Metropolitan Museum of Art Breaks Ground on Oscar L. and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing with Rooftop Celebration

Key facts

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art held a rooftop cocktail party on Monday evening to celebrate the groundbreaking of the Oscar L. and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art.
• Frida Escobedo will become the first woman to design a wing in the Met's history; her design includes over 70,000 square feet of galleries, a limestone celosía façade, an expanded fourth-floor roof garden, and a new fifth-floor terrace.
• The project has raised $670 million, more than the wing's total construction budget, making it the largest building project in the museum's history.
• Met director Max Hollein spoke about the wing's significance for a collection spanning '5,000 years of human creativity' and emphasized the essential relationship with living artists.
• Escobedo referenced 'la primera piedra' (the first stone) and the Met's unfinished façade stones to describe architecture and institutions as never entirely finished.
• Oscar Tang and Agnes Hsu-Tang approached Hollein and then-president Daniel Weiss in August 2020 with proposals to expand modern and contemporary Asian art and rebuild the Modern and Contemporary wing.
• Artists in attendance included Jeff Koons, KAWS, Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Cecily Brown, Jordan Casteel, Derek Fordjour, Aliza Nisenbaum, Jennie C. Jones, Kent Monkman, Hugh Hayden, Chase Hall, and Cy Gavin.
• The event was the last rooftop party before construction, and artist Jeffrey Gibson led a percussion performance with drums and maracas.