The Metropolitan Museum of Art moved from proposal to construction at a Fifth Avenue ceremony that signalled a tangible expansion of its exhibition footprint. The project named for Oscar L. and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang will add more than 70,000 square feet of modern and contemporary galleries and incorporate the museum’s roof into Frida Escobedo’s architectural plan.
The Story in Pictures
Boards co-chairs Candace Beinecke and Tony James spoke at the event; James noted the campaign has already raised $670 million, a total larger than the wing’s construction budget and, the museum said, the largest building project in its history. Renderings displayed on the terrace previewed Escobedo’s approach: a diaphanous limestone celosía intended to modulate daylight across the façade, an expanded fourth-floor roof garden, and a fifth-floor terrace with views over Central Park and the skyline.
Director Max Hollein framed the wing as a structural shift in how the Met connects eras and geographies, arguing that living artists help make the collections legible to contemporary audiences. He said the Met’s holdings span “5,000 years of human creativity,” and added, “We learn from artists. You show us what our collections mean now. You hold up a mirror to society,” warning that without contemporary voices a museum “would be just a monument.”
Escobedo, who will be the first woman to design a wing at the museum, invoked la primera piedra, the first stone, to describe a design that treats the long façade as an accumulation of interventions rather than a single finished object. “Perhaps that is what la primera piedra really marks: not a beginning, but a transformation,” she said.
Patrons Oscar L. and Agnes Hsu-Tang used the evening to recall the wing’s origins in advocacy for deeper programming in modern and contemporary Asian art; Tang described approaching museum leadership in August 2020 with proposals to revive the project, noting that “Time does not stay still,” and warning that focusing only on the past risks missing important chapters of history.
The crowd included a wide roster of contemporary artists and museum figures who toured the terrace displays before the remarks: Jeff Koons, KAWS, Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Cecily Brown, Jordan Casteel, Derek Fordjour, Jennie C. Jones, Kent Monkman, among others. The formal program closed as artist Jeffrey Gibson handed out drums and maracas and led an impromptu percussion session as daylight faded over Central Park.
The ceremony made plain that this is both an architectural undertaking and a public recommitment: construction will proceed with the roof reconfigured under Escobedo’s design, and the finished wing is meant to expand where and how the Met presents contemporary work alongside its historic collections.
