Opening hours
Monday through Friday: 6pm – last intermission
Saturday: noon – last intermission
Closed on Sundays

Located in the Met's south lobby, the Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met hosts works by some of the contemporary art world's most innovative and provocative figures. Created by General Manager Peter Gelb and curated by Dodie Kazanjian, the venue continues and reaffirms the Met's long history of groundbreaking relationships with major visual artists-such as Chagall and Hockney-while fostering new opportunities for collaboration. The Schwartz Gallery Met is open every day, and admission is free to ticket holders and the general public.

An extraordinary $1 million gift from Marie Schwartz, an Advisory Director on the Met Board, has made this initiative possible, and in recognition the Met has named the gallery for her and her late husband, Arnold.

New works by South-African artist William Kentridge will be on view in Gallery Met this spring, tied to the Met premiere of Shostakovich's The Nose, which opens March 5 in a production designed and directed by Kentridge. The exhibition, entitled Ad Hoc: Works for The Nose, will be seen from February 26 through the end of the 2009–10 opera season.

Gallery Met opened in September 2006 with an exhibition of works inspired by the 2006–­07 season's new productions. The artists represented included Cecily Brown, John Currin, Barnaby Furnas, Makiko Kudo, Richard Prince, David Salle, Sophie von Hellerman, and others. During the summer and fall of 2007, the space was home to Opera by Design, an exhibition of set models for the new productions of the 2007–­08 season, and Stage Fright, a collection of opera-inspired works by Argentinian artist Guillermo Kuitca.

The beginning of the 2007–08 season saw works by a variety of artists from The New Yorker and the contemporary art scene, based on the Brothers Grimm story of Hansel and Gretel, which were on display during the run of the Met's new production of Humperdinck's fairy tale opera. This was followed by Chuck Close Philip Glass 40 Years, a selection of Close's more than 100 portraits of his composer friend, coinciding with the Met premiere of Glass’s Satyagraha. The Sopranos, an exhibit featuring renowned Italian painter Francesco Clemente's series of portraits of eight Met divas in roles they performed during the 125th anniversary season, was on view during the summer of 2008.

In the fall and winter of 2008, David Altmejd Doctor Atomic presented the Canadian artist's mirror sculpture The Eye, which was inspired by the Met premiere of John Adams's opera Doctor Atomic. From February 2009 through the end of the 2008–09 season, a selection of works by German artist Anselm Kiefer was on view in a collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and coinciding with the revival of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. Ten of Kiefer's Ring-inspired pieces were lent to the Met Opera by its museum counterpart for this show, which was entitled From the Met to the Met: Anselm Kiefer and Wagner's “Ring”.

The 2009–10 Gallery Met season began with Something About Mary, an exhibition tied to the season-opening new production of Tosca. A variety of artists took their inspiration from the first act of Puccini's opera, in which the painter Mario Cavaradossi is seen working on a portrait of Mary Magdalene. The exhibition included new portraits of this biblical character by Paul Chan, Francesco Clemente, George Condo, John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, James Rosenquist, Julian Schnabel, Dana Schutz, and Francesco Vezzoli, among others, and was on view through January 2010.