Exhibition Catalogs

This collection contains hundreds of digitized catalogs and checklists from special exhibitions that have taken place a The Met since the 1870s. Among the earliest is Catalogue of the Loan Exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 128 West 14th Street from 1873, when The Met was temporarily located in a townhouse on 14th Street. Other important catalogs include The Hudson-Fulton Celebration: catalogue of an exhibition held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art commemorative of the tercentenary of the discovery of the Hudson River by Henry Hudson in the year 1609, and the centenary of the first use of steam in the navigation of said river by Robert Fulton in the year 1807, the catalogs from the series of fifteen American Industrial Arts exhibitions held between 1917 and 1940, and Al-Andalus: the art of Islamic Spain from 1993.

This is a growing collection. Due to copyright restrictions we are only able to digitize catalogs to which The Met owns the copyright or which are in the public domain. Therefore not every Met exhibition catalog is included in this collection, though every catalog is available for consultation in Watson Library.

For a complete list of temporary exhibitions that took place a The Met, please see Museum Exhibitions 1870–2022, a chronological list of all special exhibitions held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from its founding in 1870 to 2017 prepared by Museum Archives.