upcoming
Ancient American Art in The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing
About Us
A rich history of creative expression—parallel to, but independent of, the rest of the world—unfolded in North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean thousands of years prior to European colonization. Over the course of several millennia, artists transformed select materials into monumental stone sculptures, finely crafted gold ornaments, and other works in wood, ceramic, shell, textile, and featherwork. The Met’s collection of ancient American art sheds light on how these works were commissioned, created, and animated by powerful men and women across the continents. The Museum’s holdings reflect the diversity of indigenous nations in Latin America before 1600 and celebrate the associated visual cultures, origin stories, and daily lives of the people who made them. The galleries present a journey through time and space, from the royal courts of the Classic Maya and their peers to the south, the Moche, to the massive city of Teotihuacan in central Mexico, to centers of innovative sculptural production in Western Mexico and Ecuador, and finally to the imperial capitals of the Inca and the Mexica.
The Met began to acquire works of ancient American art in the nineteenth century. Since the opening of The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing in 1982, international collaborations with colleagues and institutions across Latin America have resulted in landmark projects, from major exhibitions to focused explorations of specific topics.
The online collection features high-resolution, open-access images of works in the collection, along with cultural and chronological information. These object records—an ongoing research project—also provide data on the history of works from the time of their creation to their acquisition by the Museum.
Most of the collection comes from unknown archaeological contexts. The Museum is guided by the Report of the Association of Art Museum Directors' Task Force on the Acquisition of Archaeological Materials and Ancient Art (revised 2013) and the American Association of Museums' Standards Regarding Archaeological Material and Ancient Art, see Collections Management Policy.
See "Aztecs in the Empire City: 'The People without History' in The Met" for more on the history of the Ancient American Art collection.
For further reading on the history of the department, see Making The Met: 1870-2020 and The Nelson A. Rockefeller Vision: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.
FEATURED
Gallery Closures
The Met’s galleries devoted to Ancient American Art are temporarily closed for renovation and will reopen in late May 2025.
Art
Metropolitan Painter
600–800 CE
Eastern Nahua
1200–1521 CE
Ixtlán del Río
200 BCE–200 CE
Initial Style artist(s)
1–500 CE
Cupisnique artist(s)
1000–800 BCE
Central Region artist(s)
300–700 CE
Teotihuacan artist(s)
350–600 CE
Maya artist(s)
400–500 CE
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Articles, Audio, and Video
Featured
The Met’s galleries for African Art, Ancient American Art, and Oceanic Art are undergoing an exciting new renovation project which will reenvision these collections for a new generation of visitors.
By carving symbolic designs into recycled tires, Betsabeé Romero creates artworks that reference ancient motifs and evoke reflections on movement.
The Latest
Research
Library and Archive
The Robert Goldwater Library is a noncirculating research library dedicated to the documentation of the visual arts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Native and Precolumbian America.
Four thousand years ago, artists in the Andean region of South America began transforming a ubiquitous material—clay—into vessels.
Hace cuatro mil años, artistas de la región andina de Sudamérica empezaron a transformar un material ubicuo —arcilla— en vasijas.
Exhibitions
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