wide spectrum of building typologies and sectors, including cultural, civic, educational, residential, and commercial projects. BBB has long been recognized for the revitalization of nationally celebrated buildings and urban sites, including such cultural institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the New York Public Library, Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, the Rubell Museum DC, the Frick Collection, and the Morgan Library. BBB specializes in adapting existing structures for new uses and in sensitively integrating contemporary building systems within historic contexts. The firm’s mission, as creators and curators of the built world, is to provide people with environments of beauty and comfort, of contemporary relevance and timeless endurance.
About Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects
Nelson Byrd Woltz (NBW) is an internationally recognized landscape architecture firm with studios in New York City, Charlottesville Virginia, and Houston, Texas. The firm has been instrumental in steering landscape architecture towards integrated, ecologically performative design, relying on science-based methodology and collaboration with a wide range of systems-experts. NBW has dramatically expanded the traditional role of landscape architecture into the areas of restoration ecology, urban planning, civil engineering, and agriculture. The firm has particular expertise working successfully in sensitive cultural landscapes including UNESCO World Heritage Sites and historic landscapes internationally and across the United States.
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May 1, 2024
Contact: Ann Bailis, Alexandra Kozlakowski
Communications@metmuseum.org
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