Vancouverscape, a Vancouver based blog covering travel, tech, and lifestyle

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s massive collection includes over two million works of art from around the world (spanning over 5,000 years), located under one roof in the heart of Manhattan.

Often referred to as the Met, the iconic cultural institution is one of the most renowned and influential museums in the world. Located along Fifth Avenue on the eastern edge of Central Park and founded in 1870, the museum is instantly recognizable by its grand façade and wide stone steps that welcome millions of art lovers each year.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s earliest roots date back to 1866 in Paris, France, when a group of Americans agreed to create a “national institution and gallery of art” to bring art and art education to the American people.

The Met’s main building, aka Met Fifth Avenue, spans over two million square feet, making it one of the largest art museums on Earth.

Its galleries are arranged by culture, time period, and artistic movement that allow visitors to travel across continents and centuries in a single visit. From ancient civilizations to modern masterpieces, the Met offers an unrivaled overview of human creativity.

One of The Met’s most famous sections is the Egyptian Art collection and the Temple of Dendur — a full-scale ancient temple displayed in a light-filled gallery.

[Faience beads from Malqata Palace]

The European Paintings galleries showcase works by masters such as Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, and Monet, while the American Wing highlights the development of art in the US through paintings, sculpture, furniture, and decorative arts.

Having looked beyond the permanent exhibition offerings online, my eyes immediately perked up when I noticed a special Man Ray exhibit in Exhibition Gallery 199: When Objects Dream, on through February 1, 2026.

Amongst pushing the limits of painting, sculpture, film, and photography, visionary American artist Man Ray pioneered the rayograph, an alternative technique used to make photos without a camera.

Man Ray found that by placing objects on or near a sheet of light-sensitive paper, then exposing it to light, he could turn subjects into unique and mysterious compositions.

Before Man Ray first picked up a camera in 1915, he was focused on painting, utilizing forms of Cubism, Expressionism, Fauvism, and Futurism in his works at the Armory Show in 1913.

The magical qualities created by the rayographs during the period between Dada and Surrealism led poet Tristan Tzara to describe them as capturing the moments “when objects dream.” Rayographs exist in an indistinct place between photography and painting, the mechanical and the handmade, documentation and dream.

[Trans Atlantique]

When Man ray left New York for Paris, he expressed his relocation in the form of a game. His clever work, Trans Atlantique, contains a photo that documents the contents of an upturned ashtray knocked across the floor of the artist’s studio, while a worn map shows where Man Ray first lived after his move to the French capital.

These two elements mark a physical beginning and end; the checkered pattern plots the journey as it moves on a game board.

[“Flou”, French for out of focus; a movement coined by French writer Louis Aragon]

The Met’s exhibit is the first to showcase Man Ray’s rayographs in relation to his larger body of work of the early 20th century. When Objects Dream is curated from both The Met collections and over 50 US and international lenders.

[Cut-Out; 1915]

Visitors can take in some of the artist’s most famous works, including 100 paintings and around 60 rayographs in one of the coolest exhibits I have had the pleasure of viewing to date.

[Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room]

Visit the Met Museum online for exhibition details, special events, opening hours, and admission prices.

I was a guest of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the purpose this feature. Opinions, as always, remain my own.