The Met's New Summer Wing Opens to 12,000 Visitors on Day One, Setting a Museum Record

NEW YORK -- The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened the first phase of its new Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education expansion on Saturday to a single-day attendance figure of 12,000 visitors, the largest opening-day crowd the museum has recorded for any new gallery or wing in its 155-year history. The expansion, designed by the Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye, adds 45,000 square feet to the museum's north wing on Fifth Avenue, providing dedicated space for educational programming, a new permanent gallery for works on paper, and a flagship temporary exhibition gallery that opens with a major show on the global history of textiles.

The inaugural exhibition, titled Thread: Cloth, Culture, and the Global Imagination, spans 4,000 years and 60 cultures, presenting more than 350 works that range from a Peruvian tunic from 300 A.D. to a dress by the Ghanaian designer Christie Brown shown at the 2025 Venice Biennale. The Met's textile collection is among the largest in the world but has been largely inaccessible to the public for decades due to the fragility of the works and the limited gallery space devoted to the category. Thread represents the most ambitious presentation of the collection in the museum's history, and its curators have argued that textiles have been systematically undervalued in the Western art historical canon despite being among the most universal and technically sophisticated art forms humans have produced.

Adjaye's addition is deliberately restrained in its exterior presence -- a glass and limestone facade designed to sit quietly beside the museum's Beaux-Arts main building rather than compete with it -- but announces itself immediately in the interior, where a 40-foot atrium flooded with north light serves as a transitional space between the old building and the new galleries. The materials palette, which emphasizes pale stone, warm wood, and diffused natural light, is consistent with Adjaye's broader practice but also responds specifically to the needs of a museum that displays fragile works sensitive to UV radiation.

Met director Max Hollein described the opening as the culmination of a decade-long capital campaign and a statement about the museum's commitment to expanding its definition of what belongs in an encyclopedic collection. 'Textiles are not a supplement to the story of human artistic production,' Hollein said at the opening ceremony. 'They are one of the oldest chapters of that story, and this building finally gives them the home they deserve.' The museum said it expects Thread to be among its most visited exhibitions of the year, with reservations for timed entries in the first four weekends already fully booked.